an entry somewhere else

*Warning* excessive vacation post

Ten days of vacation: check.
Six flights: check.
Being arms-length from an orangutan: check.
Five hour jungle trek on Borneo: check.
A couple hours on a bamboo raft: check.
Ten hour bus ride: check.
Christmas karaoke: check.
Good company: check

That was my holiday, briefly. I’ve got some decent photos that I’ll put up somewhere soon. The whole business was quite a pain in the arse as I was in charge of getting seven people on the same page and in the same city and paying the guide fees up front. After that, it went pretty well. As it turned out, the only place that one can fly into Pangkalan Bun, the closest airport to Tanjung Putting National Park, is from Semarang. It was a prop plane and only just over an hour. For some reason, the nice and slow prop planes scare me less than the big jets I usually have to take. From Pangkalan Bun, we were picked up and ushered onto a boat in the river town of Kumai. The boat was a two deck affair with a toilet in the rear from which a could peer out at the foliage, or my comrades, while having a wee. The small area could also be used for showers if we were to stay on the boat. Luckily, we were booked into a place a little more posh, Rimba Lodge.

The ride upriver was a good retreat for all of us. The jungle had some fresh air and the aura of Borneo jungle took us in. Splendid. The next couple days were visiting orangutan rehabilitation camps—places where rescued orangutan have been sent in hopes that one day they will venture off into the wild. In those three days, we saw quite a few orangutan. Unfortunately, many were quite used to having humans watch them take their daily feedings and even provided some entertainment in trying to snatch water bottles and bags from visitors. Overall, it was amazing to see orangutan in the flesh and see them move from tree to tree and hang around. We even were caught in a line with a few female orangutan who were holding their babies as they marched to the feeding platform. A very nice and quiet time in the jungle. We did manage to see one wild orangutan from the boat as well as some proboscis monkeys. No crocodiles though.

The third day, we set off by afternoon bus for Pangkalang Raya. We arrived around 3.30a after bussing through some pretty deep water that disappeared the roads at some times. There were also a couple stops to helps the ‘economy’ bus of the same company and wait for a passenger who missed the bus at one of the stops. Never a dull moment. We went looking for the hotel the guide recommended. The ojek drivers told us it was too far away to walk, and a local getting off the bus told us it was not 200 meters away. Off we walked. We checked into a room with a gold bed spread, dark wooden ceiling and cold water from the bath. The sign on the wall behind the reception said that the hotel was given a two-star rating in 1997. The Hotel Adidas has seen better days. We spent that night and the following in Pangkalang Raya but were only charged for one at check out. Lucky.

Using the public transit, we arranged a jeep for the ride to Banjarmasin for Christmas day. Then we went exploring to the two places the guidebook listed as tourist sites. The first one was some type of provincial museum that was closed despite our collective wandering to find someone to open the darn thing up. Following that, we visited a longhouse. We only were able to wander the outside of it, even after jumping the locked gates (sorry, mom). Our other wandering put us at a building for karaoke. Pangkalang Raya had the most churches I’ve seen in a while and they were all busy throughout the day. We supposed the karaoke was closed for Christmas Eve as well, and it was.

The next item on the agenda was beer. As I’ve been here the longest, it was up to me to ask the taxi driver where we could get some. His face lit up at the question and he said, of course. He then stopped in front of a shop with cases of beer and several varieties of spirits indigenous to Indonesia. The evening would not be dry. Little did we know, one of our compadres had lugged a bottle of homemade wine from my great state to Indonesia for such a splendid occasion. Excellent and sweet.

My colleagues also had it in their heads that we should ‘dress up’ for the evening. This meant batik. All six of us bought a new batik shirt in either red or green to mark the festive occasion. The hotel we were staying at had a Christmas tree in the lobby and we congregated there with our drinks to sing Christmas carols before trying to find karaoke once again. In the end, we got rained on and couldn’t find karaoke. Damn. Pangkalang Raya did have a club that was open that night but it was quite far out from where we were staying.

The jeep picked us up at noon for the four hour trip to Banjarmasin. We just all barely fit with our bags. It was tight. Christmas Day was spent sleeping, talking, and watching the jungle and clear-cut forest pass by. We finally made it to Banjarmasin in time to clean up for dinner. As I was the only male in the group, I had to take a hotel. The others stayed with a colleague there. It wasn’t such a sacrifice as I got a nice, hot shower and A/C. It also turned out that my colleagues took pity on me and chipped in on my bill for the night. Bonus.

We ended up hitting Pizza Hut for Christmas dinner. It was my first time there since I lived in Makassar. It wasn’t so much the quality we were looking for, but a little more Western ambience to accompany our Christmas cheer. Then we hit the karaoke place next to my hotel. It was clearly a karaoke/hostess place, but we booked a big room for the five of us and started it up. Karaoke with friends in a private room is really the way it should be. I don’t feel so bad singing way off key if it’s just friends. I did, however, channel Elvis with “Heartbreak Hotel,” much to the surprise of my colleagues.

Next stop: Loksado. This jaunt was arranged by one of my colleagues acquaintances. We took a small van four hours to Loksado village. A place billed in the guidebooks as quaint and a bit of the old world here. A nice and new guesthouse stood in the middle of the village. That’s where we stayed. A couple beds to a room, Western toilet, and clean. That’s 12.50USD for you. We then took a stroll to a longhouse about 40min from the guesthouse. It was getting old and a newer one was being built closer to Loksado village. A glimpse at the past for us.

Day two in Loksado was the near killer. Our guide spoke little English and we only knew that we were going to a waterfall and a jungle walk. The waterfall was nice and some of us went swimming in the chilly waters. After that we proceeded to take the one track through the jungle, fording streams, slipping up and down hills, swatting mosquitoes. We didn’t bring all that much for lunch and definitely not enough water for the four hours of trekking we did that day. We visited another longhouse and saw some great vistas along the way. A few of us got scraped up well and all of us had some nasty shoes from all the mud and waters. We were more than happy to wash up and get ready for dinner at a nearby warung that we commissioned to find us some vegetables. We actually arrived at the warung just before the rains started up and were ushered off the benches in front of the house into the living room and on the floor with kerosene lamps lighting the evening. We ate rice, eggs, and green beans. For some reason, vegetables were scarce at the time. In the end, the dinner cost 50,000 for six of us, a little over 5USD. By the time we finished dinner, the rain had let up and all of us were ready to hit the hay.

The third day in Loksado wasn’t a lot. We met our guide and found out that we couldn’t leave at the time we wanted because we needed another river guide. It turned out that another group of travelers were plying the river that day. Eventually we hopped on the bamboo rafts with benches in the middle for the tourists. The rafts were triangular with the front being lashed together tight. For the next couple hours, we sat while the boatman kept our raft from getting stuck on the rocks. He was a workhorse for the whole time. We stopped for a bit for a swim, but that was it. It was 150,000 rupiah for three people for 2.5 hours on the raft. Definitely worth the price.

After the rafting we were looking forward to the hot springs nearby. Unfortunately, the hot springs were in a state of disrepair with only a small shallow pool heated up. Two larger pools were either brown or green-watered. The changing rooms were not particularly clean either. The local collection of young men were also very keen to have a look at my traveling companions and followed us all around, tossing their cigarettes in the only clean pool while we were in it. The hot springs at Tanuhi are best skipped. Back to Banjarmasin.

The next morning put nearly all of us at the spa next to my hotel. Again, I was charmed to find out that my colleagues got together and sprung for a 90 minute massage as a birthday present for your correspondent. It cost around 20 bucks and got very personal. I entered and the masseuse told me to strip and put a towel on. I did so and lay down. She came back in and promptly took the towel away from me, leaving me in my birthday suit. I’ll just say she got as near to my bits & pieces as she could without actually touching them. I did get a good rub down that countered the aches from the jungle trek up near Loksado.

I stayed on a couple days to explore Banjarmasin proper. My colleague there and I had New Year’s Eve dinner at a nice Japanese restaurant only a short rickshaw ride down from where I was staying. We then returned for dancing at the pub adjacent to my hotel to ring in the new year. Good times for all.

I’m not back in Banda Aceh and exams to end the first semester will commence on Friday. After a couple weeks, I’ll have another break between the semesters. I might end up in Kuala Lumpur and probably head to Jakarta to get my fungus looked at again.