My plane out of Surabaya was 30 minutes late – considered on time in Indonesia where jam karet (“rubber time”) is the law of the land. Circling over the city and its sinuous waterways, we touched down at humid Syamsuddin Noor airport in the dead of night. Our guide held up a big sign, loaded my bag into the van, then pulled on to a modern highway for the 27-km ride into Banjarmasin, the capital of South Kalimantan Province.
Known for hundreds of years as “The City of a Thousand Rivers,” the Old World flavor of Banjarmasin hung on even into the 1980s, though its charm has diminished over the past decade with the increase of traffic and the resolute filling in of its canals (which never numbered one thousand in the first place).
Like any scrappy middle-sized Indonesian city, you have to peel back the layers to reveal the richer lodes - the lilting life of its back alleys, the disheveled rusticity of its harbor, the stateliness of its religious architecture masked behind the soot and grime.
The Istana Barito Hotel in the downtown is a big rambling structure put up in the province’s timber and oil boom years. Though tattered around the edges, the busy lobby, antiquated elevators, long dim-lit corridors somehow give it a stubborn and musty air of glamour.
I fell asleep after isyak, the day’s last call to prayer, the lights of the city’s tallest minaret shining in the distance like a low star over a sea of squarish buildings covered in brown ironwood shingles. All too soon I was awakened by the first call to prayer and dragged myself to the front of the hotel in the half-light. My driver and I then searched the waterfront for our boatman.
The boatman was looking for us too. The dark shape and deafening sound of his klotok soon pulled up to a small dock. A great many Indonesian words are pronounced according to the sound they make. Klotok, if uttered often enough in quick succession, exactly approximates a noisy 5 hp diesel engine, the type most often used in the remote riverways of this watery nation.
The shafts of yellow and white lights from piers wavered upon the water as each house sent one representative down on a rickety stairway to the river to greet the day. Against the dim outlines of black buildings I saw old men fishing, grandmothers quartering chickens, women washing pots, other human shapes scrubbing teeth and splashing water over themselves elephant-fashion with dippers.
After klotok-ing downriver for ten minutes we turned abruptly west on a tributary, whooshed under an arcing ironwood bridge where a thriving, shadowy early morning market was in progress. Passing us was a larger “mother” klotok hauling seven paddle prahu to market, each paying a thousand rupiah apiece for the privilege. Lining the waterway, the glinting silver onion-shaped domes of small kampung mosques, sarau, broke the skyline like white spikes of a picket fence.
Twenty minutes later, now in the full blaze of a new day, the Kuin River opened up to the 900-meter-wide, 25-meter-deep, 6000-km-long Barito. From the great ports of S.E. Asian, big cargo ships carried foodstuffs, building materials, cars, spare parts and electrical goods, returning to their ports of origin a week later with processed rubber, timber, coal. Monolithic slow-moving barges, like black humpbacked hippopotamuses as large as horizontal skyscrapers, hauled coal from the Tanjung area in the north to such faraway processing points as Singapore and Hong Kong. Pulled by tugboats, other barges slipped silently by, weighted down with the corpses of forests.
Waterborne shops crowded the side of the river, interspersed with sawdust-piled lumber yards and screaming sawmills, posters of dangdut queens pinned on dust-caked walls. Undulating carpets of heavy logs tied together slapped the waves. On the far side of the river, rattan processing plants and plywood factories belched black smoke.
Our klotok slowly nudged itself into a wide thicket of boats that had the appearance of hundreds of pick-up-sticks thrown haphazardly into a bathtub. Prahu, of every shape and size, were loaded down with sacks of rice, vegetables, ribbons of long beans, heaps of ripe pineapples, melons and cassava, pungent salt fish, bundles of firewood, mounds of hairy coconuts.
There were floating pharmacies, clinics, hardware stores, petrol pump stations, clothes vendors. A maritime teashop sold soup, packets of ready-to-eat meals, sticky rice and other pastries from an array of plates. I stabbed my pastry with a stick. The proprietor made tea and coffee from steaming water ladled out of an aluminum container heated over a fire in the bowels of his vessel.
Except for the spluttering outboard motors, this floating market has remained essentially unchanged from the time its existence was first recorded 550 years ago. In 1714, an English sea captain, Daniel Beeckman, dropped anchor on the Barito in what was to become Banjarmasin. In the ship Eagle Galley’s log, he observed precisely the scene unfolding before me now as daylight broke, bereft only of TV antennas and satellite dishes.
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When I first got into the Towne, I was surpriz’d to see these floating Houses, and the people in great numbers paddling up and down from House to House in small, but neat built Canoes or Praws……we saw the river full of Men, Women and children, even some in Arms, to which this way of bathing must needs be very beneficial and refreshing in so hot a climate.”
Our klotok wedged its way gently through the mass of boats, the larger ones bobbing free at anchor waiting for customers, the smaller ones paddling furiously after buyers. In the back of each prahu sat a woman, many under the famous wide-brimmed Banjar hat, the tanggui. In order to avoid a fieldworker’s complexion, their faces are protected by swirls of rice powder.
The sun and the heat were climbing. We weaved and finally broke free of the tangle of boats. I thought to myself that this must be one of the rarest and finest visual experiences Indonesia has to offer, of cinematic caliber, the crass and callous tourist floating markets of Bangkok pale by comparison. The visitor can only succumb wholeheartedly to the spectacle.
E-mail : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2004 PakBill
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