Borneo – Through the smoke screen to the gold diggers in the jungle

Borneo – expectations of exotic virgin rainforest, monkeys and parrots. Yes, behind the screen of smoke from the burning forests, there's still a bit of that left. And it was worth seeing! Before they burn the rest of it...

The flight was pretty uneventful, the first real experience came at the airport in Singapore, where right in the middle of the hall there's a gorgeous tropical garden with about 30 different orchids, golden carp and palm trees. Even on the Singapore Airlines plane it was already clear that travelling can actually be a relatively pleasant experience.

A flight on an empty, elderly plane, trouble-free passage through customs. Apart from us, the only other white people to get off the plane were one American family with three kids. The longer I'm here, the less I understand what they were doing here.
The eastern, Indonesian part of the island of Borneo is called Kalimantan – it's noticeably poorer and less civilised than the western part, which belongs to Malaysia.
The whole economy here is built on two complementary activities. Logging the tropical rainforest and planting palms for palm oil production. The only problem is the sustainability of such an economy. The forest ecosystem can produce about 1 cm of humus in 100 years. An oil palm can exhaust soil that took 1000 years to form in a couple of years. The result? Desert. At the moment already over about 2/3 of the island. The result of some 30 years of extraction.
Back to the airport. A taxi into the centre to the hotel was supposed to cost 70,000 rupiah. You buy a taxi coupon there, so no ripping people off. After changing dollars (1$ = 12,700r) and doing a bit more maths, it turned out the taxi cost 140 crowns. A room in a 4* hotel in the centre right by the sea was about 500 crowns. Food, meaning rice and fish, or rice with chicken deep-fried to death and then reheated in the fryer again in palm oil, occasionally some boiled vegetables.
Price between 20 and 60 crowns. It's worse with beer. If they even have it somewhere, it costs around 80 – 100 crowns for a third of a litre in a bottle. Looks like a detox expedition -.
Outside a steady temperature around 30 °C, 27 at night, partly cloudy and 100% humidity. If you've never experienced it, it's most like the steam room at the local swimming pool. The guidebook said that here you find out what eyebrows are actually for.
The first day on Borneo wasn't anything special. Just a short walk from the hotel we randomly found a brilliant market on the waterfront. That's always a joy for a traveller and a photographer. Loads of different fruit, fresh fish, dried fish, vegetables of every possible shape, etc. The heat and jetlag rule out any big activity, but strolling around the market and the shore is OK. We were looking for some famous beach. There's no nice sea in Balikpapan, so a beach is more of a rarity. First we found some park with a memorial. There was an entrance fee. We splashed out and paid the 2 crowns per person.
What was odd along the whole coast was the state of all the restaurants and hotels. It looked like closed after the season, but the 2010 season. Everything shut, dusty, falling apart. Originally luxury hotels, stylish restaurants, a wooden promenade above the beach. Today more like a post-apocalyptic picture. Gradually we're finding out that this is the state of things practically everywhere. Tourists have simply stopped coming to the eastern part of Borneo. We still don't know why. The most likely explanation is that tourists used to come here for the tropical rainforest. But the Indonesians have burnt that down except for a few spots deep in the interior. You can only get there by boat up the river now and it takes 4 – 5 days.

For breakfast we just had melon and bananas from the market. Then we asked around which little green van goes towards the bus station. Number three, a teeny little van fit for about 4 small locals, carried us (and another 6 locals) rattling through the local jungle of scooters, motorbikes and small cars to the station. The bus to Samarinda was just leaving. We set off in relative luxury with air conditioning. For second breakfast the bus vendor sold us a bag of "omelette in cubes". Everything here is fried in palm oil (of course it is, when that's their only export commodity. Maybe along with timber). Palm oil has a nasty aftertaste… After 2.5 hours we were in Samarinda and it's starting to get proper (read authentic). The minibuses don't have numbers anymore and they go wherever you tell them. For Barangs (which is the local, mildly derogatory nickname for white tourists) the price was 100,000 rupiah. That seemed like too much, so we haggled it down to 70k (140 crowns). Hotel Andhika was noticeably more primitive than the Ibis in Balikpapan (we'll be keeping up this trend for a good while yet). On the other hand, just to be safe, we had 6 rooms booked. We need 2 rooms, seeing as there are three of us and here they only have doubles. Except the Bookeng.com app had trouble sending the reservation and in the end it did it 3 times.
We dumped our packs in the room and headed out to find food. Patrik once again felt the need to find something sufficiently cheap. We walked across half the town, went along the docks, and our presence causes enormous amusement among the local kids and an irresistible urge among the girls to have their photo taken with us. Already yesterday in Balik a gang of about 20 kids formed behind us in various alleys and escorted us to the end of the district. Here we're an even bigger attraction. According to several local guides we're the first tourists since April.
Well, I don't know, but what's certain is that we haven't met a single white face here. We had to pose several times. A daughter or two girlfriends would snuggle up to us and the parents photographed it on their phones. One pair of girls chased us for about half an hour on a motorbike before they plucked up the courage to ask for a photo.
In the end I had to drag us into a harbour shack, where they cooked us rice, chicken deep-fried to death and tea. (8 sugar cubes per cup.) The food situation here is pretty dodgy so far.
After eating we set out to find "the biggest travel agency in town" according to the Lonely Planet guide. We didn't fancy heading into the jungle completely without a guide. Without Google Mops we'd never have found it. A tucked-away dirty alley, a ditch, a heap of kids yelling around us, all the women from a wedding party who wanted photos with us, but no travel agency anywhere. In the end the kids from the wedding figured out what we were looking for and called the owner of the agency The Gigant Tour, some Lucas from Holland. Lucas sent us some guide who came over on a scooter. He spoke a bit of English and offered us a 9-day trip into the jungle for 1550 dollars. That would be 116,000 crowns for three people!!! Since we already know how cheap everything is here, we told him to go where the back loses its respectable name. He made excuses about the bad economic situation and the shortage of tourists, which is why everything is more expensive. (??). Worse is that he's the second person to tell us there's terribly little water and it's almost impossible to get into the jungle. Oh well, we still have a phone number for one more guide, and if even that doesn't help, we'll head out there on our own.
On the way back along the river the embankment turned into an endless restaurant. Old billboards on the ground to sit on and low tables, an endless row of food stalls and loads of locals. First we had grilled meatballs (a crown each), then corn, then more meatballs, a fried potato spiral, lovely and chilled by the river. Every now and then someone wanted a photo, they smile sweetly and pose when we take pictures of them. Suddenly a tiny pretty girl sidled up to us asking whether we needed a guide. Apparently she was born in the jungle and is a professional guide. In the end we agreed we'd take her. She wants 350,000 rupiah a day and she'll negotiate local prices for us everywhere. She estimated it would come to about $1,000. Well, still better than $1,550. On the way home Patrik spooked us a bit with the guidebook's warning about walking through the town at night, but nothing happened.

The morning started off cheerfully. Our new teammate Rhena arrived in thick leggings. (Surprisingly she had a backside about 3x bigger than it looked at night.) I collected all the dollars we had from the boys and Rhena said she'd take me to the exchange office on her scooter. Well, she's exactly 44 cm shorter than me. Sure, I've got a motorbike, I know how to ride, but they drive on the left here and it's a right mess. On top of that I wanted to film the ride through that chaos on the Go Pro. For someone half my size, she got us through like a knife through butter. She overtook trucks, minibuses and other obstacles with the confidence of someone born on a motorbike. Which is true here. Whole families ride on scooters (all at once) and I've got photos of kids being breastfed while riding, bottle-fed while riding, sleeping while riding, riding standing up, sitting up front, lying down at the back, etc. From about the age of 8 they start riding themselves, and that's why they're genuinely better on a bike than weekend riders in Europe.
There are two exchange offices in Samarinda, at opposite ends of town. At the first one they sorted my dollars into three piles. The first, only completely new 100$ bills, at the standard rate. The second, about a third, were older bills (not worn), for which they offered me about 10% less. The third third were slightly worn bills, which they didn't want to take AT ALL! That really pissed me off! Who do they think they are, questioning the validity of dollars that I got in California from the Bank of America, no less!
So Rhena and I set off to the second exchange office, at the other end of town. On the way she showed me a great sight, which she probably even made a detour for. The local shopping centre! It was a bit bigger than a village department store. I put on a suitably enthusiastic face so as not to offend. She said she comes here on her holidays…
At the second exchange office everything went noticeably more smoothly. They only refused two bills and the rate for the older ones was still a bit better than the best rate at the previous place. On average the rate came out at 13,111 per $. The funny bit was how they paid out the final amount of 14,470,000. The biggest banknote is 100,000 r., so I got several bundles a few centimetres thick, counted by a funny robot and tied up with rubber bands. I could barely fit it all into all my pockets. Luckily, because of the mosquitoes and malaria, we wear long-sleeved shirts (with pockets) and long trousers with lots of pockets. Even so, it looked like I was carting a whole library around in my pockets.
At the hotel we finally managed to pay by card and we took a minivan taxi to the bus station. The minivan is cheap (only 100 crowns for all of us for a 30-minute ride across the whole town), but it stops on every corner and picks up people. The bus was leaving at twelve, we only just made it there by twelve. Except the departure was at twelve tropical time, which means anywhere between 12 and 14. The driver was missing, you see. So at least we managed to have lunch and buy some half-rotten mandarins. They had good ones too, but Patrik refused to pay anything as insane as 60 crowns for mandarins.
Our worries that we'd be cold in the air-conditioned bus were unfounded. The bus was so small, there was as much legroom as on a Ran Air plane, and it certainly wasn't suffering from air conditioning. What it did have was an iron bar positioned exactly where your sit bones are, which pounded us mercilessly over the potholes for the next 12 hours. They took us not only to Melak, as the timetable said, but for a surcharge all the way to the port of Tering, from where our boat leaves in the morning. A small simple little hotel with a squat toilet and a mattress on the floor seemed better at two in the morning than a shut-down abandoned hostel, now more of a squat.

In the morning we headed straight to the harbour. Only here did we understand what they meant by there being little water in the river. There's a floating pontoon in the harbour, which you get onto from solid steps about 3 storeys high. So the pontoon floats at whatever level the water happens to reach on those steps. The lowest step was now about 3m above the surface! They had to build another makeshift pontoon which you reach along a wooden gangway.
There was also a grocery shop and a restaurant on the pontoon. After all that rice (which they even have for breakfast here!) we bought some packaged buns. They were horribly sweet, but a welcome change. I had to pour out half of my tea with eight sugar cubes in it and top it up with water. It was right here that we learned to say teh tampa gula in Indonesian (tea without sugar).
Rhea is turning out to be a good choice. She speaks decent English, knows a lot of things (because she's a professional guide) and asks the locals about the rest. Ever since we've had her, we pay the same as the locals. Naturally, we're not after luxury but genuine experiences. So we go by public transport wherever possible, we eat and sleep where the locals do. Since there aren't any tourists here anyway, it's not that hard.
The boat is long and narrow, about 20 people sit on it in two rows lengthwise. Luggage on the roof, the whole thing powered by a single Yamaha V6 2.6 litre outboard motor. Just how little water there is in the river (mostly about 100 – 150m wide) becomes clear after about an hour of the ride, when the driver slows down considerably from the usual high speed and we're wondering why. He goes really slowly and lifts the engine out of the water right up to the surface. Even so, in a while the propeller starts churning stones up off the bottom and they fly into the air behind the boat and rattle. We fear for the propeller.
After about two more hours of riding and several shallow spots like that, suddenly there's a terrible crunch at full speed and the engine stops. The driver and his sidekick try to fix something, but it can't be done on the water. The river is full of smaller boats, one of them tows us to the bank. The guys take it apart, the propeller is fine, but apparently the gear in the joint behind the propeller has snapped. We're on the bank on a little alluvial beach, all around us nothing but jungle (partly on fire), mist, smoke, no food, the nearest settlement was about an hour downstream. Surprisingly, spirits are high, the engine doesn't work, but the mobile does. The broken part lies on the beach, a replacement boat is supposedly coming in an hour. We know it's a tropical hour, so more like two.
So we pick up a 2h delay and because of that there's no time for the planned lunch in the next village. So unplanned, we travel hungry. The boat trip upstream in unrelenting mist and smoke, with the powerful engine roaring, ends up taking over ten hours.
Finally in the village (1000 inhabitants) of Long Bagun and just to be safe we have 2 dinners. We've finally found good food, fried rice with egg and chicken, the obligatory 2x teh tampa gula and then fried rice again. Over dinner we're first entertained by a green grasshopper that lands on the camera (we know that one) and then by a beetle with big wings that lands in the same spot, flies around insanely erratically and bumps into our heads. Rhea claims it's a sweet little creature that children love to play with. To prove it she catches it and holds it in her palm so we can stroke it. The beetle makes a horrible buzzing noise, a bit like a high-voltage short circuit, and oddly enough we don't feel like cuddling it. In the end a scrawny cat turns up, furiously hunting the now-freed beetle for ages, and eventually really does make a decent dinner out of it.
Since it's around 30 °C here all the time (even at night) and 100% humidity, we sweat permanently, like we were digging with a pickaxe. And mostly we're just sitting. So a shower is a must. Even though it's in the squat toilet. Even though it's not a shower, but a big plastic cup with a handle for pouring over yourself (and flushing the toilet). Even though you fill the cup by scooping from a concrete tank next to the toilet. In the end that cold water is a pleasant refreshment.
We have mattresses on the floor, which doesn't matter. Since we're now deep in the jungle (even if burnt out), we have to defend ourselves against malaria and for the night we rig up mosquito nets. We hammer nails into the ceiling from a stepladder, tie strings to them, hang a special net on those which wraps around the whole mattress like a tent. Then you crawl inside and sleep relatively worry-free. Except for the insane heat and sweat. Except for that muezzin (or is it a wailing banshee) who at exactly six in the morning starts howling from the loudspeaker of the nearby mosque. Except for the disco they put on at 7 in the morning in the shop below us.

In the morning we work out how to continue. It would still be possible by boat, but slowly and with problems. The other option is by car through the jungle. Apparently it's a new road and we'll be there in about 4 hours. It'll cost 2 million (!), but the boat would cost about the same. Well, it's a lot, about 1000 CZK/person, but on the other hand we'll be driving through the jungle in an off-road vehicle. For breakfast we have fried noodles and set off for a walk, because the car doesn't leave until noon.
The village consists mostly of concreted little lanes, along which stand houses knocked together from planks on stilts. At the end of the village there's a tiny lonely little house, which we renamed the babybox, because apparently years ago they found a newborn in it, which the whole village took care of together and she grew into a beautiful woman.
The trip up the hill behind the town cost us a lot of sweat, but wasn't worth it, because the eternal mist and smoke ruin the view. On the way back we passed several surprisingly luxurious houses with beautifully carved doors and windows. We kept wondering what it was they were loading onto the boats by the hundreds in those white sacks. Along the way we saw plank slides down to the bank and piles of those sacks by the river. Now there was a heap of them here too. It was stones! One sack, about 30l, costs 800 CZK! They're used for building houses and are apparently extracted from the river, or from some deposits around the river. In the lanes only the occasional person rides past on a scooter, surprisingly slowly.
Around noon we cut open a melon and then the car arrived. To our amazement it was a practically new Toyota Hilux, a 5-seater pick-up. As it turned out only at the end of the journey, it already had 30 sacks of rice of 25kg each on the bed, about 10 boxes of 12l of some liquid, our backpacks on top of that and on top of all that a local was sitting as well. Plus the 4 of us and the driver, the car was loaded with 1.5 tonnes! Inside, unheard-of luxury, air-con, we played our own music from the radio and set off into the jungle. The road clearly wasn't all that new. Right behind the village a hellishly steep climb, just a pass bulldozed through the vegetation, rutted tracks, the odd rock. Of the several dozen bridges we passed in the following 5 hours, about a fifth had already collapsed and we drove around them through fords. From underneath you could see their construction well. Thick logs thrown from bank to bank in several layers and compacted earth piled on top. No wonder such a construction doesn't survive a proper tropical downpour and flood. The car gradually demonstrated greater and greater abilities. It brilliantly climbed steeper and steeper muddy hills, crossed fords and handled any arbitrarily chewed-up and washed-out road. We always hummed in admiration and wanted to take photos of it. The driver looked quite puzzled, asking whether we don't have roads like this. Well, since we had no idea what was ahead of us, we were puzzled that he was puzzled.
After about 4 hours we arrived at a place where the road ended. Further on the excavators were only just digging it out. We finished the melon and waited for the excavator to finish a stretch of road for us. It looked like a freshly ploughed wet field. Only then did the real rodeo begin. I've experienced quite a lot off-road, we used to go training in off-road cars in a former open-cast mine, then I drove a chunk of the Sahara in a 4x4, in the USA I was off-road a few times too. But what awaited us here was more like Camel Trophy, or ads for off-road vehicles.
Right behind that dug-up stretch, the road disappeared over the horizon. When the car's nose tipped over the edge, my breath caught. It looked like a vertical muddy wall going down. In reduced first gear we slid deep down, the drop must have been about 100 – 200m. At the end the same thing, but upwards. It was physically impossible for us to get up it. But the Toyota overcame the laws of physics. For the umpteenth time we said to ourselves "I'd like to see a place that would put this car in trouble". Well, a few more slippery hills, several fords, and our wish will come true.
When driving off-road, not much can actually happen on the way up. At worst, the car just doesn't make it. The problem is on the way down. Especially after the car stops in the middle of a steep slope and starts rolling back uncontrollably. The front swings out a bit, the car flips onto its side and off it tumbles downhill. Luckily that didn't happen to us. But we got stuck all the same. After several deep fords the road suddenly turned straight into the riverbed. We were simply driving through deep water between the banks. The crowning touch was a canoe parked at the edge!
At the end of the riverbed the problem arose. We needed to drive out of the river up a steep bank, which was wet and muddy. Our driver, who up to then had handled everything brilliantly, drove slowly onto the bank and only when the whole front axle was on it did he hit the gas hard. The wheels started spinning, the car danced desperately in the mud, the engine roared at full revs and basically we were standing still. Instead of reversing and trying again, or trying to "rock" the car, he just desperately mashed the accelerator. We offered to get out to lighten the load, but he was completely locked up and didn't respond. In the end he reversed back into the river and let a Mitsubishi L 200 go ahead, which got up it on the first go without hesitation. It must be said it was far less loaded.
So we ended up getting out and he made it up at about the tenth attempt in that "standing on the gas, turning the wheel and waiting" style.
Then a few more crazy hills up and down and we were at our destination. The village of Long Panangai is one concreted little lane above the riverbank and about 3 turnoffs up the hill (to the school, to the church and probably to the cemetery).
We came to one local "restaurant", which was a little room with mesh in the windows and two benches, right next to a chicken coop. The landlord was just building himself a satellite dish out of sheet metal parts. He said he couldn't give us dinner, because that's only by order at least 2 hours in advance. So at least they made us a soup with Chinese noodles. We hadn't eaten since morning, so at least something. The soup cost twice what the whole meal cost in the last village. The further we go upstream, the more everything costs, since it has to be brought in by river (or laboriously by off-road vehicles through the jungle). Somebody's living room with a sofa and TV, a plastic table and 4 chairs in the corner. Through the doorless passage into the kitchen you could see an open hearth with a pot on it. And that they'd make us fried rice with egg. It was so good we had it twice. Accommodation, the classic. A wooden two-storey shed, little rooms upstairs, a squat toilet and a "shower" downstairs, consisting of a water tank and a plastic scoop. After the whole day we're sticky as pigs and so we're glad to pour water over ourselves above the toilet. Because in the meantime a government delegation with health education arrived, we have to squeeze into two little rooms. This time I got Rhema.

The next leg of the journey towards the not-yet-burnt-down rainforest has to be done by canoe. There's so little water in the river that nothing else can get through anymore. Luckily we don't get issued paddles. The canoe has an insanely noisy engine at the stern with an exhaust without a muffler, and attached to it is a roughly metre-long shaft with a small propeller on the end. You dip it under the surface by hand as needed. Worse is that in the canoe you sit in a row one behind the other, on the bare floor. The ride down the river is interesting, we pass one gold prospectors' settlement after another, now and then a village with kids bathing. Except the original three hours (tropical time) turn into five and I remember that line from Pulp Fiction: "Your ass is gonna get medieval!" Sitting so tightly in a row one behind the other, there aren't many ways to sit on the hard wet floor. In the end, out of desperation, I even sit on a plastic bottle.
A bit more about the gold prospectors. The Mahakam river is evidently gold-bearing. Every few minutes we come across an enormous machine, either on a boat or set up in the shallows. A noisy engine driving, via a V-belt, a mighty pump that washes gravel and mud off the river bed and pushes it through a 15 cm thick hose high up onto a wooden structure, from which the water is then let down a "bench" with slats nailed across it, where the gold is supposed to catch. Sounds simple, except that the gravel and mud from the bottom is shovelled into the pump hose by hand.
We got to Rhea's home village at about five. Her dad is an evangelical pastor at the local little church and Rhea offered that we could sleep at their place. The pastor's house is quite big by local standards, but laid out unusually. The entrance hall is at the same time by far the largest room in the house, stretching all the way to the back. To the right of the hall are 3 tiny little rooms. Everything is made just of planks, of course. In the hall they invited us to sit down and have some tea. There would be nothing strange about that, if only there had been any furniture in the hall. Apart from a TV stand there was absolutely nothing. Just a plank floor. Well, after five hours sitting on the plank bottom of a canoe we didn't much feel like it, but we sat down. It hurt so much that we started lying down. Our host concluded from this that we were sleepy, so he brought pillows with pillowcases off the beds. He was probably puzzled that we sat on them.
After tea we set off to have a look round the village. It spreads along both banks of the river, joined by a suspension bridge about 200 m long made of steel cables and little planks. You can even ride across it on a motorbike. On one bank we bought vegetables and bananas, had a look at both little churches, the army barracks where the soldiers were playing (excellent) volleyball, and the town hall. On the other bank we bought rice. It's pretty expensive here already, supposedly 4–5 times dearer than down in town. On both banks we photographed loads of kids, who love posing for photos but are a bit shy at the same time.
Since eating in a restaurant is already expensive here (relatively), Rhea offered to cook. Out of that shopping she conjured up something so good we haven't had anything better here. The whole time she keeps telling us she can't get married because she can't cook. Well, it's probably more that she's too emancipated by local standards. Her greatest fun, she says, is drinking beer. Which isn't so easy for a woman on her own in Kalimantan. Only prostitutes go to the bar where beer is sold. At home you're forbidden by law (!) to drink alcohol. So she has no choice but to pay for a hotel room and drink her 3 beers there completely on her own!
Before dinner Rhea asked us whether we wanted to shower in the shower or in the river. I don't know why they call pouring water over yourself from a mug above a squat toilet a shower. We chose the river without hesitation. So she went down to the river with us and, wrapped in a sarong (a wide cloth wound round the body), "showered" and soaped up there with us. You can't swim in the river because even though it's still about 70 m wide, there's a proper current in it. Still, it was bliss. On the equator, they say, the temperature hasn't dropped below 25 °C for several million years (not even at night), so the water is gloriously warm. Maybe too warm. By the time we got back home (in complete darkness by then) we were sweaty again.
After dinner we planned the next step. Rhea wanted to take us on a "hike" to a rock behind the village. We rejected that, saying we want to go all the way to the jungle. To which she said we'd need a ranger, that is, a guide. So she went straight off to get one and brought back 2. She wasn't able to explain to us why 2, but they only cost 400 CZK/day, so OK. We agreed we'd set off at nine in the morning.

In the morning it turned out that 9:00 wasn't our time but tropical time. We set off at 11, until then we were forever waiting for something. From the village you have to go further upstream, and again by canoe. When Rhea said it's only two hours, the calluses on our backsides started to ache. On top of that we (correctly) guessed that 2h = 3h tt.
It got even funnier when after five minutes we turned into a small tributary and after 200 m of riding we hit a shallow and got stuck on the bottom. Us in long trousers and Salomon Speedcross 3 trekking shoes on our feet, in which we were supposed to do an 8-hour tough trek through the jungle. So we started taking off our shoes and socks in the canoe, rolling up our trouser legs and we climbed barefoot into the river. The locals stared at us rather oddly. Honzík stayed in the boat because yesterday in the "shower" he cut his big toe horribly open on a rock. He was the only one who responsibly wore shoes into the "shower", but his foot slipped off the flip-flop and that was that. Straight away we understood why we had two rangers with us. Nimbly and barefoot they jumped out of the boat and pushed the 6 m long wooden canoe, engine and all, across the shallow and shoved it upstream over a smaller natural weir with rapids. And that's how it went on for another three hours. 200 m in the boat, jump out, push across the rapids, the shallow or the weir, that's 100 m on foot, hop back in for 200 m of canoe, jump out and push. By the second repetition it was clear to us that we wouldn't keep our shoes dry. We're not locals, able to run hundreds of metres barefoot over a bed full of sharp lava rocks.
After three hours upstream we turned into an even smaller tributary and there we finally landed. All around us now was wild, original tropical rainforest, just as it has apparently existed here without major changes for over 5 million years. After five days of slogging across the burnt remains of what was rainforest only 5–15 years ago, after five days in permanent smoke and minimal visibility, finally the goal of our journey. All around us, including the familiar and varied sounds of the rainforest or jungle. Just like something out of Jules Verne.
We threw our packs on our backs and set off. At the start there was still a cocoa plantation and a wooden house. Then one more small rice field on a flat patch of burnt-out forest by the river. After that, nothing but wilderness. We crossed the little river a few more times (we carried Honzík across) and when we'd crossed the last ford, it was time for lunch. It turned out lunch was fish over a fire, but neither Rhea nor the two experienced seventeen-year-old rangers had any matches. Now that's what I call reliable preparation. So I had to save the day, I happened to have a lighter with me. Honzík also had a fire steel on his knife, but we didn't get very far with that. So the lads made a fire on the bank of the stream, cut some sticks and roasted the fish on the sticks. Meanwhile Rhea made plates out of a giant banana leaf torn off in the jungle and dished out the rice we'd carried with us. The fish was excellently roasted, even if it was all bones, but it was such splendid romance by a stream in the jungle.
After lunch we walked a bit further along various streams, then the path started climbing and dropping pretty steeply. In the jungle it's exactly like in the tropical pavilion at Prague Zoo or in the steam room at the swimming pool. 30 °C and 100% humidity. Not a single thread stays dry, your eyebrows can't keep up. Since we have to wear canvas trousers with long legs and long-sleeved shirts, those 10 km of tough terrain are quite a grind.
The lads originally claimed we'd be walking through the jungle for 8 hours, but luckily they badly underestimated us. Since thanks to them we set off at 11 instead of 9, and since the sun here drops abruptly at exactly six, a night march through the jungle would have been quite the adrenaline rush. But we managed it in about 4 hours. And we arrived at our destination about 10 minutes before dark. The destination was a fairytale gold prospectors' settlement, like something straight out of the Klondike. We've no idea how or when, but somebody found out that this tributary of the Mahakam is gold-bearing and that a good deposit is right here deep in the jungle. The only clue is that among all the surrounding steep hills there's an exceptionally flat little valley here.
The settlement, built at the confluence of two streams, has about 20 small shacks on stilts. The lads took us to one of them. We couldn't have been announced, because naturally there's no signal here and we'd decided spontaneously the previous evening. Even so, the lady living in this shack with her son took us in willingly. We settled down on the floor, Rhea disappeared into the "kitchen" and made us tea right away. We haven't managed to get water (bottled) for a long time now, so we mainly drink tea, or water treated with chemicals.
A bit more about that "kitchen". A house with a wooden floor about a metre above the ground, the kitchen a small corner with a big open fireplace. How come it doesn't burn through? I run over to have a look, I can't see a damn thing in the dark, just wood embers on a wooden floor. Apparently the fireplace is covered with sand.
Rhea came for the lighter again, she was starting a second fire (with petrol). Well, better than yesterday when she was feeding plastic bags under those fish. I had to let her in on the sweet secret that smoke from burning plastic is carcinogenic. She looked at me roughly as if I'd just told her there's life on Mars. They really don't have a great relationship with their environment. Not only have they already burnt down 80% of the island's area so they can grow oil palms (and breathe that smoke across the whole island most of the year), but they'll finish off the rest by chucking rubbish everywhere they go.
Anyway, in about an hour Rhea conjured up an absolutely luxurious dinner. She got a piece of fresh wild boar from the gold prospectors, brought various kinds of vegetables and spices, plus fresh rice – a fairytale! A total contrast with the place we're in. The lads didn't eat with us, and only in the morning did we find out they'd had their own feast of freshly hunted porcupine! I've still got a quill from it, in the morning we even got to taste some. After the excellent dinner and tea with fresh lime we laid out our sleeping mats on the floor, hung mosquito nets from the ceiling and I very carefully fastened mine to the mat at the bottom with safety pins. Patrik underestimated it, in the night his legs came out from under the net and in the morning they were like a sieve from the mosquitoes. There's quite a malaria risk here, so let's hope he doesn't catch it!
I've slept the best here so far. It got cooler at night, so in the world's thinnest sleeping bag I finally didn't sweat like a horse, and an inflatable mat is a treat. In the morning a proper tropical downpour even started at last. So maybe it'll help disperse that smoke and haze that's been ruining our photos (and lungs) from the start. We spoke to the local doctor in the village of Long Panaghai. He said the most common thing he deals with these days is respiratory tract infections ….

Getting up after the rain was great. Before we even crawled out of our sleeping bags, Rhea had another lot of rice and wild boar ready, done a different way. There really is something to this culture without emancipation. At first I thought I couldn't face pork with chilli and rice in the morning, but after a visit to the spring for my morning wash I changed my mind.
After breakfast we headed off to take photos – a tour of the settlement and mainly of the diggings. What an experience!! It took me a while to figure out the whole system. In the gravel, or rather quartz, bedrock they had dug a pit, about 4 metres across, 3 m deep, full of muddy water. Next to it a noisy petrol engine, connected by a belt to a sludge pump. With that they pumped water through a hose into a second pit of a similar size, where the pressure of the water undercut the banks and so made the pit bigger. The soil and gravel washed loose from the bank was then sucked up by a second, stronger pump and dumped onto the top of a wooden structure with a wooden bench laid on a slope, nailed with crosswise battens. As the water and gravel tumble down the bench, the heavier particles (stones and gold) get caught behind those battens.
The whole thing is run by 4 people, not always blokes. They throw out the big boulders by hand, dig away the vegetation on the bank, break up the bank with poles. The worst job of all is the one operating the intake of the sludge pump. A plastic hose about 15–20 cm across disappears into horribly muddy water with yellow foam on the surface. At the start there's plenty of water, so the lad, barefoot in his shorts, now and then dips in or goes completely under. He removes boulders from the bottom and generally makes sure that as much gold-bearing gravel as possible gets sucked up.
The whole crew, after a full day of gruelling graft in that heat, mud and filth, far from any civilisation, earns around 10 grams of gold a day. Gold goes for 400,000 rupiah a gram here. So each of them makes about 2000 CZK a day. Except you have to subtract the costs, which won't be small. 2 pumps, petrol for them. The boat engine ate 10 litres in 4 hours, which cost 400 CZK in the village. Somebody has to carry it here through the jungle on their back, and before that take it upstream by canoe. One more gadget in the gold-digging machinery caught my eye. From the first pump ran a string which, over by the second pit, was wound around a stick stuck in the ground. Turning the stick gave throttle to the engine pumping water 50 m away.
After photographing the gold diggers from every angle with every lens, we went to say goodbye to the lady of the house, put on our backpacks and slowly set off back into the jungle. The lady headed off too and a moment later we found her sitting in one of the pits, throwing out stones by hand.
The march through the jungle was just as exhausting, but since it was morning and also the sky had finally cleared after the rain, the visibility was better.
About 3000 species of plants live in the jungle in a rare balance. The basis is formed by giant trees with strangely vertical roots. Lianas climb up them to a height of a hundred metres. I don't know why I thought a liana was green and bendy like a daisy stalk. It's brown and woody, and from a thickness of about 1 cm it isn't bendy at all and looks like a hornbeam trunk. I tested one that was still soft and flexible for strength, planning to swing on it like a monkey. Somewhere high above me there was a crack and the liana came showering down on me from up there. I measured it and it was over 20 metres long! Lots of other plants live up in the treetops as well. The most common sight was a clump like an iris, a few dozen metres above the ground and easily 3 m across. Thanks to the lush vegetation in so many layers, it's gloomy in the jungle even at high noon and the cameras had their work cut out. So Patrik's eternally lugged-around tripod finally got its turn.
Because it was just after the big rain, it was pretty slippery. You walk a lot along stream beds, across which the trunks of giant trees have often fallen. I was crawling under one such mega-tree and whoops, I'm lying on my back in the stream. But I didn't let go of the camera and basically I fell backwards into a beautiful little spot with a view of the fallen tree and a pool, where I took a few photos.
We found the canoe in its place, the lads fitted the engine they'd hidden away from the “harbour”, we took a final group photo and set off downstream.
Surprisingly it wasn't much faster. There was only a little more water after the rain, so again we spent most of the time (even if a shorter distance) walking. We got back to the village to Rhea's parents again exactly before dark.
I don't know if I've written this already, but we're practically right on the equator here, specifically about 100 km below it. That has several interesting consequences. The day lasts exactly 12 hours all year round, it gets light at 5:55 and the sun sets at 18:05 every day. At noon the sun really is exactly above us and it looks weird (well, if you can see it through the smoke at all…). And the satellite dishes, of which there are hundreds here. Generally, the poorer the country, the more TVs and mobile phones. Apparently it's their window out of the misery. And those satellite dishes point straight up! They're not tilted at all like back home, they just lie on their backs.
In the evening we went down to the river for a swim again, after a whole day of bathing in your own sweat that's always an absolute treat. We wanted to go and eat somewhere in a restaurant so Rhea wouldn't have to cook again, but she convinced us it was too expensive (about 200 a head) and that the women would cook for us. It was excellent again, so we praised her. She launched into a monologue about how nice white men are, praising a woman even if they have to lie.
Sleeping on the floor in mosquito nets we'd already tried out, and we wanted to get up early so that tomorrow we could manage 2 legs in one day.

Up at 6:15, pack, fried noodles for breakfast, say goodbye to the pastor and his second wife and into the canoe. Having learnt from last time, we put the backpacks between us. We sit on the wooden floor one behind the other and having something to lean on is essential. On the way we stopped at some village for food and we had to get out into the water. I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers. In the restaurant we bought a bunch of the excellent local mini-bananas, and with that we got 9 battered fried ones plus rice and a bamboo sauce to take away. As we were getting back into the boat the sun was shining nicely, because the layer of smoke had thinned out. I pulled out my sunglasses and greased up my mug. I settled back at the rear of the boat, wedged in by 4 backpacks on 4 sides, legs stretched out along the sides of the boat around Patrik sitting in front of me, sitting on a PET bottle. A stable, relatively comfortable position which however didn't allow any movement whatsoever. Before it could dawn on me, the tropical sun did its work of destruction. Rolled-up trouser legs, shins burnt to a crisp. After another 2 hours of the ride we switched back to the off-road Toyota. While everyone was eating, I was mounting the camera on the Toyota's grille. On the way here it had been such an off-road adventure that there could be some great footage. Well. Could have been. Except this time we went a lot further by boat, so the toughest part was already behind us. The camera on the front grille heroically kept filming for 47 minutes, then it overheated and switched off. So we've got 47 minutes of a pretty boring dirt track with the occasional ford.
In Long Bagun we already know our way around, but this time we're staying at the house of the owner of the boat we came in. Clearly a successful local businessman, a big house on the main “avenue” by the river, about 10 little rooms upstairs for visitors, we sleep for free. After five days my body finally overcame its resistance to the local version of a toilet and dropped off the surplus. After a demanding day we're more battered than after the jungle trek. It's hot, we're sunburnt and right up to the evening we can't even bring ourselves to take a walk around the photogenic village. In the end we just buy a melon and after a short stroll (during which we admire the fingers of the local volleyball crew's setter) we have the same fried rice (nasi goreng) as last time. At the guesthouse there's a little group of locals with us and Rhea has drunk three beers and some mixed fruit drink with them, so she's talking nonsense. Before bed I photograph a cockroach, a grasshopper and that musical beetle out in the corridor, all of them the size of one of our mice.

During the night it's insanely hot, so practically right after the ritual of dousing myself with a cup in the toilet I'm sweaty again. Just as the room cools down a bit towards morning, the roosters start taking turns with the muezzin, shouting in the street and shouting neighbours. When I finally fall properly asleep, the alarm goes off, it's 6:20.
For breakfast we finish the buns we've been lugging around for a week and the melon. Just after seven we set off down the river by boat. Unfortunately the boat has not only a noisy engine but an even noisier sound system with an amplifier proudly labelled 15,000Wats. I've got my big Beats headphones with me, mostly I use them unplugged, just as ear defenders…
We stop for lunch as early as 10. I'm not really keen, but in the end it's great. A self-service restaurant, “Scoff all you can”, 60 CZK/person. Battered chicken, liver goulash just like mum's, bits of pork, steamed vegetables, fried noodles, rice of course and finally a cocoa doughnut and tea.
The trip to the toilet is interesting too. 3 cubicles, each with just a hole down to the river. To the right of the cubicles just a plank for peeing into the river. On the beam under the plank, a turd. And directly above the turd hangs freshly washed (in the river) laundry. With a Manchester United shirt leading the way.
The rest of the boat trip went fine, especially after that amplifier finally overheated. There really is too much noise around here, every vehicle here has an engine with an exhaust without a silencer, that invention apparently hasn't made it here yet. And in the end we didn't even get any silence in the jungle. After dinner the sounds of the jungle started up, so I was just about to head out and record something, whereupon the gold diggers right next to us fired up their generator! And that was for the TV at full blast (an action film in Indonesian).
At the port of Tering you switch, for some reason, to a car, which took us to Melak. Rhea suggested visiting a mate of hers who had a good job “in an office”, but it got on his nerves, so he quit, got himself a little house by the river and goes fishing. He came for us by boat, he really does live right on the river. A house, or rather 2, because the kitchen is a separate “boudoir” that actually floats on the river. In the rainy season the river level rises by several metres, so everything by the river is either up on long stilts or built on a raft of thick tropical timber logs. That wood is so oily it doesn't rot and doesn't soak up water. The visit was a success, we enjoyed it enormously. A live owl was sitting on the jetty (terrace), lots of photogenic kids were running around the walkways between the houses, we got tea and biscuits, we had to admire the ingenious floating outhouse with a hole down to the river, and in the end the kids even lured me in for a swim. I consoled myself with the thought that the river is so enormous that whatever comes out of those outhouses has long since dissolved. All the same I saw the fisherman's sweet, tiny wife rinsing our tea mugs right in the river. In the end we even got an excellent dinner and then the fisherman's roughly 12-year-old daughter took us back across the river to the boat. This time it's already a huge two-storey vessel, for about 200 people. We'll be on it for 18 hours all the way to Samarinda. The bus did it in 10 hours, true, but compared to that this boat is pure luxury. The whole upper deck is a dormitory, each of us has his own mattress and a locker for our stuff. Downstairs there's even a bar, a toilet and on the floor loads of families with children are travelling.

We snored on the boat till nine, one of the best sleeps ever. We just drew a bit of attention by banging the mosquito nets into the ceiling .
Unfortunately Honzík didn't feel too good overnight, so he stayed lying down with a temperature. Patrik and I first had rice with noodles and then we settled down next to the unbelievably fragrant sacks of mangoes in the cargo part of the boat. The pub was right above the engine room, there was really no sitting there.
Since there are about 5 people for every job here, even running the boat takes a small army. One of the nice lackeys pulled out 2 mangoes from those sacks and showed us that you eat them. I've never had such incredibly good fresh, ripe mango!
We got to Samarinda around half past one and a taxi for 80 CZK took us to the Amaris hotel. That turned out to be a big win. Even though it costs the same as parking at my favourite hotel in LA, it's a modern, beautiful and clean hotel. A shower, a normal toilet, air conditioning, a great breakfast, total comfort compared to the last 10 days.
In the evening we headed out for a beer. That's a much bigger expedition than it might seem. They don't sell beer at the hotel, they don't have a licence. That costs 75 – 100 million Rupiah a year. There are only about three bars in the city that sell alcohol. Honzík is recovering (in the afternoon we went for an examination at the hospital, he got pills for the flu) and Patrik isn't much of a drinker, so we set off with Rhea and Meryo, who is the hotel manager. First bar on the list is called Dejavu. It's a fancy-pants restaurant, all designer. A bottle of spirits (they don't do shots) would cost from 2,400 CZK. Luckily we're only going for a beer. A pitcher of draught Heineken for 700 CZK, but Meryo negotiates a discount . Rhea drinks, no, she boozes like there's no tomorrow. In a while she's barely talking, just now and then she drops some pearl of wisdom. (ran out of pen ink, I talk too much…)
For instance, she claims that the government is very wise, that it supports burning the rainforest and planting oil palms, because that will make Borneo an energy source for all of Indonesia.
And then the government is also wise because it only permits coal mining where the coal is already "ripe". And the rest it leaves to "ripen". She doesn't react to my objection that brown coal takes about a million years to "ripen" into black. Instead she also claims that the rainforest doesn't burn because of people, but that it's a natural process caused mainly by that coal under the forest. Luckily Meryo is considerably smarter and less drunk, so I learn a lot of interesting things from him. He's got a wife and kids on Java, but works here and goes home once every three months. His wife is also a hotel manager, but they live on a farm outside the city. It's funny when he tells me his wife studied 2 years in Amsterdam and travelled around Europe. He pulls out his phone and says: "What's this?" The Eiffel Tower. "And this?" The Colosseum in Rome. "And this?" The cathedral in Barcelona .
We move on to Muse entertainment. On the roof on the eighth floor there's a beautiful Beer House. On draught again only Heineken, a few others in bottles. Still no tourists. For 12 days you don't meet a single white face! In the end we move at Muse to the 2nd floor, where a live band is playing. Instead of the recommended water Rhea orders a beer again. On the way home she's afraid the neighbours would notice she's drunk (she can barely walk) and so she wants us to take her to a hotel. Otherwise she'd lose her good reputation as a Christian girl. (It's about half and half with Muslims here.) The Aramis is full, so we drop her off at a substitute hotel on the way. On the way from the car to the room she falls over 3 times, we practically carry her.
In the morning I described to her in writing how alcoholics end up. She solemnly promised that she's given up drinking for good.

Because Honzík still isn't well, we extend our stay in Samarinda and before flying off to the diving islands we wait a bit to see if Honzík gets better.
In the morning we lounge around in the room and catch up on the backlog. (diary, photos, reading and so on).
For lunch Patrik and I head into town, buy plane tickets to Berau, have a great fried rice with shrimp (for 40 CZK) and then go on foot and by taxi across the city to the biggest mosque in town. Since you go into the mosque barefoot, we leave our shoes and 3 kg of mangoes on the steps (where everyone has their shoes). After about an hour we come back, the mangoes and Patrik's sandals are there, but my old worn-out sneakers are gone. In a country where the biggest guy isn't even 160 cm, who's going to do anything with size forty-fives? I walk to the hotel barefoot, quite a bizarre experience. Well, the ranger guys walked through the jungle barefoot for 2 days, so whatever .
In the evening we head out to the local market. It's covered, a shopping centre has grown above it, and it's excellent because you shop from your motorbike. A sort of drive-in market . In the fruit section we buy bananas, mangoes. In the ready-made food section we have chicken skewers (8 pieces for 20 CZK), pancakes with an egg-white (or rice?) filling and banana/chocolate for 2 CZK a piece, peeled pineapple for about 40 CZK and then again other pancakes fried with banana and jam (also 2 CZK a piece). On the way home a small kebab too. As far as food goes, heaven on earth.

In the morning Meryo arranges a ride to the airport in the hotel car. The driver even refuses a tip. The little airport is only 8 min. from the hotel, in the middle of the city's housing. People have their living-room windows looking straight onto the apron. Nobody cares about the water in my bag, they just weigh us. Since we weigh twice as much as the locals, they have to seat us in the middle of the small propeller plane, over the wings.
From Berau you still have to do 3 hours by car through burnt-out rainforest to the harbour and then 40 min. by boat. The locals told us we had to wait another half hour, because it was going to rain. Rain? Well, a proper tropical hell broke loose. Good thing we didn't head out into the open sea in that. A small motorboat all the way to the island. Crystal clear water, rows of little houses above the water on beams, palm trees, no tourists anywhere, a room right on the beach (or rather above the beach) for 270 CZK/person.
The village looks like it's ready for hundreds of tourists. Dozens of little pubs, shops, bike and diving gear rentals, loads of little hotels and private rooms. But only 2 tourists. Us. There's also a bunch of white families here with lots of kids. But they're locals. For ten years now they've been running a (Christian) non-profit and with their own small planes they transport whatever is needed to small remote villages in the jungle. Patrik falls asleep at half past six, he's not feeling great either. Hopefully he doesn't have the same thing as Honzík.
I go off on my own to look for a pub that has beer. Without success. Surprisingly though, they do have chilled Bintang beer in cans, so I bring it along with a chicken skewer to our hotel on the pier above the sea.

On the Americans' advice, first thing in the morning I head to the beach behind the village where the coral reef starts. A wooden pier runs out from the beach, with little cabins to stay in, a lovely pub with a round bar in the middle that has a hole down into the sea, and then a diving gear rental. Everywhere deserted and empty, and that despite the fact that, unlike the rest of Indonesia, everything here is new, clean and nicely tidied up. The first time I get into the water with just my own swimming goggles and swim out to the reef from the beach. On the beach I leave my backpack with the camera and everything else. They don't steal here (supposedly – apart from those shoes). Since it's overcast, I'd rather wrap the backpack in a waterproof cover.
I'm not even halfway there and a tropical downpour starts again. In the water it doesn't matter, I keep swimming and start filming with the GoPro underwater camera. Water hammers the surface, but under the surface it's gorgeous. Colourful corals in every unimaginable shape, fish of all colours and shapes, beautiful.
Before lunch Patrik arrived, so we go for a Nasi goreng (fried rice) for 44 CZK, tea included.
On the way back I rent diving goggles, a snorkel and fins and head back out to the corals. I even manage to film giant turtles, a ray and other rarities. I'm completely blown away (I'd never seen coral live before) and I'm even thinking about how to get the whole family here, maybe over Christmas. I'm sorry we're only here for one day and won't manage to visit the other islands. The only thing spoiling it for me are thoughts of Honzík, who stayed in Samarinda and in the end ended up in hospital. I'm in the water non-stop until dark, the snorkelling is only briefly interrupted when we suddenly see a white, beautiful little bum in thong swimwear sticking up on the pier. On closer inspection it turns out that besides that bum there's also a whole young Polish girl with a group of divers. The first tourists we've seen here in 13 days!
Patrik goes to sleep again at about seven, so I sit on our little terrace above the sea, sipping Bintang, reading Respekt and stuffing the used pages into my shoes, which got soaked in that downpour. For a while I keep thinking about how to extend my stay here by a day. It really is a tropical paradise here. A gorgeous island, white sand, diving, cheap good food and accommodation, all day I live on mangoes and papaya, and I don't miss a thing. But in the end we'd rather head off to see Honzík and hopefully go with him to see orangutans in KUTAI national park.

The boat is only coming for us at nine, so I get up early and at seven I head out to the corals again. Yesterday it was overcast all day (and still 28°C), now the sun is shining, I'm hoping for better shots. Even though I run, by the time I get into the water it's overcast. It's gorgeous anyway and I stay in the water until we leave.
Yesterday there were lots of giant turtles here, I reckon they're about 80 cm. They swam calmly and let themselves be filmed, but when they decided to bolt, they were quick as a flash. Even with fins I don't have a chance of keeping up with them.
The trip back to Samarinda is a terrible pain again. 30 min. by boat, 3 hours by car across scorched earth and a potholed road. The only interesting thing was that we got out of the boat and before we managed to sort things out with a taxi driver, the very car we'd come in the day before yesterday comes driving over the bridge! It wasn't arranged at all, we hadn't even told him when we'd be back. Still he acted like he was here for us and that we could set off right away. 3 hours of bumping along, the airport, lunch right in the hall for 44 CZK, a little coffee, a pretty lax security check, 40 min. delay and we're in Samarinda.
The airport in Samarinda is right in the middle of a residential district, so the landings are watched by kids sitting on a wall about 50 m from the runway. We dropped the backpacks off at the Amaris hotel and off to see Honzík.
He's got his own room in a nice garden (the room itself is missing quite a lot to be called "nice"). He's getting drips with minerals (we were pretty dehydrated from the jungle) and antibiotics. He has a low level of white blood cells and platelets. It's not malaria, theoretically maybe dengue fever. They don't have a test for it here, but it's treated with antibiotics anyway.
Since Rhea has been taking exemplary care of Honzík the whole time (she even sleeps over at the hospital) we took her out to dinner at the local famous crab and shrimp restaurant. Don't go imagining the Alcron though! On a street corner a shelter, crabs boiling in cauldrons on the ground, a few plastic chairs around, the whole thing lined by a street gutter. Even so the crabs and especially the shrimp are luxurious. They claim one portion is meant for two, but we know them by now. In the end 4 portions for three. Plus a fantastic fresh mango cocktail. It's the most expensive dinner of the whole trip, but still probably ten times cheaper than the same meal would cost in civilisation.
Coming back to the hotel is always like flying to another planet. Outside heat, noise, dirt, rubbish, thousands of scooters. In the hotel quiet, tidy, clean, air-conditioned. A shower. It is a splurge, but after all those hostels with filthy squat toilets we deserve it. On top of that the boozing with Meryo showed in the price, so we're only paying about 419 CZK/night . Towards the end of an expedition the fatigue from the everyday little travel annoyances always shows. We don't feel like bumping along in a bus any more, the noise and dirt bother us more, we dream of a moment without sweat-soaked clothes, of a cold beer or bread and butter.

In the morning Indonesia shows itself in full force. Rhea calls to say she's got us tickets on the VIP bus to the park. An hour later she calls again to say the bus is full and we don't have tickets. After a visit to the hospital we head over there in person. Very carefully I explain to the girl, draw it and write it down, that we need two tickets for the 12:00 bus to Sanghatai. She nods along to everything, yeah, sure, and the tickets cost 175,000R. Then we sort out the other buses back to the airport, she works out how much the whole thing will cost, we count out the money and we're glad it worked out after all. Bullshit! Only when we're paying does the girl remember there's no room on the 12 o'clock one!! Rhea then claims it was a misunderstanding because the girl doesn't understand English well. Like hell! She's as thick as a barn door!
In the end we take an ordinary public bus and it's not so bad. Luckily I get a double seat so I eventually fall asleep, because my audiobook runs out. All Quiet on the Western Front. And so I slept through my very first overland crossing of the equator! And at the same time I missed the brutal apocalypse along the road. The road runs along a ridge, so apparently you can see far into the distance that burnt, or still burning, plain, the one that's had the whole island shrouded in smoke for 5 months already. The locals burn and burn like their lives depend on it, so they can sow rice or oil palms. And next year they'll burn another chunk. Because the harvest is better that way. Well, hopefully I'll see it on the way back. Mainly the equator.
On the bus the guy behind me struck up a conversation with me. He speaks decent English (which is an exception here). He's a teacher, special education with a focus on children with autism. Apparently there are a lot of them here, supposedly because mothers drink bad water during pregnancy. Oddly enough the government doesn't pay him for it, in fact nobody pays him for it! He comes from Jakarta so he makes extra money importing various goods. He's a keen photographer, he showed me photos on his laptop from newly discovered caves in the jungle where they found 2,000-year-old drawings (of hands). In the end we agree he'll come with us to see the orangutans. He arranged a ride by phone, on the way we buy food, because in the jungle we're supposed to cook for ourselves. They were meant to take us to the park by boat, but because of fallen trees we end up going by motorbike. Me on a tiny off-road Kawasaki 150, Patrik on an old and similarly tiny police bike.
The lodge, or rather the cabin in the jungle, is a tragic filthy shed with the worst possible toilet and a horribly smelly room (it smells of the chemical they used against moths during the war. For the life of us we can't remember what it's called). ((naphthalene, transcriber's note)). Next to us there's a couple of tourists from Holland. At around nine in the evening we set off on a night walk through the jungle with a guide. Neither the tarantula nor the scorpion is home, so in two hours of walking we see a few spiders, a sleeping orange bird and a small lizard. But the jungle is full of sounds so it's worth it. We come back once again completely soaked in sweat.

In the morning I'm still furious about where we've ended up. A filthy toilet where we pour dirty water over ourselves. A stinking room, a mosquito net with holes big enough for crocodiles, heat, noise from the guides partying. After breakfast (the buns we bought in Tering ten days ago) we head off into the jungle. We see a nice owl, and soon we come across a lovely family of orangutans too. They pay us no attention at all, they jump around or lie in the branches maybe 3–10 m above us. They're munching on lianas, there's a pregnant female and a mother with two kids, 7 years and 10 days old! The baby clings to her even when she's jumping from liana to liana. There's research going on here, so a young girl with binoculars, a tripod and a notebook comes along with us. Then a downpour starts and, soaked through, we head back to the lodge. We dry our stuff and from the terrace we watch first the macaques (in the morning they stole a sack of rice) and then 4 monitor lizards, from about 80 to 150 cm. They stroll around under the terrace looking for leftovers.
In the afternoon we talked ourselves into going into the jungle one more time. The hardest part of the talking-into was squeezing into wet trousers and cotton shirts that hadn't dried. We've only got small backpacks with us, filled more with cameras and lenses than spare clothes. We left the big backpacks in Samarinda.
The afternoon walk through the jungle was without any major zoological surprises, but the guide made up for it with botanical ones. For instance, he hacked off with his machete a piece of liana about a metre long and 5 cm thick (at that thickness it's woody) and gave us a drink from it! The inside of that hard stem is so porous that water poured out of it in a stream for several minutes! Then he showed us the seeds and trees of Iron Wood. The seed is the size of a smallish mango and the wood is so dense it doesn't even float. The biggest experience was probably the King of Trees. The trunk maybe 5 m wide at the base (it's not round, more star-shaped), height maybe 80 m. It has terribly tiny leaves, about 2–3 cm. It's amazing it can supply such a huge body. The branches look like stumps after an amputation. Sitting on the trunk we wondered what reading on the Richter scale a seismographic station would record when a tree like that falls from old age. Which made us all the more surprised in the evening as we sat on the terrace with our books. First a huge rumble from afar, it sounded like a thunderstorm. Then a terrible crash followed by a clearly perceptible tremor of the ground and the terrace. Sort of as if someone had given the bench we were sitting on a sharp kick. The night was a bit less awful than yesterday, but the longing to get back to civilisation hasn't diminished.

In the morning the macaque gang came to say goodbye. I threw them the rest of a bun, the mother with the baby came too, and the old male. In the end a small caiman turned up as well, about 1 m. They took us across the dirty little river by boat (supposedly full of crocodiles?) and this time drove us in a police car all the way to the travel agency that runs the VIP bus. A really luxurious minibus, we're sitting in it now and I've got my legs fully stretched out in front of me. Unfortunately the roads are just as full of holes and the driver's an idiot. I explained to him that we want to stop at the equator and take a photo. He nodded along, sure thing, he understands, and then he drove right past the equator. Sadly it's part of the local (or Asian in general) character to nod along to everything. Even when they don't understand, don't know or don't agree. Terrible trait. The whole time we're driving again through countryside that's either still burning, freshly burnt or burnt and already planted with oil palms among the charred stumps and fallen logs. They don't even bother to harvest the timber.
Honzík is already packing up from the hospital so he can join us in Samarinda. On the way we also book flights with Bridget, sitting in LA, for skiing in Salt Lake City in December. A fairly funny thing to be doing on a bus at the equator. In Samarinda Honzík is already waiting for us with Rhea. Rhea is clutching a plastic bag holding a handmade painting, which I earned by taking her out for a beer where she got blind drunk. The painting is a horribly depressing depiction of some kind of fairy escaping from blue mud. Supposedly it represents an Indonesian woman who is imprisoned in marriage and trying to escape. An A3-sized painting packs into a backpack just great.
In Balikpapan the bus takes us right to the hotel. A luxurious skyscraper on the beach with an infinity pool and a patisserie. A suite with two bathrooms. A brilliant steak for dinner, beer. As a contrast to the squalor and filth in Kutai National Park, perfect. We don't even leave the hotel any more, we lounge by the pool and in the room, and just watch the mess outside from the window. What originally seemed exciting and genuine to us is now just noise, chaos and dirt. Ideal for looking forward to going home.

The flight to Singapore was uneventful, we just managed to buy presents at the airport. (T-shirts and civet coffee.)
In Singapore we had about 10 hours, ideal for a look around the centre, which you can reach from the airport by express train.
Singapore is the most modern, cleanest and actually the richest-looking city I've ever seen! The train journey took about 45 minutes and the whole way there wasn't a single old, unrepaired or dirty building to be seen, no dump, no wreck, no dirt in the street. Compared to it, Prague, London or San Francisco are complete sewers.
In the centre we had a look at the colonnade along the river, had some brilliant Vietnamese noodles in an underground labyrinth of restaurants and shops, and then headed to the botanical garden. That's a big park on the edge of the centre where insane architecture of colourful 20 m tall chalices is combined with a show of real tropical plants. The highlight is a visit to two pavilions, one simulating tropical rainforest high in the mountains and the other a tropical garden or something. Honzík and I visited the first one. It's basically a 50 m tall cone built inside a greenhouse, with a waterfall falling down its sides and orchids growing on it. Inside there's a labyrinth of corridors and exhibitions on the theme: "Humanity is destroying the rainforest while breeding too much, and that's why we'll be extinct within 50 years."
After visiting the botanical garden we went to look at a crazy building nearby – a Hotel??? Two skyscrapers joined at the roof by a roughly 300 m long "boat" with palm trees growing on it, plus a park and swimming pools.
Through the hotel we walked into a modern shopping centre which had an artificial river with little boats in it. Outside in front of it, a crowd was gathering in the bay and a light show was starting. Controlled water jets shot up from several boats and from the shore, and they projected a colourful show accompanied by music onto the spray. A brilliant experience.
Then just ice cream and coffee in the underground city and the train back to the airport.

We managed to talk our way into seats in the emergency exit row, so we had tons of legroom. I slept the whole way. In Amsterdam we bought fresh tulips for our wives at the airport and off home. Honzík is fine now, so we're coming back in good shape.

We booked ourselves in for an examination at the travel medicine department. We want to know what Honzík actually had and whether we've got it too. Something like Dengue fever definitely occurs in the jungle.
The head physician, Dr Malinová, was quite baffled about what we were doing there when there's actually nothing wrong with us. In the end they kindly took our blood, saying they'd only do the Dengue test on Honzík.