Days 159 – 160: Samarinda to Berau

Back in Samarinda after my jaunt through the jungle, I got a few hours of sleep and then headed down to the main pier, 3km outside of town, at 6am to catch a longboat northeast up the Kedang Kepala River. My guidebook told me that “Regular longboats head up Sungai Kedang Kepala…” which didn’t seem particularly precise, or helpful, but by this point in my trip I was able to translate the Lonely Planet jargon: “Regular” is Lonely Planet code for “We think this mode of transportation is still working, and we think it leaves fairly often, but really we have no idea because we didn’t bother to check it out! If we had, wouldn’t we just have given you the precise details?”

I arrived at the pier just as the sun was rising and poked around until I found the boat that went up the Kedang Kepala River to Muara Wahau. After a brief discussion in Indonesian with an old man who was sitting on the boat and seemingly in charge of something, I was able to gather that the boat was not leaving until “besok”—tomorrow. The man chattered for another minute after that, but he spoke so quickly that I had no idea what he was saying, and I decided that I would just come back in the morning and hope for the best. Besides, killing a day in Samarinda would be relatively painless given the cable TV in my room and the internet café and the McDonald’s down the street (I *never* eat McDonald’s in the US, but abroad, after weeks of nothing but fried rice, it starts to look more appealing).

The following morning I went back to the pier, but to my chagrin the boat was, once again, leaving besok. This time when the old man chattered I asked him to slow down, and I finally figured out what he was saying: no one had bought tickets for the boat, so it wasn’t going anywhere, and it wouldn't go anywhere until it had passengers. Maybe it was leaving besok, but maybe it was leaving tidak pernah—never.

I should backtrack and mention that my interest in traveling up Sungai Kedang Kepala was somewhat last-minute; I had originally planned on taking a seagoing ferry or a bus to Berau, in the northeast corner of Kalimantan, but then I heard that the Dayak villages along the Kedang Kepala were relatively unexplored, and I figured out a way to get from the headwaters of the Kedang Kepala to the Kelai River, where I could catch a boat downstream to Berau. The whole journey would take me four to five days instead of 27 hours by ferry or sixteen hours by bus, but I had the time, and I thought the trip would be interesting, or at least an adventure. But I wasn’t willing to sit in Samarinda any longer waiting for the longboat to leave, so I took an ojek (motorbike) back to town and began looking into other options.

I had been warned about the condition of the road from Samarinda to Berau, so I decided to take the ferry despite the fact that the journey would take eleven hours longer. But when I got to the office to buy my ticket, I found out that there was no ferry to Berau, and that there hadn’t been one for over three years. Thank you, “Newly Revised and Updated for 2007” Lonely Planet.

So, by process of elimination, I was taking the bus. The dreaded sixteen hour bus ride. Did I say sixteen? Better make that 22.

The bus ride turned out to be the most miserable of my life, which is quite a feat considering some of the buses I’ve been on in the past few months. To say the road was covered in potholes would not be entirely accurate; more specifically, it was interspersed by ditches that varied in width from a few feet to several meters, and the widest and deepest ones caused the bottom of the bus to scrape against the pavement as the front tires sunk into the hole. We hit a new ditch anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes after the last one, and I always knew one was coming because the bus driver would slow to about two miles per hour, the bus would heat up to about six million degrees due to the lack of wind, and the cigarette smoke that had previously been blowing out the windows would settle into a cloud that covered the entire interior of the bus. Then we’d hit the hole itself, and suddenly the bus would become an off-road vehicle—the sort that has no shocks and rattles its passengers’ bones. Before the worst ditches, the driver would bring the bus to a complete halt; it was as if he needed a moment to think, “Now how in hell are we going to get through this one?”

But the condition of the road was only one small part of the misery caused by this ride. The seats alone, even on a smooth freeway, could have qualified as instruments of torture: made almost entirely of metal with only a thin strip of pleather serving as support, the seats were spaced about six inches apart, which meant that even with my knees jammed into the metal seatback in front of me I still couldn’t get my butt all the way into the seat. This meant that I was essentially squatting for the entire 22-hour journey; squatting, that is, with my kneecaps crushed against a slab of metal that would jolt with every bump in the road. Lovely.

Sleeping, of course, was out of the question. Leaning forward onto the metal seatback in front of me was suicide, and the seat back behind me only came up to my neck, leaving me nowhere to put my head. The couple times that I dozed off, my head slid toward the window, and I woke up with a start as my eye socket slammed into the metal window frame. Accordingly, I managed to emerge from the overnight bus ride without a wink of sleep, but with a black eye.

But perhaps the most painful part of the ride had nothing to do with the condition of the road or the bus, but with the people on it. You guessed it—smoking. I don’t think I’ve ever secondhand-smoked more cigarettes than I did in those 22 hours, and that includes the time I’ve spent in Winston-Salem bars. The bus, you see, was packed with Indonesian men, and Indonesian men, like their Chinese counterparts, smoke by default. In fact, I don’t think I’ve yet met an Indonesian man who doesn’t smoke. Imagine that.

The smoke on the bus came in waves. First one person would light up, and then everyone else would catch a whiff and whip out their cigarettes and light up too. I coughed as loudly as I could, hoping someone might take pity on me, but no one did. I counted, and the man sitting next to me smoked 38 cigarettes during that bus ride. Multiply that by thirty passengers, and you can start to understand why a cloud of smoke filled the bus for the entire journey.

On a side note, I find that I lose all sympathy for people when I see them smoke. In this case, I was riding with twenty-odd Indonesian men, none of whom was totally destitute, but none of whom was particularly well-off, and I’m sure that in a different situation I would have felt sympathy for their situation in life. But when they were puffing away at their cigarettes and blowing smoke in my face, all I could think was how they were willingly destroying their lungs and spending money on cigarettes that they could otherwise be spending on food for their families. And it annoyed the hell out of me.

Just as I thought the ride couldn’t get any worse, one of the bus’s shocks blew out, which was a great surprise to me because as far as I could tell, the bus had no shocks to begin with. Two hours of sitting on the side of the road later, the repairs were made and we were back on the “road.” When we finally rolled into Berau at 8am the following morning, all I could think was how relieved I was that I had arrived without any permanent damage. Then I pulled my laptop out of my pack and saw that the screen was smashed, either from all the bumps or from being squished under a pile of other luggage, or from some combination of the two. Seeing as I can’t see a thing when I turn the computer on, it seems I’m back to doing all my blogging from internet cafés, India-style.

Needless to say, if any of you ever need to get from Samarinda to Berau, for God’s sake, take a flight.