Kalimantan comprises roughly three-quarters of the island of Borneo, the third largest island in the world. This Indonesian territory, with its vast uncharted rainforests laced with mighty rivers, is one of the country’s most neglected and underrated destinations. You can trek for days through Kalimantan’s deep interior without ever seeing open sunlight or any sign of cultivation. Borneo hosts the world’s largest arboreal mammal and its only flying squirrel, flying snake, flying frog, and a lizard that opens webs between its toes and flies. A fabled and mysterious land, no question.
This Borneo journey began at humid Syamsuddin Noor airport. I loaded my bags into a taxi, then took the modern highway 27-km into Banjarmasin, the capital of South Kalimantan Province.
The next morning before sunrise I headed deep into the hills of the Meratus Range to the subdistrict seat at Loksado, the cultural center of the Bukit Meratus people. Following the river, cassava, rattan, krupuk and padi lay drying on the roadside, Brahmin bulls grazed in dense grasslands, idle boys played chess on porches.
The road then snaked through heavy forests. Verdant, little exploited, sparsely populated, Loksado didn’t even have a road to it until 1992. The area effectively opened to travelers only in the early 1990s with the construction of a jungle lodge on a fork of the Amandit, the region’s most important river.
Built on the site of an old riverside market, with jackfruit, durian and mango trees shading its yard and the hump of Gunung Tandawan towering in the distance, the Amandit Lodge is a no-frills but comfortable refuge in the middle of hilly, semi-wild rubber plantations. During the day naked children jump gleefully from bamboo rafts into the river and through the night birds, lizards and insects chatter and shriek - as always, the tiniest insects the shrillest of all.
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On the very afternoon I arrived, I found myself trudging behind a rubber tapper up one of the thousands of forest tracks that crisscross the Loksado region. The Meratus Dayak are, in fact, so used to walking narrow jungle trails that you can usually pick out these mountain rustics in Banjarmasin walking single file behind one another.
On a steep slope the tapper stopped before a light-colored tree over 20 meters high. A meter above the ground, he cut a narrow diagonal channel into its trunk below scores that had already been cut. At the bottom of the groove, the tapper attached a small leaf spout under which he fitted a half coconut shell. The air weighed heavy with humidity making the milky white sap oozed freely down the scarred skin of the old rubber tree.
Rubber tree seeds were first brought from Brazil to Malaya for replanting in the 1870s. All the plantation trees of Indonesia, from the very first grown in East Sumatra in the 1880s, came from those seedlings. Because of its vast Sumatran rubber plantations and oilfields the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1942, in one stroke cutting off three-fifths of the world’s natural rubber supply to the United States.
Our tapper-cum-tracker then pointed out a Meranti, a highly sought after light hardwood from which most of Indonesia’s plywood is made. At the top of a small rise, we stumbled out of the jungle onto a larger walking track which in turn led to the "main" road. Bundles of rubber – like rolled up buffalo hides – sat in piles waiting to be picked up and taken to Banjarmasin for processing.
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Pak Gani, wearing a "James Dean Lives" T-shirt, was at the door early, ready to take me on a raft down the seething Amandit. The most accomplished boatman of the Loksado area, he wins all the races for his village. Pak Gani knew the river well and steered his raft effortlessly and uneventfully.
The narrow triangular-shaped raft was made of giant 8-meter-long stems of green bamboo lashed together with bamboo strips (buluh), curled up at one end like an Ottoman shoe. The journey took 3 hours from Loksado to the road intersection and the welcome hotsprings at Tanhui. The bamboo poles bulged as they scraped over bolders beneath the surface, sending a ripple down the raft’s entire length. The sensation the whole time was like being inside a bouncing rubber ball.
Along the shore we came upon scenes of primeval beauty and innocence. In settlements far from any road gatherers cut, stacked and tied rattan, monkeys crashed through trees overhanging the river, grannies flopped wash on rocks, boys aimed fishing sumpit (blowpipes) from isolated sand spits, men carrying battery packs waded in shallows stunning fish with wands like the grotesque antenna of a twitching insect.
From the Amandit, it was three stages back to urban civilization – the walk to the road, the ride to the lodge, then the long highway southwest to Banjarmasin. Saying our goodbyes, my tip was thrust immediately between the plump bossom of the proprietor’s wife, the safe harbor for Indonesian women of every ethnicity on every island of the archipelago.
Practicalities:
From Banjarmasin, Loksado is one hour (42 kilometers) by bus to Kandangan. From Kandangan to Loksado, it’s Rp10,000 (35 km) by four-wheel public taxi, leaving in the morning and arriving around 1 p.m. Or take a ride on the back of a private motorcycle taxi (ojek), Rp25,000.
The Amandit Lodge: Built right on the river, the lodge is owned by Arjuna Travel of Banjarmasin. Tariff: US$35 single, $40 double; meals extra. Day-to-day management is in the capable hands of Sutanto and his wife, who is a miracle worker in the kitchen. The hotel has no telephone, but there’s a wireless connection to a wartel in Loksado. Make bookings through Banjarmasin’s Borneo Indo Tours, tel. 62-511-300-050, fax: 62-511-305-078, website: borneo-indotours.co.id; email: borindo@indo.net.id.
E-mail : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2004 PakBill
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