Hey, Girl. West Kalimantan.

For those of you who aren’t super brushed up on your Southeast Asian geography, let me give you a quick lesson. The island of Borneo (which you might know about if you are an avid watcher of the Anaconda movies) is shared by three different countries. The majority of it is called Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian portion of the island. Towards the north is part of Malaysia which then surrounds the tiny coastal country of Brunei. A LOT of Borneo is made up of jungles and rivers. In the interior of the island one can find a variety of tribal peoples still adhering to the same customs and traditions they have maintained for the past thousand years. Along the coasts are some major, relatively (emphasis on “relatively”) modern cities, the biggest of which is Pontianak – my destination.

Pontianak’s biggest claim to fame is the khatulistiwa, or equator, which runs right through the heart of the city. So of course we went to see it! Right about… HERE.

We were a little excited about it, as reflected by our entry in the guestbook.

 

One foot in the northern hemisphere, one foot in the southern hemisphere!

Strange fact about the equator – they say that since there is an equal gravitational pull from both hemispheres, raw eggs can be made to stand on end. It is tricky, but with a little patience, it is possible!

The one on the left is mine! Success!

While still on Borneo, I posted from my tablet about some of my adventures. You may have read that. If not, don’t worry, it wasn’t that exciting. I mentioned going to church and meeting up with my friend Jess’s family. Here are some pictures of those adventures! First, an Indonesian hymnal – with an English translation!

I finally learned this year to read Indonesian music. They don’t use staffs and notes like we do in America, instead they use a system of numbers and symbols to represent the position of each note relative to the key it is being played in.

After church, as I mentioned, we went out to lunch for noodles and chocolate shaved ice! So delicious, and it really hit the spot in the blazing hot weather. On the right is Jess’s awesome family! Her sister on the far right is moving to my town this month to go to college!

Yes, those red beans go in the chocolate shaved ice. Indonesians love putting red beans in so many things that Americans would never think to.

I also posted before about my culinary adventure the day Jess’s parents took us out for traditional Dayak food and I heaped my plate without asking first what each thing was! Here is a better picture of my pile of dog, snake, and pig’s stomach.

And in case you didn’t believe me about the snake…

And now, for those of you who haven’t brushed up on your Southeast Asian history for awhile, here is YOUR lesson. Malaysia was colonized by the British. Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch. The British, when colonizing, had the general mindset of, “We will help make you poor savages as good as we are”. The Dutch, on the other hand, came in with a “we will take everything you have for our benefit” mindset. Both are wrong, obviously. But the Malaysians at least ended up with a much better national infrastructure than the Indonesians did.

And this is relevant to this post because…? West Kalimantan is largely inhabited by three primary people groups. The Dayak, the Melayu, and the Chinese. There are also large pockets of Javanese, Bugis, Balinese, and Madurese people. The Dayak are the largest original tribal people group of West Kalimantan. The Melayu are Indonesians of Malaysian descent. And the Chinese… Well, they’re Chinese. The ethnic divide there is huge. The Chinese run most of the business in town and tend to be the wealthiest ethnicity. The Melayu make up most of the middle class. They tend to be well educated (remember – good British infrastructure) and business savvy. The Dayak, on the other hand, are often looked down upon and discriminated against because they are seen as uneducated, backwards thinking people. It really is true that the education system there is pretty dismal unless you are wealthy enough to be able to go to private school and travel to another island/country for college. However, this mindset about and discrimination of the Dayak people has spread to a national level. Over recent years, the government has called for all Dayak longhouses to be destroyed, citing them as a safety hazard. The longhouse is one of the most important components of Dayak living. An entire village will live in one long house (hence the name) that is raised off the ground and divided into individual “apartments” for each family. The culture of the longhouse is all about unity.

One Dayak person I talked to said that the government is scared of them and that is why they are forcing them out of longhouses. I asked why the government would be scared, and she said that the government is afraid of their unity. If the inhabitants of just one longhouse decide they don’t like a leader or a government decision and they stand up and fight, that’s enough to cause quite a big problem. She says the government is trying to break them apart and scatter them so that they can’t be unified any more.

Another very concerning government action in recent years involves the lumber industry. Government officials have been going into Dayak villages and demanding to see property deeds and certificates of ownership. These people have lived there for generations, since just about the beginning of time. Of course they don’t have legal paperwork showing that they own the land. So the government uses that as justification to kick them off the land and to allow lumber companies to come in. And the government counts on them being uneducated enough to not know how to fight the system. As long as they keep it that way, they can keep making big money off all the timber that can be found there. The Dayak are discriminated against, and they know it.

So the Dayak are looked down upon by the Chinese and Melayu who are, in turn, somewhat resented by the Dayak. One thing they can all agree on though is that they hate the Javanese. Because the Javanese are super hard workers who come and take the jobs. Because of the overpopulation of Java, the government has a transmigration program where they basically pay for Javanese people to go to other islands to work. Their lives certainly aren’t glorious. A lot of families just travel around from place to place looking for work. But because of their reputation as reliable and hardworking employees, people want to hire the Javanese. A lot of them find employment as construction workers.

Either row housing or a strip mall was being built in the picture above. The construction workers slap together a house out of spare materials, which you can see two or three of in the foreground. Often, entire Javanese families will be living in those shacks until the project is finished and they move on to find other work.

It was really interesting to walk around the mall in town. There were rarely any mixed groups of people walking around. Most people tend to stick with people of the same ethnicity. I know that in some ways Java can be the same. There is a lot of tension between the Javanese and the Sundanese – the 2 main ethnic groups on the island. But the groups of people I hang out with are SOOO ethnically mixed. I’ve never really experienced that much division before in Indonesia.

There are definitely richer neighborhoods and poorer neighborhoods in Pontianak, but in most places, one can find people from opposite ends of the socio-economic scale living in the same area. For example, these two houses are just literally meters away from each other.

 

I also took a picture of this house, just around the corner from the first two, because it looks SO MUCH like an American house to me! I’ve never seen a house like this in Indonesia before!

There was one other place in town that reminded me of America. Not that I’ve ever been to Beverly Hills, but I imagine it would look a little something like this, with the palm tree lined boulevards.

One of the things I really wanted to do there was to visit the West Kalimantan Cultural Museum. So on my last day there, Mel and I went!

Here are some of my favorite exhibits. First a witch doctor’s regalia from hundreds of years ago. Kind of cool with all the teeth and stuff.

An old math book handwritten in Arabic!

A sign detailing the Melayu baby shower tradition. I think a lot of these ideas sound pretty fantastic and make American baby showers look pretty lame in comparison!

I don’t remember what this exhibit was entitled, but it contained a censer, circumcision tools, and a plate of fried chicken. I wish I’d taken a picture of the accompanying sign, because I really cannot think of what these three things have in common.

Traditional instruments! SOOO different from Javanese instruments.

And last but not least, some cool plates. Oh, and Mel and I.

The very last thing we did before I left was to go to the mission home located there for taco Tuesday! I got to explore the guesthouses and the grounds. They have a really wonderful place there. If you ever need a place to stay in Pontianak, I can hook you up! Also, they have these sweet little animals called lorises that they rescued from the jungle! They were about to be eaten…

 

From there, we loaded my luggage onto Mel’s motorbike, got someone to draw us a really sketchy looking map, and from that managed to find our way to the airport!

One last tale to tell. There are not many white people in Pontianak at ALL. So when one is spotted, it is kind of a big deal. I thought Java was bad, but Kalimantan is at least 10 times worse. We got our picture taken SO MUCH. Like when we were driving, cars would pull up next to us, slow down, open their windows, and people would start snapping pictures. That just creeps me out. On Java, when people see a white person, they will often shout the mildly racist term for a white person, “Londo!” On Kalimantan, they mostly shout, “Hey, girl!” Like, in English. Which cracked me up every time. It was the one redeeming quality of all the unwanted attention. So anyways, when it came time to leave, I was dreading sitting alone in the airport. I was just envisioning me being sad about leaving and a huge mob of people wanting to take pictures with me and chat with me. It didn’t help that when I got to the one and only gate, it was PACKED and there was hardly an empty seat. Everyone was staring at me, and I just knew this was going to be terrible. So I walked around looking for a seat not next to a sketchy looking man or an overzealous youth. I finally found an open seat next to a Chinese lady who didn’t give me a second glance. That seemed promising. I asked if I could sit, and she smiled and said yes. Like the independent, anti-social white person that I am, I automatically took out my cell phone and started SMSing people in an attempt to not look conversational. It didn’t work. She asked me where I was going. Then where I was coming from. Then where I was from originally. Then where I learned Indonesian. And on and on and on. I didn’t want to be rude, so I answered all of her questions and also politely asked some questions back. Turns out she was part of a group of 8 people who had just come out of a tribe that morning. They had come to Kalimantan from Java the same day I did to do a short term missions trip with a certain jungle tribe! I got to meet her whole team, who were all also fluent in English. There was one high schooler on her team who knows my school because he has seen my students play basketball before! He comes to their games! I felt pretty humbled. Even with my bad attitude about not wanting to sit and answer 20 questions just because I’m white, God provided an awesome situation for me. They were such a neat group of people, and I was so encouraged and blessed to sit with them just for 45 minutes!

OK, I’m done talking about Kalimantan now. It was a great adventure, but the best part of all was getting to spend exactly TEN days with my darling MelMel. She loves it when I call her that.

Here is her cat, Manning, looking much like all of us did in the afternoon heat every day.

Welcome to the Jungle

So I FINALLY got around to sorting, editing, and selecting pictures from my trip to Kalimantan in June! And I realized I had so much awesome stuff to show you that it would probably make one ridiculously long blog post. So I’m splitting it in half. And I’m actually posting the second half first so that when I post the first half second, they will show up in their proper order on my blog!

You’ll see later what the first half is about, but this second half is all about our trip into the JUNGLE! Like, for real. One friend has really been dying to see an orangutan in the wild, so we decided to go hunting for one. Just to be clear, NOT hunting with guns. We were actually in a national park/orangutan preserve. No guns allowed.

Pretty much all we were told beforehand was that we would have a guide and that all food would be provided and that we would be hiking and sleeping in tents. So that made for some fun packing. None of us had really brought jungle/hiking gear with us from Java. None of us even had a pair of shoes… Pontianak was BLAZING hot, but we didn’t know what elevation we’d be at after hiking to know what the night temperature would be like. We didn’t have any sleeping bags, sunscreen, mosquito nets, or bug spray. Between the five of us, we had one hiking backpack, but the rest of us had normal backpacks. So we made do. We borrowed some mosquito nets and then hit up the mall to get the rest of the essentials! We each packed one flat sheet and hoped that would provide enough warmth.

We woke up early one morning to fly 30 minutes to the nearby city of Ketapang (we actually boated back to Pontianak after the trip – 8 hours!). Fun fact – Kalimantan is SO beautiful from the air! It is so heavily forested and known for it’s myriad of winding rivers! But our airplane had SUPER dirty windows, so you don’t get to see any pictures of that, sorry. After landing in Ketapang, we rode in a car for about 3 hours. The roads were extremely rough, but our driver apparently did not value his car or the comfort of those in the backseat (ahem… me) whatsoever, and he rarely dropped below 80 kph. I literally bashed my head against the ceiling a few times. No big deal though – I REALLY enjoyed the drive. I love road trips and getting to see places I’ve never seen before!

We kept seeing buildings like these all along the drive. Tall, narrow buildings with no windows and only one door but lots of holes in the sides. Any guesses what they’re for??

They’re to collect birds nests! People build these buildings then just leave them, waiting for a certain type of bird to start nesting inside. After a certain period of time, the owner will come in the door at the bottom, collect the nests, then sell them for the production of birds nest soup. Now, I’ve never tried birds nest soup. It’s a pretty Chinese thing, and frankly, Chinese people do some weird things. But I’ve heard it’s quite expensive. If I remember correctly, our driver told us that one kilo of nests can be sold for around $1500! I’m so curious about this whole operation. I’ve already told you everything I know, but I have so many more questions. Like what does the inside of the building look like? How does the person get to the top to get the nests? How do you cook a poopy birds nest? We have a few of these buildings in my town, so maybe someday I’ll get to learn more.

As I’ll probably mention in my next, more general, post, West Kalimantan is comprised of three main people groups – Dayak (the local tribal people), Melayu (of Malaysian descent), and Chinese (of Chinese descent, clearly). This area was mostly Melayu Muslim with a smattering of Javanese and Balinese people who came due to transmigration. We passed through several small villages, and most houses looked about like this.

It felt weird to see houses not made of cement. Driving in the car, I almost felt like I was on a missions trip to a third world country somewhere else – like in Central America or something. I mean, houses made of wood? Who does that?

When we weren’t driving through a village, we were driving through the countryside, which was FUN. I haven’t seen this much unoccupied land since… Ummmm… I guess last time I was in America in 2011.

We drove over a lot of rivers that looked like this one. It kind of made me sad to see how dirty the waters were in an otherwise clean part of the country!

Two of our friends, having never been hiking/camping before, were a little bit nervous about our jungle adventure. As we drove over nasty river after nasty river, they began to conjure up images of us being eaten by monster river crocodiles that thrive in the murky waters of Borneo. Hoping to ease their fears, I asked our driver if crocodiles even exist in that part of the country. That was a mistake. His answer was, “Oh, yes. Sometimes they go in people’s houses and eat them.” Oops.

After our three hour drive in which we were like popcorn kernels being thrown around a hot pan, we finally arrived at “base camp”, which was our guide’s house at the very edge of the national park. He had the creepiest bird I’ve ever met. The thing talked in a man-child voice and said weird things when you weren’t looking.

So from left to right, we have some guy I don’t know who jumped in the picture; Pak Musliyanto, our good guide; the five of us; and Pak Idris, our creepy old guide. This is our “before” picture, in front of Pak Idris’s house. Before we knew he was creepy.

And here we are after hiking a mountain in the middle of the day through a jungle in 235978346% humidity. I don’t know which parent I get it from, but I have the supernatural ability to barely sweat. All the other kids were jealous.

We were super pleasantly surprised to find that we were NOT sleeping in tents but that the national park had actually constructed a tree house of sorts for researchers and guests to stay in! Since we were with the only two available guides for the entire national park, that meant we were the ONLY people on the mountain! Pretty cool.

So here’s a quick tour of our house. This is the kitchen. There is a little enclosed room next to the kitchen that can be locked. They use this for storing all the cooking supplies, like pots and pans. Those would be heavy to carry in and out every time. Pak Musliyanto carried up all the firewood and food though.

Here he is cooking us a lovely dinner our first night here. We didn’t have a lot to work with. Mostly rice and veggies. But he made do with what we had, and his cooking style is apparently to make small portions of tons of different foods!

One meal we had included fried potatoes, green beans, spinach, shredded coconut, cucumbers, fried eggplant, and some other greens that I don’t know the English word for. And coffee and tea made from river water.

Here is our dining/living room. This particular day, we were having English lessons. Pak Idris has been a guide for 14 years, so he’s used to working with foreigners and actually knows a fair amount of English. Naturally, being the creepy old man that he was, he mostly knew how to tell gross stories in English. Pak Musliyanto had only worked there for 4 years and we were the first group of foreigners he’d ever met who could speak Indonesian! He was prepared for us to only speak English and had actually packed an English-Indonesian dictionary in his bag so that he could talk to us!

On the left is our bedroom, the upstairs of the house. On the right is our outhouse which contained an actual squatty potty! High rolling.

 

Our house was in between two little rivers (or one river that curved around – I’m not actually sure as the foliage was too dense to see through) that we used for bathing, washing dishes, and drinking. Here is a view of our house from across the river. It kind of just blends in with the jungle! I love it!

Aaaaand a few other shots from around our site.

We pitched our mosquito nets and wrapped ourselves like burritos in our sheets. It did get quite cool in the middle of the night and stayed pretty chilly on into the morning, but we were all toasty enough. The weirdest thing happened in the middle of the night though. I don’t know that any of us can fully describe it, but what essentially happened was that a massive bomb went off. But it didn’t. But whatever happened was loud enough to leave our ears ringing and close enough to cause our house to shake pretty hard. Pak Idris jumped out of bed with a flashlight and went to investigate. He didn’t find anything though.

We discussed it the following morning over breakfast. We ruled out basically every possible natural cause. Pak Idris told us that has happened more than once when he has brought groups up. He says it is the spirits of the mountain trying to keep people away. Oddly enough, I believe that. That answer wouldn’t satisfy me in America, but here, it does. Pak Idris went on to say we’re lucky we didn’t hear the voices. Naturally, we had to ask about that. Apparently, sometimes when people come up, they can hear a woman’s voice laughing or crying right next to them when there is nobody there. Yes indeed, we are lucky we didn’t hear the voices.

After we hiked in the first day, we had a quick lunch, then spent most of that evening hiking around, seeing what we could see. Once it got dark, we headed back for dinner, creepy stories with Uncle Idris, then it was lights out for us. Until Pak Idris was bathing in the river and found a huge turtle that he thought would be cool to put in our room. I passed him my camera under the mosquito netting, asked him to take a picture, and put the turtle back. Here is Pak Idris managing to take a picture of his prized turtle AND his own feet at the same time.

The next day, we had breakfast, then set out for more hiking until early afternoon. Unfortunately, there were no orangutans on our mountain. No fruit was in season when we were there which means the orangutans have trouble finding enough food, so they tend to move around a lot more in search of fruit or other foods. We did find some abandoned orangutan nests though. See this one?

And we also got to see lots of other jungle wildlife, some more welcome than others. Monkeys are incredibly hard to take pictures of, but I did get some terrible shots of one monkey our guides called a makaka. I have no idea what that translates to. He’s the reddish blur sitting toward the bottom left of the photo.

We also saw several gibbons and other monkeys frolicking around the treetops. We saw one hornbill (bird), and lots of jungle insects. The most scary thing in there was the ants. There are two main types. First you have the giant man-eating ants.

They are about twice as long as the width of my thumb. I have NEVER in my life seen ants so HUGE! Luckily, none of us were bitten by these particular ants, but our guides said it hurts worse than a crab pinch.

The even scarier ants are the ones you can’t see. I think all of us at one point or another got bitten by those. The bite is terrible. It basically feels like a wasp sting or like you stepped on a nail or like someone is stabbing you with the strength of a thousand needles. For about 10 minutes, then it suddenly goes away. When they bite you, your instinct is basically to scream and run because it feels like you are being attacked by a swarm of 100 ants when really there is only one. Nasty little guys.

Here are some other cool animals we found. In order of appearance: a chameleon, some sleeping bats, and a dragonfly that watched me bathe.

And since I don’t have any exciting pictures of orangutans to show you, here are some boring jungle shots!

 

One last fun fact – if you know the word orangutan, then you know at least one word in Indonesian! Our English word orangutan comes from the Indonesian name for the same creature – orang hutan. Orang means person and hutan means jungle. Hence, orangutan = jungle person!

Home. For A Minute.

I made it home safely from Kalimantan on Tuesday, and I've spent the past two days catching up with people I've missed and haven't seen for about a month. Tomorrow I'm leaving again, this time for a weekend BEACH TRIP! I'm a little excited. But after that, travels are over, and it's time to buckle down and get some  real work done! That also means time to edit and post some pictures from June's adventures. I'm pretending like you care.

The biggest thing that happened while I was gone was that gas prices rose for the first time since I've lived here. So that makes it the first time in at least 5 years. (Can you believe it's been 5 years?) They were actually supposed to do this last year, but there were SO many protests over that 20 cent raise that the government postponed it.  A couple of times, actually. Then it felt like the raise kind of happened all of a sudden without a whole lot of warning. It was probably better to do it that way, but they're expecting protests over it all the way until August. The US Embassy sends us warnings about things like that.

So gas is all the way up to 65 cents a liter now. I might have to budget a whole $1.50 per week for gas instead of the usual dollar.

It's a rough life I have here.

Hey, Y'all!

So I'm writing this post on my tablet (best buy ever) from the hot, hot island of Borneo! This trip has been way more of an adventure than I ever imagined it would be.

The trip started with 2 days in Jakarta visiting old friends and doing some fun shopping (Forever 21, cheeeeyeah!). Then on Saturday, we got on a plane to Kalimantan - the Indonesian part of Borneo. We were warned that it would be hot here, but I was so not prepared for HOW hot. The equator runs through the coastal city in which I'm staying, and the house we're staying in is still in the process of being built, so no air conditioning yet. The only furniture in the whole house is a kitchen table and 2 beds. And we've got 5 people sharing the space!

Our hosts were considerate enough to buy air mattresses and fans, but the electricity has been sketchy at night. If it's off for more than a minute or two, I'm already sweating through my pjs. Literally. Hot, hot heat. It is unbelievable. I'm really embracing the siesta culture. Three hour nap during the hottest part of of the day? Yes, please. Too bad I'm on the wrong side of the world for siestas.

Fun fact. I did a load of laundry yesterday, and I got a tan in the less than 10 minutes it took me to hang it up. Tan lines, folks. Blazing hot.

I have a friend back on Java named Jess who is from this city. Yesterday I got to meet her entire family! They picked us up and took us to their tiny church on the third floor of the Prudential Insurance building! It was a tiny, crowded room and the floor was very shaky, but it was really neat to be able to gather with this group of believers in this part of the world. I just kept praying we wouldn't all crash through the floor to the offices below...

Jess's family took us out for delicious noodle dumpling soup for lunch. The place they took us to was also famous for their chocolate shaved ice! I've never even seen shaved ice in Indonesia, much less CHOCOLATE shaved ice! It basically my new favorite food. We mentioned to them that we were planning to go visit the equator and to do some other touristy things this week.

So this morning, they showed up without warning, ready to show us around! After 10 frantic minutes of scrambling to get ready, we were in the car, ready to go. We tried to go visit the Dayak cultural museum, but it was closed. The Dayak tribe is the biggest in this area, and after talking to Jess's mom, I learned a TON about this tribe. They are extremely discriminated against by other tribes and also by the Indonesian government. I think when I get back, I'll have to write a big long post about the Dayaks. But I still have a lot to learn.

After our initial museum disappointment, we decided to go the equator instead. So here are some pictures of that.

Um, just kidding. I don't know how to insert pictures where I want them on this tablet. So there may or may not be a picture compilation of me at the equator monument somewhere in this post.

There might also be a picture of a plate of food, so let me explain that. After the equator, we went out for a traditional Dayak lunch. It was buffet style, so I piled my plate with food. Then my more cautious travel buddies started asking what the foods were as they went through the line. I maybe should have done that first, because I had just served myself generous portions of dog, snake, and "the contents of a pig's stomach". So that was great. But at least I got lots of vegetables! And yes, I cleaned my plate. Everything tasted delicious! It's just the textures that I sometimes have trouble with...

So that's been our time so far. I'm sure many more adventures are yet to come, and I can't wait!

Hellos and Goodbyes and Views

I'm gonna be so excited when I have 25,000 pageviews. But that's probably going to happen later this week or next week while I'm away from my computer.

That's right. I feel like I just got home yesterday, and I'm already taking off again! I'm leaving on a train tomorrow to the capital city, where I'll spend 3 days hanging with friends and going to an AWESOME waterpark. Look: http://waterbom-jakarta.com/web2013/

Then three of us are heading to the wild island of Borneo. My friends have a flight back to America to catch, so they'll be heading back to Jakarta earlier than I will. I'll be there 10 days before heading back home to Java. We have some plans to see some orangutans and stand on the equator and maybe do some jungle exploration.

But the thing that I'm MOST excited about is that I GET TO SEE MELANIE. That's right, people. She moved into a house TODAY - after living in random spaces for the past four months since moving there - so now she even has a place for me to sleep! It is going to be a grand reunion, and to say that I'm pretty happy about it would be an understatement.

So yeah. That's the plan. Please pray for safe travels and lots of fun! : )