Getting to Borneo is an adventure in itself. It starts off smoothly with an international flight into Jakarta and then it becomes something entirely different. The airlines that fly to the particular part of the Borneo landmass we needed to reach don’t have websites so:
Step 1 – you head over to the terminal where they fly from and stand in line
Step 2 – these airlines don’t quote prices and are a cash only business so
Step 2a – leave the line to go to the ATM machine
Step 2b – pay the fare (probably twice local rate but still reasonable)
Step 2c – watch the guy put the cash in his pocket and hand you an A4 sheet of paper that says you have bought a flight
Step 3 – hope
Surprisingly after all this you end up on a Boeing 737 that served a rather appetizing meat roll wrapped in a leaf. We nearly missed this flight because the airport information screen said it had a 3 hour delay when in actuality there was no delay at all. Only for the fact that we were the only white people in the terminal the guy from the airline who came and got us would probably never have found us.
Upon arriving in Pangkalan Bun, Borneo we picked up our bags at the end of the runway and hopped into what I think was an old Toyota Corolla. The car belonged to our ‘tour operator’ (I use these words loosely) and was a bit gangster. We got dropped off at our hotel (guest house) and were told that we’d be off at 7 the next morning. So, another Toyota Corolla later and we were boarding a boat that was to be our home for the next 4 days.
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| Our temporary home |
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| Our bedroom on the water |
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| Our dining room on the water |
We came to Borneo primarily to see two things, i) the rainforest and ii) the orangutans. To get to both you need to get a boat up one of the many rivers; there are no roads through the jungle. As it takes a while to get there (about 6 hours) you then sleep on your boat and use it to get to various entry points into the jungle (camps, trails, etc).
We were a party of 5; the 2 of us and our skipper ‘Captain Annan’, our guide ‘Ancis’, and our cook ‘Name Unknown’. It was so exciting setting off across the large tributary/bay that led to the river entrance and it didn’t take long before all we could see was the water, trees and wildlife of Tanjung Puting National Park.
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| In the jungle |
During our boating we saw silver lemurs, long-tail macaques, proboscis monkeys (which are indigenous to Indonesia), red tail monkeys, wild orangutans, lace monitors, fresh water crocodiles, kingfishers and a variety of other miscellaneous wildlife. One of the best moments came only a few hours into our trip when a group of proboscis monkeys decided to cross the river in front of us.
Apparently they do this all the time because they understand that the noise of the boat’s engine scares the crocodiles which like to eat them when they swim across the river. However it only happened to us once so we felt very lucky to have seen it. The video below shows some of them making the jump.
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| Splash! |
At the end of our first day’s boat journey we arrived at the main camp of our expedition, called Camp Leakey. This was founded by a man named Leakey who instigated the world’s foremost research project into the 3 great apes (orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas). He firmly believed that women made better long term researchers than men so he appointed a lead woman researcher to each primate. The lady from Gorillas in the Mist (name escapes me) was one of his 3 appointees. The lady in charge of orangutan research, a German/Iranian whose name I can’t spell has been doing her work here for well over 30 years.
When we arrived at Camp Leakey we got off at the dock they’ve built there and we were immediately staring straight into the faces of a mother and child orangutan. They were standing there giving us this ‘who are you’ look – this closeness blew us both away. Over the few days that we toured the various orangutan research areas we saw orangutans fighting, playing, eating (including sucking termites out of soil) and generally swinging about the place.
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| Orangutans - first contact |
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| Feeding time |
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| Mother and baby |
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| Orangutan acrobatics |
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| Claire and Pomorogo |
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| Hanging out with the cousins |
As well as meeting the orangutans we also went jungle trekking through the rainforest. The diversity is amazing with every tree and plant in your vicinity being different at any given moment. That is if you can see it through the sweat pouring out of you as you walk (blob) along. Our guide showed us various herbs for all kinds of maladies – including herbs that one would probably class as more recreational (natural viagra).
On one of these walks we had our second stroke of fortune. Knowing that we really wanted to see some crocodiles (well, Claire was ambivalent) our guide took us to a place called Crocodile Lake that was more of a peat bog/swamp. This emerges from the forest out of nowhere and we walked into it excited to see more wildlife. Then we lost our way. We couldn’t find our route back onto the trail (just a wall of forest) and we were sinking up to our knees in the bog and to make matters worse you could feel that something was out there. |
| Big buttress trees |
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| Funky mushrooms |
Our guide was panicking and kept running on ahead hacking a little too wildly for comfort with his machete. We went into the forest, fought our way through solid jungle and came back out again with no trail in sight. Our eyes were never as open to the real wild. In the real wild you just don’t want to meet a crocodile, a python, a tarantula or one of the many varieties of snake/spider against which you’ve got next to no hope. The only thing really keeping you safe is that they’re all smart predators and they’d rather kill something easy. Thus I was never happier than when we literally ran into a couple of mouse deer when we were trashing through the forest. Shortly afterwards we found our way back onto the trail and felt blessed.
Our final stroke of luck was thanks to our Crocodile Lake trip. Due to getting soaked and lost, we missed out on the orangutan feeding at the research center. Feeling sad about this we decided to hike up there anyway about an hour before dusk. All of the other tourists had left and we were all alone with a couple of small female orangutans in the forest. Then all of sudden our guide Ancis said ‘get back, the king is coming’.
The orangutan king is the alpha male for the entire forest area and for 4 days neither us nor anybody else had seen him. As he gets to command all of the wild fruit in the forest he has no need to come to the feeding stations and by all accounts spends his days pleasing the many women who want to be with the alpha. As the king is king by force any kind of challenge is met with violence so you need to stay clear and be deferential. There we were, in the forest all alone with this guy and the 3 women who were following him around looking for some fun. This was the icing on the cake for our orangutan visits.
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| Tom - the local king |
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| One of Tom's ladies submitting herself to him |
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| Tom cares for one of his ladies |
As we boated back down the river on our last night we got to see the fireflies making certain trees glow like ghosts in the darkness. We got a parting gift from our crew and even though the time was so short it felt like a family parting when we left. The jungle is an incredibly harsh environment and we were glad to be back on dry land but we really missed our little crew for a long time afterwards.
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| Borneo sunset |
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| Mucky feet! |
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| Rob, Unknown, Annan & Ancis |
The rest of our Borneo adventure was less successful. From here we went on to Banjarmasin which was billed as the Venice of Asia. This was a gross exaggeration. Corrugated iron huts on a river delta do not a Venice make! We went to a ‘mid-range’ hotel where we bypassed the Deluxe and Superior room options and opted for a ‘Junior Suite’ for a whopping 25 euro. This meant that the room had a window. We’re still wondering if we would have gotten some toilet paper had we gone for the ‘Executive Suite’ option.
Our plan was to make our way up to Derawan to swim with the mantas and the turtles which was a couple of additional cash flights and boat trips but there was a cultural obstruction which we hadn’t considered. Ramadan began as we arrived in Banjarmasin which means you can’t really get anything to eat (publicly) between dawn and dusk.
While this in itself is surmountable, our afternoon taxi ride from the airport demonstrated some other concerns. No Muslim observing Ramadan can eat, drink or smoke during daylight hours. They get up just before dawn to get some food in (which by-the-by makes staying in a hotel with families a riot). Our taxi driver, a chronic smoker, stopped his car after he’d be veering to verge one time too many. He got out into the 30-something degree heat and splashed water all over his face but didn’t take a drop.
Here was a man dying of hunger, thirst and suffering severe nicotine withdrawal symptoms driving us around at 100 kph; No thanks! The funny side was that the streets of Banjarmasin at dusk were awash with chain smokers glugging down water between puffs. After digesting this reality we both felt that our hearts just weren’t in it and agreed that the Hindu island of Bali would be more fun (we are on holiday after all). So, a couple of cash money flights later we were on our way to a completely different Indonesia.
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