Week Eight Part One: Two Degrees From the Equator

Drinking coffee on the boat near Palangkaraya's famous bridge

This week, The Jakarta Globe needed to send a reporting team on a boat cruise through Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province in Borneo, and by some crazy process of elimination I got to go. We left my house at about 3:00 a.m., got on a 6:00 a.m. flight and were in Palangkaraya, the region’s capital city, by 7:00.

The river looks like where Pocahontas’ “just around the river bend” might meet Mowgli’s backyard in The Jungle Book.  It winds for miles deep into the center of Borneo.

The Petuk Katimpun village is built on stilts to accommodate river tides. These houses are right on the water during the wet season.  

Our first stop was at a tiny Dayak village, a village of Borneo's indigenous people, called Petuk Katimpun. The population is about 200 and they only have electricity from 6-12 p.m. During the dry season, the school’s front lawn is a soccer field. In the winter, it’s where mom’s drop off the carpool from canoes because the water levels are so high. Students have class from 8-11 am, after which time girls go home and help their mothers cook, and boys help their father’s fish.

classroom in petuk katimpun

When the school was run by solely government funding, the teachers only came to school a few times per week because the road to get there is so difficult to navigate. We talk about privilege a lot in America. But I’ve never had it illustrated quite so clearly as seeing this elementary school, compared to mine.     

View from the small motorized canoes that took us to the orangutan island

We continued up the river, to observe the orangutan sanctuary run by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. I felt like Steve Irwin riding down a river offshoot in a tiny motorized canoe. Our guide, Putu, told us the story of Kessie, an orangutan who had been tied up so tightly at a palm oil plantation that when she was rescued her hand had to be amputated. He told us about how these animals are becoming more and more endangered by the minute, and of course, humans are to blame. 

Kessie, the one-handed orangutan enjoys sugarcane on the coast of Palas island

Cruising down the twists and turns of the river, Putu also told us about the history of the city. He told us about Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, and his plans to make Palangkarya Indonesia’s new capital city in the 1960’s. He brought in Russian engineers to build roads and a huge bridge across the river. As fear of communism mounted in Indonesia, these Russian were jailed and development of the city more or less stopped. Its weird to think that most of this history I’ve learned has been Hawaii or America centric. You learn a lot when you change your centric, and learn about a place and time in another part of the world.

The longer I spend hear, the more I realize what a beautiful, crazy, and diverse place this country is; how I can be on Bali’s sandy beaches, then Jakarta’s congested roads, and deep in Kalimantan’s jungle and its all in the same country. I’ve missed the feeling of being in nature, free from streetlights and pollution and traffic-jammed streets. With hordes of emails and piles of work out of reach, it was so nice to just be in nature, to have a coffee with the sunrise and a beer with the full moon. I never realized a jungle boat, two degrees from the equator in rural Borneo was on my bucket list, but I’m definitely glad I’ve crossed that one off.  

Full moon view from the ship's back deck