Samarinda, East Kalimantan, Indonesia
Zzzzzzzzip across Sabah and into Indonesia!
A few nights in Kota Kinabalu eating nice food and visiting with a few of Linda’s innumerable but individually immensely memorable siblings and then jump onto a night bus for Tawau, Sabah.
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The bus is as comfortable as can be expected, but the road is windy. Each of us has friends. Erin has a book that puts her to sleep. Nate has a few pills of Gravol. Linda has a plastic bag she refuses to fill up with vomit, despite the demands of her gastrointestinal system and her addled inner ear. Ben has a dram of Irish whisky, poured into a plastic water bottle and consumed openly, as though it were cold tea.
I loved that bus! Everyone else was either sleeping or miserable, but I was drinking decent whisky for the first time in weeks, I had a good book and when I looked up, there was a hilariously miss-subtitled Thai/Chinese kung-fu movie to laugh at. When I asked the bus driver to wait for me to pee in the ditch while we were stopped at a police checkpoint, even the gravel on the road looked magical to me, standing out in long black streaks in the headlights of the bus. And when I looked up just in time to clearly see a dog disappear under our front wheels with a satisfying thump, I giggled. That bus ride was meant for me!
The morning was much less good. The bus driver was too fast for dogs and for passengers wanting to sleep past 4:30, when we arrived in Tawau in the middle of the heaviest rainfall I’d seen in at least three days. Sleepily, we stood around for the bus shelter waiting for the rain to let up, and then we ran through the rain to a dirty all-night restaurant that served coffee and food that can only be served in the middle of the night by the only place open for miles.
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We waited until 6:30 (we thought the boat left at 8:00) and carried our bags across town to the ferry port, where we were told the boat didn’t leave until 11:30. We bought tickets and found a slightly dirtier restaurant nearby, where Linda and Erin tried to read through bleary eyes and where Nate and I slept with our heads on the table, periodically waking to order another cup of coffee or bowl of soup. Finally at 10:00 we cleared customs and got on the boat at 10:30. The boat didn’t actually leave until 1:00 — an hour and a half late — but I was far too asleep to feel impatient.
At Tarakan we did some backpack-laden gymnastics, climbing from boat to boat to pier among our smiling and helpful Indonesian fellow passengers. Up on the pier, Erin immediately declared, “I like this place. That was fun. Those people were so friendly.” We had been in Tarakan for less than 10 minutes at the time. I kissed her for being so prejudicially positive, or I should have, anyway.
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Even before we clear customs, the one English-speaking cab driver in town finds us. We don’t need an English-speaking cab driver; Linda speaks Bahasa Malaysia, which is ten words and an accent away from Bahasa Indonesia and besides, the rest of us have fifty words of Bahasa and a phrasebook to get us whatever we want. But once he has us, we can’t shake him, and we climb into his shitty little van and he makes inquiries on our behalf.
He calls the travel agent Linda spoke to yesterday and mysteriously they haven’t kept the plane tickets they promised they would hold for us. All of the other travel agents are closed, he says. The hotel we want to check into turns us away. There are too many bad things happening all at once. Anything this man touches turns to shit, I say. Still, we let him drive us to another travel agent. He takes us to a residential back alley. The agency is closed, the driver says, so the travel agent is at home. Suddenly, mysteriously, the “agent” is quoting us a price for a plane ticket that is nearly double what we thought we would pay.
It’s all much too bad for coincidence. The only thing to be done is to get rid of the cab driver. We make him drive us to our second-choice hotel, the Hotel Paradise. He suggests a different one, but we insist on Paradise. We drove past it before, so we know where it is. So he takes us there and we get rid of him, and everything starts to get better again.
We get rooms. The Hotel Paradise was never splendid, but even its lack of splendour has faded. The rooms are shabby and overpriced, but they have beds and showers. Linda is exhausted from being our go-between with all of the conmen we’ve met, so Erin and I let her and Nate shower, while we go downstairs and try to sort out our flight situation. The hotel’s travel agency is closed, but the nice man at reception makes a couple of phone calls and tells us that there is room on the 7:00 AM flight we intended to take on Batavia Air, and if we show up at the airport at 5:30 AM, we’ll probably be able to get on the plane.
This is an improvement. None of us wants to have to spend a whole day in Tarakan.
The motto of Batavia Air is “Trust us to Fly”. I always thought that it is implicit in the act of buying a plane ticket that you trust them not only to fly, but also to land the fucking plane. I don’t find the motto encouraging.
We shower for the first time in well over 24 hours. Undressing is an olfactory assault. The last thing I want to do is pull my t-shirt up over my nose, but it’s the only way to get the thing off my body without cutting it off. I consider cutting it off. I have so few t-shirts, though; instead, I take a deep breath.
Refreshed and feeling human again, we go out and find food. Tarakan is a bit of a hole, but we find a lively street market and some passable street food. Then I look for beer and find it nowhere. Muslims. We’re about to give up when we walk past a much more expensive hotel than our own. Expensive hotels always have bars, and this one is no exception. Bottles of ice-cold Bintang beer are about C$1.75, and the staff is very friendly. Things are getting much better.
We have a couple of beers and return to our hotel and find the hotel’s travel agency suddenly open. The nice man at reception evidently called the travel agent in on our behalf. The travel agent tells us that contrary to our previous fear, there are several flights a day from Tarakan to Balikpapan. He sells us tickets on Sriwajaya Air for a very reasonable price and tells us that he’ll drive us to the airport for free the next day at 10:00 for our 11:30 flight. Things are bordering on being fantastic.
Sriwajaya Air’s motto is “Your Flying Partner.” I personally don’t feel at all qualified to be their flying partner. I’d never thought of my arrangement with any airline as being a reciprocal partnership on the subject of flying. I’d always thought of it as being a strictly one-way relationship, in which they did absolutely all of the flying without consulting me on any of the technical aspects. I hoped that I wouldn’t be called to the cockpit to fulfill my part of the partnership — landing the plane, for example.
The breakfast at Hotel Paradise is worse than the rooms, but the travel agent is good as his word and he meets us out front with an SUV. We had only seen him sitting down before; he turns out to be unbelievably short. He drives us to the airport, takes our money and gives us fully-functioning plane tickets. We are very happy with the short man.
Sriwajaya did 100% of the flying to Balikpapan. Their in-flight service consisted of handing each passenger a boxed meal as we boarded the bus that took us across the tarmac to the plane. The box held a container of water, a chocolate-filled bun, and a small cube of sticky rice with chicken, wrapped in a banana leaf. Erin didn’t want hers, so I ate it for her. We discovered that the reason they gave us the flight meal in advance was that the flight attendants were far too busy during the flight trying to sell all manner of tatty dollar-store goods to the passengers to serve meals, but they did land the plane without my help.
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In Balikpapan we got a cab to the bus station and a bus to Samarinda. Samarinda is a bustling, dirty boomtown that has recently switched from logging to coal, but it’s not completely without its charms. We found one restaurant that is very nice except for being lightly infested with beggars, and we found a hotel that I like very much. Every time I go to the toilet or have a shower, I have a cultural experience. The toilet in our room is a squat toilet, (which I have been told and which I believe to be much healthier for your bowels than a sit-down toilet) and showering is accomplished by scooping water onto your head from a container called a mandi. I enjoy it.
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Some people ask me why I enjoy traveling in uncomfortable places so much. I like it because it’s like a roller coaster: up, up, up, DOWN, (wheee!) up, up, up, DOWN, &c. The bad moments are trying enough that the small victories are immensely rewarding. Finding a cold beer can be a triumph and a $15 hotel room can feel like a palace.
We have found a guide and made plans to depart tomorrow for our exciting trip up the mighty Mahakam River. I don’t think I can tell you what we’re doing up there. Erin is writing another story. It’s probably a secret. I’ll ask her, though.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Anti-inflammatories
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
It has been four days since we descended Mount Kinabalu. I’m up to four anti-inflammatory pills per day, trying to quiet my raging knee and make it behave itself as an instrument of locomotion once again.
My knee has been bothering me for the last couple of months; I fucked it up landscaping, and then helping Erin move her office. Every now and then something pops out of place and it hurts like hell until I can pop it back in. During our descent from Kinabalu, five hundred meters from the end of the trail, my knee finally popped out of place and I couldn’t get it back in. It hurts, but I did make it up and down that mountain.
Even more than my knee, my problem with walking has been from the muscles in my legs. I was a younger man the first time I climbed that mountain. I don’t remember my legs aching for this long last time. Erin, Nate and Linda all say that their legs are nearly back to normal. Mine aren’t.
There were twelve of us plus two guides who started out climbing Kinabalu on Thursday: my parents, five of Linda’s brothers, one of her sisters, Linda, Nate, Erin, the photographer for Erin’s story, and myself. We stuck together for the first half an hour or so, but the Jimi kids couldn’t restrain themselves to our pace for long. Most of them are younger than the rest of us and all of them are way more Dusun than the rest of us.
It is their mountain. Mount Kinabalu is where the souls of the Dusun go when they die. Kinabalu was giving their legs strength and pulling them up to the top. Us, it fought every step of the way. The Jimi family ran up the trail ahead of us. We didn’t see most of them again until we reached the mid-point, where we would spend the night.
Sharing the trail with us were dozens of Dusun porters taking supplies up to the lodge at the mid-point of the mountain, everything from food to canisters of gas to building materials. They generally walked slower than us, but unlike us, they seldom stopped to rest. I asked one tiny woman with a homemade backpack how many kilos of cement she was carrying. She told me, “only 28.” She was barely over 4 feet tall. An older man was carrying two 10-foot long planks on his back. Linda asked what they weighed and he said 52 kilograms. We asked what he was getting paid to carry them up the 6-kilometer trail which gains 1500 meters of altitude, and he said 175 Ringgit — about C$60.
About halfway to the mid-point, my mom got sick. I think she was pushing herself a little too hard and climbing a little too fast, and she started puking. She couldn’t keep water down, so there was no way she was going to make it. She and my dad turned back.
The rest of us slogged up to the mid-point, which is at an elevation of about 3300 meters, making it a total climb of 1500 meters on the first day. That’s really a lot. For Vancouverites, it’s the equivalent of doing a high-altitude version of the Grouse Grind twice in a row, and the trail is nearly as steep and not quite as well-maintained.
The Jimi boys were waiting for us in the lodge at the mid-point, and they were freezing their asses off. A thermometer on the outside of the lodge told us it was 11 degrees Celsius, which was the coldest temperature most of them had ever been exposed to. By the next morning, they would be nostalgic for 11 degrees, but they didn’t know that yet.
They got in bed and shivered. Jerry Paul refused to get out of bed for supper until I went into his room and gave him hell. I told him that half the reason he was cold was that he was starving, whether he felt hungry or not. He had climbed 1500 meters that day. No fuel, no fire.
We tried to get to sleep early, because to make it to the summit for sunrise, we’d have to start climbing at 2:30 AM. Erin and I decided to have a beer after supper, to help us sleep. A can of Carlsberg costs about 4 Ringgit in most places in Sabah. At the mid-point lodge we paid 20 Ringgit, which is about C$7.00. Considering someone had to carry that beer all the way up, I felt like we were getting a pretty good deal.
After the beer, I lay down in my bunk and listened to the Malaysian soldiers who were staying in our lodge talking on the other side of the paper-thin wall of our room. I’m not sure how much I slept. There was definitely a period of semi-conscious confusion between about 8:00 PM and 2:30 AM. I hated my alarm at 2:30, which means that I probably was asleep when it went off.
It was raining like hell and black as death at 2:30 AM. Our guides had a conference with some other guides for about ten minutes, discussing whether it was safe to climb. They decided that it was, so we set off. The rain quickly stopped.
The beginning of the climb was a lot of steep stairs. Both Linda and her sister Jolivia felt like they were going to die, and we walked slow.
The middle of the climb had a lot of ropes and involved climbing a lot of cliffs in the dark.
.
Then there was a long section that Nate calls the “inclined parking lot”. It is a steep plane of granite, over 3500 meters in altitude where the air gets a little thin. There is nothing to think about except for your next step, whether it’s time for a break, and whether the sugar you get from a piece of candy is worth the gummy, sugary phlegm in the back of your throat.
The last hundred meters is a scramble up the pile of granite boulders that is Low’s Peak, altitude 4100 meters, the highest point between the Himalayas and New Guinea.
I’m lousy at describing scenery. Fortunately, we had a camera, so I don’t have to.
The summit was freezing. Linda warned her brothers not to climb too quickly, because if they got to the summit early, they’d have to wait around for the sun to rise and they’d freeze their dicks off sitting around on the top of a mountain, not moving. They didn’t listen. Their (mostly) young legs and their Dusun souls propelled them to the top of the mountain. By the time we got there, Hillosky looked like his soul would have a short journey to the afterlife.
We were about to leave the summit when a sudden storm blew in. The wind picked up, pelted us with rain and threatened to pitch us off the back side of the summit and down the 1800-meter cliff we were perching atop of. The few dozen climbers who were crowded around us hurriedly vacated the summit. The storm stopped pretty much as soon as we scrambled down the peak and reached the inclined parking lot again.
Hillosky looked like he had given up on life. He had nothing on his head but a baseball cap, and the sleeves of the winter jacket he had borrowed for the climb were four inches too short for his arms. His hands were covered by knit gloves, which were now sopping wet, and he was wearing rubber shoes, which were great for traction but useless for insulation. Worst of all, for the first time since I’ve known him, he had stopped smiling. He was barely walking. He had given up on life. I put my arm around him and propelled him down the mountain. I promised him that the lower we went, the warmer it would get.
We retreated to the mid-point lodge for breakfast and life-giving coffee. Hillosky smiled again. Then all ten of us started down the mountain. We took about three and a half hours to get down. Linda’s brother Velentino got down in 45 minutes.
I made it almost all the way down the mountain, to a spot 500 meters from the bus to the parking lot, when my knee went out for no discernable reason. I guess it just got sick of walking. I couldn’t pop it back in, so for the last 500 meters of the hike, the jungle heard a monotonous stream of English obscenities.
My advice to you: never climb a mountain with a Dusun — they’ll make you look like a fat, out-of-shape, lazy westerner, either by climbing twice as fast as you, or by carrying 52 kilograms of lumber on their back while they do it.
I’d like to say that we white kids were better at something than the Dusun, like eating, for example, but it’s just not true. The Dusun ate more than us, too. We’re just plain useless, unless eating all the anti-inflammatories in Sabah counts as useful.
We’ve now returned to coastal elevations and we have been recuperating and preparing for the next stage of our trip. Linda, Nate, Erin and I are soon going to the Indonesian side of this island, which the locals are pleased to call Kalimantan.
Erin and I had a flight from Bangkok to Bombay (Mumbai) booked for two weeks from now. Any of you who have been following the news know that Bangkok’s airports have been occupied and shut down by the anti-government protesters who Erin and I visited last month, and Bombay was invaded by ten terrorist gunmen who somehow lasted for 60 hours and killed 195 people.
Luckily for us, we had already cancelled that flight, because it didn’t fit into our schedule. As it stands, we’re definitely not going back to Bangkok, and we may skip India altogether. Instead, we might spend some extra time in Indonesia. I’ll let you know if we ever decide what we’re doing.
It has been four days since we descended Mount Kinabalu. I’m up to four anti-inflammatory pills per day, trying to quiet my raging knee and make it behave itself as an instrument of locomotion once again.
My knee has been bothering me for the last couple of months; I fucked it up landscaping, and then helping Erin move her office. Every now and then something pops out of place and it hurts like hell until I can pop it back in. During our descent from Kinabalu, five hundred meters from the end of the trail, my knee finally popped out of place and I couldn’t get it back in. It hurts, but I did make it up and down that mountain.
Even more than my knee, my problem with walking has been from the muscles in my legs. I was a younger man the first time I climbed that mountain. I don’t remember my legs aching for this long last time. Erin, Nate and Linda all say that their legs are nearly back to normal. Mine aren’t.
There were twelve of us plus two guides who started out climbing Kinabalu on Thursday: my parents, five of Linda’s brothers, one of her sisters, Linda, Nate, Erin, the photographer for Erin’s story, and myself. We stuck together for the first half an hour or so, but the Jimi kids couldn’t restrain themselves to our pace for long. Most of them are younger than the rest of us and all of them are way more Dusun than the rest of us.
It is their mountain. Mount Kinabalu is where the souls of the Dusun go when they die. Kinabalu was giving their legs strength and pulling them up to the top. Us, it fought every step of the way. The Jimi family ran up the trail ahead of us. We didn’t see most of them again until we reached the mid-point, where we would spend the night.
Sharing the trail with us were dozens of Dusun porters taking supplies up to the lodge at the mid-point of the mountain, everything from food to canisters of gas to building materials. They generally walked slower than us, but unlike us, they seldom stopped to rest. I asked one tiny woman with a homemade backpack how many kilos of cement she was carrying. She told me, “only 28.” She was barely over 4 feet tall. An older man was carrying two 10-foot long planks on his back. Linda asked what they weighed and he said 52 kilograms. We asked what he was getting paid to carry them up the 6-kilometer trail which gains 1500 meters of altitude, and he said 175 Ringgit — about C$60.
About halfway to the mid-point, my mom got sick. I think she was pushing herself a little too hard and climbing a little too fast, and she started puking. She couldn’t keep water down, so there was no way she was going to make it. She and my dad turned back.
The rest of us slogged up to the mid-point, which is at an elevation of about 3300 meters, making it a total climb of 1500 meters on the first day. That’s really a lot. For Vancouverites, it’s the equivalent of doing a high-altitude version of the Grouse Grind twice in a row, and the trail is nearly as steep and not quite as well-maintained.
The Jimi boys were waiting for us in the lodge at the mid-point, and they were freezing their asses off. A thermometer on the outside of the lodge told us it was 11 degrees Celsius, which was the coldest temperature most of them had ever been exposed to. By the next morning, they would be nostalgic for 11 degrees, but they didn’t know that yet.
They got in bed and shivered. Jerry Paul refused to get out of bed for supper until I went into his room and gave him hell. I told him that half the reason he was cold was that he was starving, whether he felt hungry or not. He had climbed 1500 meters that day. No fuel, no fire.
We tried to get to sleep early, because to make it to the summit for sunrise, we’d have to start climbing at 2:30 AM. Erin and I decided to have a beer after supper, to help us sleep. A can of Carlsberg costs about 4 Ringgit in most places in Sabah. At the mid-point lodge we paid 20 Ringgit, which is about C$7.00. Considering someone had to carry that beer all the way up, I felt like we were getting a pretty good deal.
After the beer, I lay down in my bunk and listened to the Malaysian soldiers who were staying in our lodge talking on the other side of the paper-thin wall of our room. I’m not sure how much I slept. There was definitely a period of semi-conscious confusion between about 8:00 PM and 2:30 AM. I hated my alarm at 2:30, which means that I probably was asleep when it went off.
It was raining like hell and black as death at 2:30 AM. Our guides had a conference with some other guides for about ten minutes, discussing whether it was safe to climb. They decided that it was, so we set off. The rain quickly stopped.
The beginning of the climb was a lot of steep stairs. Both Linda and her sister Jolivia felt like they were going to die, and we walked slow.
The middle of the climb had a lot of ropes and involved climbing a lot of cliffs in the dark.
.
Then there was a long section that Nate calls the “inclined parking lot”. It is a steep plane of granite, over 3500 meters in altitude where the air gets a little thin. There is nothing to think about except for your next step, whether it’s time for a break, and whether the sugar you get from a piece of candy is worth the gummy, sugary phlegm in the back of your throat.
The last hundred meters is a scramble up the pile of granite boulders that is Low’s Peak, altitude 4100 meters, the highest point between the Himalayas and New Guinea.
I’m lousy at describing scenery. Fortunately, we had a camera, so I don’t have to.
The summit was freezing. Linda warned her brothers not to climb too quickly, because if they got to the summit early, they’d have to wait around for the sun to rise and they’d freeze their dicks off sitting around on the top of a mountain, not moving. They didn’t listen. Their (mostly) young legs and their Dusun souls propelled them to the top of the mountain. By the time we got there, Hillosky looked like his soul would have a short journey to the afterlife.
We were about to leave the summit when a sudden storm blew in. The wind picked up, pelted us with rain and threatened to pitch us off the back side of the summit and down the 1800-meter cliff we were perching atop of. The few dozen climbers who were crowded around us hurriedly vacated the summit. The storm stopped pretty much as soon as we scrambled down the peak and reached the inclined parking lot again.
Hillosky looked like he had given up on life. He had nothing on his head but a baseball cap, and the sleeves of the winter jacket he had borrowed for the climb were four inches too short for his arms. His hands were covered by knit gloves, which were now sopping wet, and he was wearing rubber shoes, which were great for traction but useless for insulation. Worst of all, for the first time since I’ve known him, he had stopped smiling. He was barely walking. He had given up on life. I put my arm around him and propelled him down the mountain. I promised him that the lower we went, the warmer it would get.
We retreated to the mid-point lodge for breakfast and life-giving coffee. Hillosky smiled again. Then all ten of us started down the mountain. We took about three and a half hours to get down. Linda’s brother Velentino got down in 45 minutes.
I made it almost all the way down the mountain, to a spot 500 meters from the bus to the parking lot, when my knee went out for no discernable reason. I guess it just got sick of walking. I couldn’t pop it back in, so for the last 500 meters of the hike, the jungle heard a monotonous stream of English obscenities.
My advice to you: never climb a mountain with a Dusun — they’ll make you look like a fat, out-of-shape, lazy westerner, either by climbing twice as fast as you, or by carrying 52 kilograms of lumber on their back while they do it.
I’d like to say that we white kids were better at something than the Dusun, like eating, for example, but it’s just not true. The Dusun ate more than us, too. We’re just plain useless, unless eating all the anti-inflammatories in Sabah counts as useful.
We’ve now returned to coastal elevations and we have been recuperating and preparing for the next stage of our trip. Linda, Nate, Erin and I are soon going to the Indonesian side of this island, which the locals are pleased to call Kalimantan.
Erin and I had a flight from Bangkok to Bombay (Mumbai) booked for two weeks from now. Any of you who have been following the news know that Bangkok’s airports have been occupied and shut down by the anti-government protesters who Erin and I visited last month, and Bombay was invaded by ten terrorist gunmen who somehow lasted for 60 hours and killed 195 people.
Luckily for us, we had already cancelled that flight, because it didn’t fit into our schedule. As it stands, we’re definitely not going back to Bangkok, and we may skip India altogether. Instead, we might spend some extra time in Indonesia. I’ll let you know if we ever decide what we’re doing.
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