.....previously, our lovely trip on the east coast of Thailand here.....
We have to firstly say, we know we are terribly behind in our blog posts. The internet in Kalimantan is surprisingly bad for a place so developed in other ways. In most towns we haven't even seen internet cafes, let alone WIFI in our hotels. So, sorry we're late- there will be more Kalimantan posts to come when it is possible..........
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| Where we are! |
As we were wandering through the car park of Balikpapan airport, a kind man approached
us and in broken English asked us if we were looking for the minibus into town.
He told us how much to pay and where to wait, then walked away, and we thought
“Welcome back to Indonesia!” The
positive receptions in Indonesia
always pleasantly surprise us after being away.
Our excitement at
arriving in a new place, Kalimantan (the
Indonesian part of the island of Borneo),
was dampened slightly by Rich’s back playing up a bit as it does from time to
time. Although Balikpapan is a very pleasant city, there isn't a great deal to
see there, so we took it easy for a couple of days, and used the time to brush
up on the Indonesian language, with a few short trips out and about, before our
impending long bus trip.
And oh, what a bus trip. We organized to take an overnight
bus south to a small town, Kandangan,
and scored what we thought were great seats right up the front. We have been on
some scary bus rides in our travels- notably the Himalayas in India and Nepal, where drivers dice with death
overtaking each other on narrow mountain roads. But nothing compared to the
fear we felt on this bus, with its psychotic, chain-smoking driver speeding like
a maniac through villages on the pitch black pot-hole filled roads. We had to keep telling
ourselves he had done that route many times before and knew the route well. The fact we had heard this was one of the best roads
in Kalimantan, didn't bode well for further
bus travel here! An interesting sight on
this bus journey, and subsequent ones,
was the massively long lines of ever-present yellow trucks queued up for hours
waiting for petrol stations to open to buy some of the hard to get diesel fuel.
Kandangan was a
one night wonder to break the long journey, and we unfortunately ended up
getting eaten all night by bed bugs in the dive hotel we ended up in. And so to Banjarmasin!
After a somewhat slow start to our Kalimantan trip, we really began to enjoy the place in Banjarmasin. Attaining a grand room for
ourselves, we spent our days exploring the more rustic areas of town, away from
the hustle and bustle of the ubiquitous traffic and crowds. We preferred the
wonky, wooden walkways around the harbour filled with produce, boats, and people working along the
river, to the more touristy river tours suggested by the few “guides” in town.
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| Banjarmasin market |
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| Riverside homes, Banjarmasin |
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| Banjarmasin |
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| Riverside, Banjarmasin |
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| Banjarmasin boy |
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| Banjarmasin goodies |
I was especially intrigued by the chicken part of the
market, with one man killing the chooks, a second plunging them in boiling
water, and a third plucking them then and there. Very efficient system and one that would probably put some people off eating poultry forever !
It was in Banjarmasin, that a small girl asked Richard “What
are you?” Good question!
An interesting day was spent in the nearby towns of Martapura and Cempaka famous for their gems- especially diamonds. After a visit
to the gem market to check out the goods, we explored the diamond fields to see
how process works from the beginning. Being a gold panner from way back,
Richard convinced me to traipse barefoot through the mud to see the smaller
scale guys fossicking with pans to find tiny diamonds.
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| Gem Market, Martapura |
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| Martapura posers |
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| Diamond mine workers, Cempaka |
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| Diamond fields, Cempaka |
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| Diamond mine workers, Cempaka |
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| Diamond fossicking, Cempaka |
The bus from Banjarmasin
to Palangka Raya was very late (no surprise there!), and we whiled the time
away “chatting” to the ojek
(motorbike taxi) drivers. They were so fascinated with inspecting everything
Richard was wearing, even getting him to take of his shoe, so they could all
crowd around to see the size!
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| Buying whisky concoctions, Banjarmasin bus station |
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| New friends, Banjarmasin bus station |
This bus was typical of many in Indonesia. They seem to have at one time been nice buses- perhaps
coming second hand from a richer country. But by the time they reach Indonesia, they are completely
knackered, and because they were originally meant to have air-con, there are
only tiny windows in the very top. This means a sweltering, sweaty bus trip
during the hot season (now)!! To make matters worse, the air quality was
atrocious due to the burning off of the fields that occurs around this time of
year.
Palangka Raya is
not the most picturesque city we've been to (especially with the extreme smoke in the air), but, after finding accommodation
(difficult in a place where many hotels won’t accept foreigners), we found a
lovely neighbourhood down by the river,
where about a dozen families live on each pier, and share little rickety
boardwalks to the water.
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| Pier, Palangka Raya |
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| Home access, Palangka Raya |
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| Riverside, Palangka Raya |
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| Riverside, Palangka Raya |
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| Riverside, Palangka Raya |
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| Riverside, Palangka Raya |
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| Riverside, Palangka Raya |
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| Floating house out of the water, Palangka Raya |
By this stage in our trip, we had learnt that some aspects of
travel in Kalimantan are difficult.
Sometimes it is the language barrier, and sometimes it’s the expense of things
we would like to do, but usually, it’s simply that there is no information
about sights/transport/accommodation for the independent traveller, and locals
often do not know either. This extreme difficulty in finding information began
to wear us down a bit, and we found we had to miss some things we wanted to do.
We had to recover quickly from these small disappointments, and think forward
to what the rest of the trip might bring.
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| Around Palangka Raya |
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| Around Palangka Raya |
