Friday, March 28, 2008

Days 173 – 174: Brunei to Bali

The only cheap flight from Brunei to Bali went through Kuala Lumpur and involved a 12-hour layover, so I spent the night in the now-familiar KL and went back to the airport the next morning for my flight to Bali. I've now been in and out of KL six times in the past six months, making it my most-visited destination (although that's only because of its cheap air connections-- I've never stayed more than 36 hours at a time). By comparison, I've been through Bangkok four times, Chiang Mai three times, and Bali three times. But in terms of time spent on the ground, Bali is well ahead of the pack.

My flights passed without incident and I arrived in Bali in the early afternoon. I checked into my usual guesthouse and found that since my last stay they had built a pool in the courtyard. And the best part is, the rooms still cost the same ($4)! I guess they built the pool to attract more guests rather than to charge more per night. That's fine by me.

Ian McHenry arrives tonight, and Jay Saxon tomorrow night. Here ends the solitary life.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Days 172 – 173: Brunei

Photos:http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2062015&l=c3919&id=1101094

The next morning I caught a ferry from KK to Pulau Labuan, a Malaysian tax haven with absolutely nothing of interest for yours truly, and from there I caught another ferry to Bandar Seri Bagawan, the capital of Brunei Darussalam.

For those of you who are a little rusty on your Southeast Asian geography, Brunei is a tiny country on the north coast of Borneo that is bordered on three sides by Malaysia and one side by the South China Sea. It only became independent from Britain in 1984, but it's now one of the richest countries in the world, driven by its reserves of oil and natural gas. There's only one problem-- the oil and gas are going to run out in 30-40 years. When that happens, no one is really sure what is going to fuel the economy. I just hope they haven't been saving for the future by investing in US subprime mortgage bonds....

But for now, the oil is still flowing and everyone is happy: education and health care are free, there's no income tax, and BMWs, Mercedes and Lexuses whiz down the streets.

Brunei is also super-Muslim-- easily the most Muslim in Southeast Asia, and up there with some Gulf States. The skyline of BSB (as everyone calls the capital) is dominated by the minarets of giant mosques, the sale of alcohol is prohibited, and most females wear headscarves. And the country is governed by an Islamic Sultanate; the current sultan is Sir Hassanal Bolkiah, the 29th of his line, who also happens to be one of the richest men in the world.

So far the most interesting story I've heard here concerns the sultan's younger brother, Prince Jefri. It seems Jefri has a weakness for gambling and otherwise spending vast sums of money, and he was sued by the sultan (his brother) in 2001 for misspending $16 billion of his country's money. And if that wasn't bad enough, consider that Prince Jefri also happened to be the finance minister.

But for all the strangeness of this place and its history, there's really very little to do here besides wander around the modern, tidy streets. That's what I did after checking into the local Youth Hostel (the only budget accommodation in town), but after a while I got so hot in my jeans (I figure wearing shorts here is in poor taste) that I went back to my hostel for a swim in the pool that was just next door. I got a lot of strange looks from the other swimmers, but no one said a word to me, which is a marked difference from everywhere else is Southeast Asia, where unfamiliarity brings calls of "Hey Mister!"

Indeed, Bruneians seem a good bit more reserved than their Southeast Asian counterparts. That's especially surprising when you consider that many Bruneians are not really from Brunei at all-- they're from Indonesia or Malaysia or India or the Philippines and are here to work and send money back to their families (and I saw evidence of that in the remittance shops that are on every corner). But it seems that once foreigners come here, they adapt to the local environment and assume an air of quiet dignity. For me, it was somewhat of a relief to be left alone for a couple days.

After dark I visited the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, named after the country's 28th sultan, which cost $5 million to build and is lit up in a brilliant green at night. But marveling at the splendor of giant mosques is about the extent of the Brunei night life, so I called it an early night and caught up on all the sleep I didn't get while in KK.

The next day I took a bus a few kilometers out of town and visited the Jame'Asr Hassanal Bolkiah Mosque, a huge golden-domed structure and the largest mosque in the country. Not being Muslim (but how can they really know?), I wasn't allowed inside, but just walking around the exterior and observing the fantastic architecture was interesting enough.

Back in town, I strolled around the water villages known as Kampung Ayer. Built on stilts directly over the Brunei River, these ramshackle houses look especially strange when juxtaposed against Brunei's otherwise modern skyline. The residents of the villages supposedly pursue a "traditional" way of life, but considering they have electricity and satellite TV I'm not sure how traditional any of it really is. Nevertheless, the whole area resembled something out of the jungle towns I visited in Kalimantan and was an interesting departure from the otherwise-posh city.

It rained that afternoon so I took shelter at the local movie theater, which had a couple of English films on offer. For those of you who were wondering, Shutter is not a particularly good movie.

After the movie, I walked around the glitzy shopping mall for a while and did some people watching. If you've never seen headscarved women jockeying for position in a donut shop line, it's a hilarious sight.

One thing that has constantly amazed me here is how focused on Islam everything is. For instance, signs here are often written in Arabic, a language that no one here speaks, for the simple reason that Arabic is the language of Islam. And there must be five or six large mosques just in central BSB, all within a few blocks of one another. Supposedly as societies become richer and more "modern," the influence of religion tends to diminish, but that relationship seems lost on Brunei.

I caught a minibus to the airport that evening, satisfied that I had visited my first sultanate but otherwise bored to tears.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Days 170 – 171: Kota Kinabalu

The following morning I set off for Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Malaysian province of Sabah, on a luxury, air-conditioned bus, and never had I been so happy to get away from the "real" modes of transportation. Ironically, I was still the only foreigner on the bus-- although Malaysian Borneo is far more touristy than Kalimantan, it's still nothing compared to mainland Southeast Asia.

Like any good air-conditioned Southeast Asian bus, the on-board temperature had dropped below freezing by about fifteen minutes into the ride, so I wrapped myself in my towel and tried my best to stay warm while pondering for the ump-teenth time why Asians equate luxury with having to wrap themselves in blankets.

Still shivering, I focused my eyes on the roadside scenery and tried to forget about the ambient temperature. I was hoping for some classic Borneo rainforest landscapes, but instead I got classic Borneo palm oil plantation landscapes. It seems that the Borneo's rainforests have been torn up and replaced by palm oil plantations so vast that at one point I fell asleep for an hour, and when I woke up we were still driving past the same plantation. I am not making this up.

I arrived in Kota Kinabalu around 5pm, but the bus stopped at a bus station that wasn't on my map of the city, and I had no clue where I was (my guidebook told me that buses dropped passengers off in a terminal in the center of the city-- WRONG!). I decided to walk for a while and try to get my bearings, but half an hour later I was no closer to anything that looked like downtown Kota Kinabalu. Just then, a car slowed beside me, and a man asked me if I needed a lift into town. Instinctively I said no, that I would walk, but he laughed and told me that in that case I'd be walking for a few hours. He seemed harmless enough, so I got in the car and we set off for downtown KK.

The man, whose name was Jason, turned out to be a incredibly friendly guy who used to be involved in the tourism industry-- for that reason, he spoke perfect English. Thirty-four years old and riginally from KK, he had worked for several different companies and was now employed at a marketing firm. His wife, to whom he'd been married for six years, worked for Shell Oil. Clearly, this was one of the economically better-off families in Malaysia.

Jason dropped me off at a hostel in town and gave me his business card in case I should need anything while I was here. I thought that was the last I'd see of him, but that night, after I had wandered around the town for a bit and eaten dinner, he stopped by my hostel to see if I wanted to go out for a drink with him and two of his friends. Seeing as I had nothing else to do, I readily accepted, and we headed to a local karaoke bar to drink and sing the night away. I sang "Imagine," by John Lennon, which I thought was a good peace-loving pick to sing in a Muslim country until I got to the line "And no religion too"-- but given that these Muslims were drinking beer and singing Western songs, I don't think they're particularly observant.

I went out to a late dinner with Jason (at midnight-- and the restaurant was packed) and told him a little more about my trip; he told me more about his family, job, and life in KK. It turned out that Jason wasn't quite the angelic figure he seemed on the surface-- he had married his wife reluctantly, because she was pregnant (although he said he's glad it worked out this way, in hindsight), and he was hooked on crystal meth until a couple years ago. Cynically, I kept waiting for the moment where he would try to sell me drugs or get me involved in some other illicit scam, but it never came-- it seems he really was just a guy trying to entertain a guest in his country.

I spent most of the following day catching up on my blog and wandering around downtown KK, and though the city has nothing specific to offer the traveler (the area's main attraction is Mt. Kinabalu, 90km from the city, but it now costs $230 to climb the mountain, so I said no thanks), it was interesting just to observe the relative prosperity of the metropolis. I hadn't seen so many new SUVs since Ubud, Bali.

More than ready for a break from the Malay-Indonesian food I'd been eating for a month, I ate lunch and dinner at two of the many Chinese restaurants in town, and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality RM 4 ($1.25) bought. That night, I went out with Jason and his friends again-- first to the same karaoke bar, and then to a pool hall. I didn't get home until nearly 2am, which wasn't a problem for me, but I wondered how Jason and his friends managed to work the next day after keeping these sorts of hours. I also wondered what his wife thought about him staying out until after midnight two weeknights in a row. I guess it's convenient that Islam commands her to submit to her husbands wishes....

Days 166 – 169: Pulau Sipadan & Environs

I spent the next three days getting my PADI scuba diving certification-- something I should have done months ago. The first day was classroom-based-- I watched instructional videos, read the PADI textbook, and took a series of quizzes and a final exam. There was a lot of information to absorb, but it really all came down to one basic rule: don't hold your breath while you scuba dive, or your lungs will explode. That's not an easy one to forget, and I passed all my exams with flying colors.

The next two days were spent in the water and were a good deal more fun. I learned to dive on a small island off the coast of Semporna called Pulau Sibuan-- it's not quite as impressive as Pulau Sipadan, where I'd dive after I completed my certification, but still it's got loads of coral, fish, and turtles, and its clear water and light current makes it an ideal place to learn.

Right away I loved the feeling of breathing underwater. I'd always loved swimming, and snorkeling was usually the highlight of my past travels, but diving is something else altogether--- the sensation of weightlessness is matched only by the feeling that you've entered an entirely new world. It took me a few minutes to get used to breathing from my oxygen tank, but once I had that down, the rest came naturally. Over the next two days I spent nearly ten hours underwater, and by the end of the second day I was PADI-certified and ready to tackle Pulau Sipadan the following morning.

Even at Sibuan, the aquatic life I encountered was the most varied and exotic that I'd come across-- even better that at Pulau Derawan. I spotted the multicolored mandarinfish (photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Synchiropus_splendidus_2_Luc_Viatour.jpg), which hides among the sea urchins, the clownfish (photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Clownfish_sprain_water3.jpg), which swims among the sea anemones in the classic marine symbiotic relationship, the stonefish and the lionfish (photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pterois_volitans_Manado-e_edit.jpg), both venomous members of the scorpionfish family, the devilish spotted moray eel (photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gymnothorax_moringa.jpg), and the strange frogfish (photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:6983_aquaimages.jpg), among scores of other species. Also, I managed to get closer to all these fish than I ever had snorkeling.

The next day I dove at Pulau Sipadan, which is one of the best dive spots in the world. Everyone told me that I would be forever ruined after diving at Sipadan, because nowhere else would ever be able to compare. And after three spectacular dives, I must admit that I see where they're coming from. I saw all the varieties of fish that I had seen at Sibuan, but the real highlight at Sipadan was the big fish: namely, barracuda and sharks. Over the course of the three dives I saw more then ten barracuda, the longest of which was about six feet long, and around thirty sharks, the longest of which were nearly eight feet long. The varieties of sharks I saw were black- and white-tip reef sharks, which measured only five or six feet, and the much larger gray sharks, which measured between seven and eight feet. At one point I was surrounded by four different sharks, all of which were circling me, and then one swam directly under me, passing only about a meter below my feet. I expected the experience to send waves of fear through my body, but I was surprised to find that in the moment, what I felt was more excitement and awe than fear. Something about being underwater with the sharks lends itself to feeling more secure-- it would be a different story, I think, if I were splashing around on the surface knowing that the giant fish were circling below me.

Looking back, my only regret is not getting my dive certification sooner. I've visited so many places that are ideal for diving over the past few months that it's a shame I wasn't certified. Nevertheless, I'm out here for at least a few more months, and hopefully I'll get in a few more dives along the way.

Days 164 – 165: Pulau Derawan to Semporna

The following two days were spent in transit, and the only thing that came out of them was the cementing of the fact that travel in Kalimantan is a real pain in the ass. The distance from Pulau Derawan to Semporna (across the border, in Malaysia) was only a couple hundred kilometers, which in any other place would be easily knocked out in half-day bus ride, but here it took me two long days of pain. Here's a brief synopsis:

I wake up at 6:30am, eat a quick breakfast of fish soup, pack my bag, and set off for Tanjung Batu via speedboat.

I arrive in Tanjung Batu at 7:30, find a share-taxi driver who is going to Berau, and then wait for three hours for the share-taxi to fill up. Once the car is so full that no one can move a muscle, we set off for Berau, just before 11am.

The car ride passes without incident (not even any vomiting this time), and we arrive in Berau at 1pm. I find a bus that's headed to Tanjung Selor, 100km up the coast-- it leaves at 2pm.

Like any good Kalimantan bus ride, this three hour journey affords me the opportunity to breathe my body weight in a combination of secondhand smoke and exhaust fumes. Lightheaded and hooked on nicotine, I arrive in Tanjung Selor at 5pm.

I catch the last boat to Tarakan, an island off the coast that is the only gateway to Malaysian Borneo, to the north. I arrive at 7pm and immediately inquire about ferries to Tawau, in Malaysia, for the following morning. Everyone gives me the same answer: "Ada dua kapal besok pagi: jam delapan, jam sepuluh" (There are two boats tomorrow morning: 8am and 10am). Satisfied, I check into a grungy hotel and pass out on the cigarette-singed bed.

I wake up at 7, catch a motorbike down to the pier, and attempt to buy a ticket for the Tarakan-Tawau ferry. "No ferry today." Ok, then what about the 10am? "No ferry today." Why no ferry today? "No ferry today."

Getting desperate, I ask around and find out there's a ferry to Nunukan, 50km to the north and just south of the Malaysian border, leaving at 9am. I buy a ticket and hope I can catch another boat north to Tawau from Nunukan.

We arrive in Nunukan at 11am, and there is a boat to Tawau, but it doesn't leave until 2pm. Annoyingly, it costs the same as the much longer journey from Tarakan to Tawau that was cancelled. I sit and wait outside immigration, silently inhaling cigarette smoke and glaring at all the Indonesian men who seem to relish blowing it in my direction.

The boat departs an hour late, at 3pm, and arrives in Tawau at 4. I glide through customs and immigration (Malaysia is a bit more organized than its neighbor to the south) and walk to the ATM down the road to withdraw some Malaysian currency. Predictably, the ATM is out of order, and it's the only one in the entire town. I change some US dollars at rip-my-face-off rates and proceed to the minibus station, where I catch a ride north to Semporna.

We drive through a veritable downpour that lasts for nearly two hours, turning the quick hour and a half trip into a three hour marathon. At one point we hit a massive puddle and hydroplane off the road. Fortunately, the shoulder is wide and there's no harm done, besides the minor heart attacks suffered by all the passengers.

We arrive in Semporna, gateway to the diving mecca known as Pulau Sipadan, at 7pm. I run through the rain to the nearest dive shop and inquire about a PADI dive certification course. I'm in luck-- the next one starts bright and early the following morning, at 7am. I sign my name on the dotted line and set off to find somewhere to sleep. Rest is for suckers.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Days 161 – 163: Pulau Derawan

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2061189&l=57bec&id=1101094

After my punishing bus ride to Berau, all I wanted to do was find a nice stretch of sand where I could plant myself for a few days and not come within 100 yards of a bus. Luckily, Pulau Derawan, a quiet island with only a couple hundred inhabitants, fantastic snorkeling, and pristine white sand beaches, was only a few hours away. I set off for the island as fast as my share-taxi would take me.

Which, as it turned out, was unreasonably fast. The driver of the car took the curves and bumps of the mediocre road to Tanjung Batu as if he was some sort of race car driver, only without the talent, and left his passengers-- seven Indonesians and myself-- clutching for the safety handles and trying to keep their breakfasts in their stomachs. But in that last regard, some of us were more successful than others-- only fifteen minutes into the ride the little girl sitting in front of my vomited into a black plastic bag, and the headscarved woman sitting next to me followed suit a few minutes later. I turned up my iPod, stared out the window, and pretended like I didn't see or hear any of it.

But what I saw out the window wasn't particularly appealing, either. All along the sides of the road I saw evidence of the environmental gutting of Kalimantan, from the numerous coal mines polluting the landscape, to the palm oil plantations that inhabit land formerly reserved for tropical rainforest, to the trucks and river barges that carry the coal and the logs from the formerly-pristine interior of Borneo to the large coastal cities like Samarinda and Balikpapan. I'd always read about the destruction of rainforests in Borneo, but it's quite another thing to see it up close.

We arrived in Tanjung Batu around midday, and from there it was only a half hour's speedboat ride out to Pulau Derawan. There weren't, however, any scheduled boat trips out to the island, so I would have to charter a boat if I wished to reach the much-hyped paradise. I considered waiting to see if anyone else arrived who would want to split the boat with me, but I decided that given the number of tourists I had seen so far in Kalimantan, the chances of that happening were slim. As it turned out, I was one of three foreigners on the island, and no one new arrived while I was there, so it's a good thing I didn't try to wait around for reinforcements.

By the time I found a speedboat driver who would take me to Derawan, the wind had picked up and the ocean swells had grown quite large. Luckily, the speedboat was prepared to handle the waves-- it was just over seven feet long, sat two people (and only one comfortably), and looked as if it could be controlled by a remote control. Every wave tossed the boat into the air, and seconds later we would hit the water with a resounding "Crack!" that led me to believe that the hull of the boat was seconds from splitting in two. It was with relief and quite a bit of amazement that I climbed out of the boat and onto the white sand of Derawan, thanked the driver, and wished him the best of luck for the return voyage.

Derawan is indeed the paradise that it claims to be, but one which seems to be about fifty years behind modern times. The island has only one "road," but given that there are no cars on the island and only a few motorbikes, the road is mostly used by pedestrians, which is a good thing because it's made entirely out of sand. Electricity is very limited-- my guesthouse had none at all, and even the fanciest houses only had it for a few hours each evening. That means no television, at least not during the day, so the residents, and especially the children, have to find other activities to occupy their time. The main options seem to be playing volleyball or badminton (nightly games near the mosque), shooting marbles (I watched countless games being played on the sandy road), or swimming in the crystal-clear water that surrounds the island. It's actually quite refreshing to see people spending their days this way, especially after watching town after town in Southeast Asia waste away its days in front of the TV set.

I spent three glorious days on Derawan, and all of them consisted of the same basic activities: snorkeling over technicolor coral reefs teeming with even brighter fish, reading in the sun on the deserted beach, retreating into the shade of the palm trees when my skin had grown just a little too red, and eating fresh fish three meals a day. One morning I walked around the island and found that it was even smaller than I had thought-- it took me only half an hour to make it around. Along the way I ran into a pack of kids, all of whom wanted their photo taken over and over and over again. I hadn't seen kids so excited about a camera since India.

The weather changed particularly quickly here-- one minute the sky would be blue and cloudless, the next I'd be caught in a torrential downpour (which, given the heat, was not entirely unwelcome), and a few minutes later the sky would be clear again and one would never know that it had just rained. The rain never occupied more than an hour or two of each day, which is not bad considering this is Borneo's rainy season.

The snorkeling here was probably the best I'd ever done-- better than in Honduras, better than in Egypt, and even better than in Sumatra. I saw every species of fish I'd seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia, plus at least ten or fifteen new ones, most of which I couldn't identify. Perhaps the most interesting was the crocodile fish, which lies on the ocean floor and blends in with the sand. It's called a crocodile fish because of its long snout (click this link for a stock photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Papilloculiceps_longiceps_by_Jacek_Madejski.jpg).

But the real highlight of snorkeling Derawan was not a fish at all, but a reptile: the giant green sea turtle, which glided through the shallow waters just off the beach. This species of turtle is endangered, but you wouldn't know it from spending time on Derawan-- I saw at least thirty of them in my three days on the island. Surprisingly, the turtles don't seem at all afraid of humans (perhaps that's why they're endangered); I swam right up to several of them and even touched their shells, and they just glided right past me without the slightest inkling of fear. They're one of the most beautiful creatures to observe in the water, right up there with manta rays; they swim gracefully with their paddle-like arms, and they're huge-- most of the ones I saw were over three feet long and probably weighed upwards of 300 pounds.

As I whiled the days away swimming with the fishes, I realized that I had now snorkeled in quite a few different locations throughout Southeast Asia. Accordingly, I feel it's time to impart some of the wisdom I've gained in the time I've spent underwater. It all really comes down to two facts:

1) There are two kinds of reef fish: the ones that swim by flapping their fins, and the ones that swim by wiggling their butts.

2) The ones that swim by wiggling their butts are way cuter.

Any questions?

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.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Days 155 – 158: Sungai Mahakam

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060820&l=63a42&id=1101094

We set off for the jungle at eight the following morning. The first part of the trip was by land via a road that was once paved but had suffered through enough wet seasons that it was now nothing but a collection of potholes, and I managed to keep my breakfast in my stomach only by focusing my eyes on the verdant, rolling hills that extended to the horizon. Three hours and four sore rear ends later, we traded the car for a ces (motorized canoe) in a town called Kota Bangun. The rest of the journey, and indeed the better part of the next three days, would be spent aboard this ces.

We started up the mighty Sungai Mahakam, the region’s dominant geographic feature, but soon we branched off onto smaller, more scenic rivers and shallow lakes. We stopped for lunch at Muara Muntai, a colorful town built literally on the water. All the houses in the village sat on stilts, and the roads were boardwalks—wooden planks that allowed the town’s ubiquitous motorcycles to buzz around the otherwise-peaceful town. After lunch we walked around town a bit before boarding the ces and continuing upriver.

We reached our destination, a village called Tanjung Isuy, in mid-afternoon. Set on the shores of Danau Jempang, a large, shallow lake that is connected to Sungai Mahakam by a series of tributaries, Tanjung Isuy is the closest Dayak village to Samarinda. Dayak, I should mention, is a term that is used to describe the various indigenous tribes that inhabit Kalimantan. The Dayak tribe in Tanjung Isuy is known as the Banuaq, but you wouldn’t know the villagers were Dayak except for the fact that they’re not Muslim. Sadly, Dayak traditions such as colorful dress and stretched earlobes of the women have been replaced by electricity and satellite TV.

But Tanjung Isuy was a relaxing village that would serve as a convenient base for exploring the jungle over the next few days. We dropped our packs at the one guesthouse in town and accompanied Suryadi to purchase that night’s dinner.

Food in Tanjung Isuy, like practically every part of daily life, revolves around water. Here, chicken is exotic, while giant catfish and oversized river prawn are staples. The only real industry in the town and the surrounding area is fishing, and it’s the occupation of the majority of the male inhabitants of the village. That makes the supply of fish heavy and the price cheap, which is not so good for the fisherman but quite convenient for us.

Suryadi bought a whole catfish that weighed four kilograms for Rp 60,000 (~$6) and three kilograms of udang galah (river prawn) for about the same price. That food, along with the omnipresent rice and noodles, would serve as our dinner for the next three nights, and not one of us complained about the repetition: Suryadi proved to be an excellent cook, and the food was a treat for those of us who consider fresh fish and shrimp to be a rarity.

Our guesthouse had no electricity, so we ate our dinner by candlelight and then John T., the middle-aged Brit, and I delved into politics. In just over half an hour John T. touched on his general distrust of government, his disdain for taxes, his view that most immigrants were criminals, his conviction that Londoners were nothing but “a bunch of wankers,” his annoyance that marijuana was illegal and alcohol and tobacco were heavily taxed, and his hatred for President Bush, among countless other things. If I had to describe him politically, I guess I’d call him a libertarian isolationist, although even that doesn’t capture the extent of his dislike for basically everyone but himself.

Physically, John T. was quite a bit more comical. Dressed in a black tank top that accentuated his pale white arms, his scraggly gray hair covered in a red bandana, his ear pierced by a gold hoop earring, his teeth brown from years of smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes, and his stubbly snow-white beard revealing his age, he looked something like a pirate. In fact, coupled with his cockney British accent, he would have made a fantastic minor character in Pirates of the Caribbean.

His son, Josh, could not have been more normal, or less like his father. A typical teenage Brit clothed in a t-shirt a zip-off khakis, Josh spent most of the trip taking videos with his camera and displaying a genuine belief that his father was a god for having taken him along on this adventure.

The following morning we set off in our ces, first across the plant-covered Danau Jempang, and then down the beautiful Sungai Ohong. It was on the Ohong that we got the best jungle views of the trip: primary forest hugged the banks of the brown river, macaques and proboscis monkeys leapt from tree to tree, and giant monitor lizards (the largest one we saw was over six feet long) swam in the shallow water and sunned themselves on the bank. We got a glimpse of a giant squirrel scrambling around in a tree, and at over three feet long it was dangerously close to R.O.U.S. status. The bird life was fantastic as well; along with the brilliant kingfisher, with its aqua blue body, yellow head, and bright orange beak, we saw herons, ibises, pelicans, and countless other birds which I couldn’t name.

We stopped by a couple villages during the day, the largest of which was called Mancong. Mancong was a Dayak village with a bit more of its tradition intact than Tanjung Isuy; locals still lived in the picturesque longhouse, and strange wooden statues stood in front of the longhouse, one for each buffalo that had been ceremoniously slaughtered. Everywhere we went, we met curious, wide-eyed children and reserved men and women, all of whom seemed surprised to see us. Clearly, it’s hard times for tourism in Kalimantan.

On the way back to Tanjung Isuy, Suryadi spotted a snake coiled in a tree, and we slowed down for a closer look. Eventually it began to slither down the branch and we got a glimpse of its full length, some six or seven feet. According to Suryadi, its poison was more deadly than that of a cobra.

Also that afternoon, we stopped in at a little house floating on the side of the river that caught snakes and lizards and sold their skin for use in luxury goods. Although I got to hold a recently captured python as well as a couple smaller snakes, I couldn’t help but feel lukewarm about lending moral support to the poaching industry.

We made our way back across Danau Jempang, and as we struggled to make out the next town on the shores of the vast lake, I learned that the silver domes that graced all the mosques in the area were quite useful navigational tools: usually they were the only thing we could see from a distance of five or so kilometers. But as we approached Tanjung Isuy, it wasn’t navigation, but vegetation, that was our main problem. The thick plants that floated on top of the water were blown by the wind during the day such that the path we had taken from the town that morning was now covered in vegetation. The only solution was to try new routes in a guess and check fashion, and it was over an hour before we finally managed to find one that took us to the village. I imagine it must be quite frustrating to be a boat driver around here—each day brings a new battle to reach the shore, and the previous day’s experience is of no aid.

The following day we traversed more jungle landscape and ended up at a town called Muara Pahu, which was the local habitat for the endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins. These dolphins are the same ones I saw in Kratie, Cambodia, so I didn’t much care about seeing them again, which worked out well because after two hours of cruising up and down the river we gave up on spotting them.

On the way back to Tanjung Isuy our propeller hit the bottom and snapped in half, leaving us with nothing but a paddle for the journey home. Luckily, after about two hours of paddling, we came upon a boat that had an extra propeller, and a few minutes later we had repaired our motor and were back at cruising speed.

The following day we returned to Samarinda, and to civilization. Though my stay in the jungle was short, I felt fortunate to have gotten a glimpse of one of the last primary rainforests on earth.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Days 153 – 154: Samarinda

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060553&l=0bdd6&id=1101094

I caught a mid-morning flight from Jakarta to Balikpapan, a large port city in East Kalimantan. For those of you who haven’t a clue where East Kalimantan is, it’s the eastern part of the Indonesian side of Borneo, the world’s fourth largest island. Kalimantan makes up well more than half of Borneo, and East Kalimantan is the biggest province on the island. Balikpapan is the oil capital of the island; flying in, I was greeted by oil rigs anchored offshore and an oil refinery dominating the city’s skyline. Balikpapan is also an unattractive metropolis dedicated almost solely to the oil industry, so I caught a minibus from the airport to the bus station and caught a bus to Samarinda, effectively bypassing the city.

The bus to Samarinda was particularly uncomfortable; it was packed full of people and I had to carry my backpack on my lap, and halfway through the three hour ride the curvy roads induced vomiting in the child sitting next to me. I held my feet a few inches above the ground for the remainder of the trip to keep from stepping in semi-digested nasi goreng.

I arrived at the Samarinda bus terminal and caught an ojek (motorbike) into the center of the city, where I found a cheap guesthouse and dropped my pack. A man who worked at my guesthouse was also a tour guide, and he began trying to sell me on a trip up the Mahakam River. I did want to venture up the river, but I was considering trying to do it on my own because the guided trips were quite expensive, especially considering I was traveling on my own. But I’d heard that it was tough to see much without a guide, so I listened to the guy’s spiel and told him I’d think about it and get back to him in the morning.

I walked down to the river to catch the day’s last rays of sunlight and observed the strange mix of logging ships, barges carrying shipping crates, and local fisherman sitting on the docks with their lines in the water. Samarinda, a town of 600,000 and the center of Borneo’s timber industry, seems to be caught between its traditional role as a fishing town and its future as a major port and logging capital. Luckily the latter hasn’t yet completely pushed out the former.

I walked past the town’s main mosque, Mesjid Raya Darussalam, which is quickly being overshadowed by the construction of Southeast Asia’s largest mosque just a few kilometers down the riverbank. I passed the new mosque on the way into town, and it certainly is grand. I guess taxes from the timber industry are paying for it.

That night I ate dinner at a local Indonesian restaurant, and I must admit that I’m running out of Indonesian dishes to try. Aside from variations on the standard nasi goreng (fried rice), mie goreng (fried noodles), gado gado (vegetables and peanut sauce), and chicken sate (chicken on a skewer in peanut sauce), there really aren’t a whole lot of Indonesian foods available at these basic restaurants that I frequent. I am, however, looking forward to the giant orange freshwater shrimp that live in the Mahakam River. I’m hoping to try them on my trek upstream.

The following morning I explored the city a bit, but there wasn’t a whole lot to see beyond the bustling riverfront and the main mosque. I stopped by a shopping mall for a bit, and I was surprised at how upscale all the products were. Apparently the timber industry has created a good deal of wealth in this city, because the mall was packed with people buying goods that I wouldn’t have expected the average Indonesian to be able to afford.

That afternoon I called another tour guide who was listed in my book, and as luck would have it he was taking a British father and son up the river the following morning and said I could join the tour. That would make the trip far cheaper for me, and hopefully a lot more fun, too.

By about noon the weather was intolerably hot (after all, Borneo does straddle the equator), and I retreated to my room for some reading and writing. A shower was out of the question, though, mostly because for the most part Indonesians don’t have showers. Instead, they have mandis, and that’s what my guesthouse room was equipped with. A mandi is essentially a large container of stagnant water that is dumped over the body with a ladle. It’s surprisingly refreshing, especially when it’s flaming hot outside, but one doesn’t get the feeling that he’s getting particularly clean. I’m not sure when my next real shower will be, but you can rest assured that it will be a very long one.

That evening I met my tour guide, Suryadi, and my two fellow travelers, and we planned to set off at eight the next morning. And that night I got to sample the giant freshwater shrimp a little early, at a restaurant in town that I stumbled upon. Called udang galah, the shrimp are prepared in a number of ways, but I had them in a spicy red sauce. The only trouble that was the shrimp were still in their shells, so I had to stick my hands in the hot sauce to peel the shells off, which left my hands both burned from the heat and covered in sauce. It crossed my mind that maybe I was supposed to eat the shrimp with the shell still on, but unfortunately there were no locals eating the same dish as me so I couldn’t figure out the proper etiquette. I’d have to ask Suryadi the next morning.

One more thing about this place: I’m once again a spectacle. I get stares from passing cars and motorbikes, “Hey Misters” from kids, and curious glances from their parents. Clearly, tourists here are rare; the Brits I’m traveling with starting tomorrow said they’ve been in town for a week and hadn’t seen another Westerner until they met me. They were especially shocked to be meeting an American. “We figured Americans didn’t even know where this place was!” they said. Have I mentioned the great sense of pride one gets from being an American in Southeast Asia?

Days 151 – 153: Jakarta

I caught a flight from Bali to Jakarta on March 5th; my Foreign Service Officer Test was scheduled for the morning of the 6th at the US Embassy in central Jakarta. The flight took only an hour and a half, but the 35km bus ride from the airport to the center of the city took a full two hours due to heavy traffic. Jakarta’s streets, it seems, are just as clogged as Bangkok’s and nearly as wild as Saigon’s. I finally checked into my guesthouse around six, and proceeded to kill about twenty mosquitoes in my room in the next fifteen minutes. That didn’t stop me from waking up the following morning to a new patch of bites, though.

I arrived at the Embassy a half hour before my test was to begin, but at the security check no one seemed to understand what I was doing there. I showed my letter and told the security staff that I was there for an exam, but they routed me to the consular section, where I waited in line for fifteen minutes before being told that I was in the wrong place. Someone finally escorted me to the USAID building just in time for my test to start.

When I got to the testing room I realized why no one had known where I was supposed to go: I was the only one taking the test in Jakarta. And, as the test administrator told me, they hadn’t even expected me to show up—because I had only listed my North Carolina address on my application, they figured I must have selected the Jakarta test center by accident. I guess they hadn’t considered the possibility that I’d want to take the test in Jakarta even though I don’t live there.

Unlike the last time I took the exam, in April 2005, the test is now fully computerized; everything from the multiple choice sections to the essay is completed online. But as we all know, technology can make things both easier and more difficult, and that proved true when I attempted to log into the test site and it rejected my User ID. The test administrator called a technology guy in to work on the problem, but in the end he had to call someone back in the US to figure out what the problem was. Half an hour of twiddling my thumbs later, I was finally able to log in.

Everything went smoothly until about midway through the biographical information section of the exam, when my web browser suddenly shut down because of a “severe time synch error.” I don’t even know what that means, and neither did the technology guy who had stayed in the room ever since my first problem, but in the end my computer had to be restarted and I lost the entire section of answers and hard to start over. I’m just glad the State Department managed to work all the kinks out of this new testing system before they put it into production.

I finally finished the exam nearly an hour after the supposed ending time, and I silently thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t tried to schedule a flight out of Jakarta for that afternoon. Rain swept through the city for the remainder of the day, so I spent the rest of my time in Jakarta reading and intermittently swatting mosquitoes in my prison cell of a hotel room. In the morning I’d be off to Borneo.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Days 143 – 151: Bali

Photos:
Kuta: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060118&l=4d7c5&id=1101094
Central Bali: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060344&l=097e7&id=1101094
Ubud Monkey Forest: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060353&l=4663e&id=1101094
Bukit Peninsula: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060355&l=c22e7&id=1101094

After a few days of cold rain in northern Vietnam, I was more than ready to return to the tropical paradise known as Bali—the little island that was also my first love in Southeast Asia back in September 2007. I flew through Kuala Lumpur, and because technically I was taking two separate flights instead of one connecting flight, I had to pass through Malaysian immigration. I had slept most of the way from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, and when I woke up we were landing, and I hadn’t yet received an immigration card. Assuming the cards were handed out while I was sleeping, I asked the flight attendant for one as I left the plane, but to my surprise she told me that immigration cards were no longer required. Sure enough, I passed through immigration with nothing but a swipe of my passport—no filling out forms in block letters with blue or black ink, no writing my name in handwriting that isn’t legible anyway, and no lying about my “Address in Malaysia” (as if I ever know that in advance). Malaysia, it seems, is embracing the computer age. Will all you other countries do the same, please?

Both my flights were uneventful and on time, which was no surprise given that I was flying AirAsia. I still have yet to have a flight on AirAsia be delayed for more than a few minutes. I really love this airline.

As I walked though the automatic doors that separated the air-conditioned terminal from the boiling Bali air, I immediately reevaluated my happiness at having traded the cool days and shivery nights of north Vietnam for the flaming sun and suffocating humidity of Indonesia. Had I forgotten India? Was hot weather really my thing? I decided to stick close to the ocean, or to make sure that I was on a motorbike with the wind in my face.

But as it turned out, the heat wasn’t much of a problem during my stay in Bali. The rain, on the other hand, was. According to my guidebook and multiple external sources, the rainy season doesn’t affect Bali much. If that’s true, I’d hate to see the islands that it does affect, because by my estimation it rained nearly half the time I was there.

The first day, however, was nothing but sunshine. Sunshine so hot that despite the sunscreen that I had lathered onto my skin, I left the beach looking something like a lobster. That probably had something to do with the fact that I spent about seven hours in the water surfing—I think it was the reflection from the surface of the water that got me.

But the good news is that by the end of the day I was standing up on medium-sized waves and riding them for something like ten seconds each. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I had rented the biggest surfboard on the whole beach. Riding this thing was like standing on top of an aircraft carrier—the waves were crashing below me, but I hardly felt a thing.

That night I walked the streets of Kuta and checked out some of the (in)famous Bali nightlife that I had mostly stayed away from during my last visit. The various bars and clubs ranged from totally clichéd to actually kind of fun, and the one I eventually settled on featured a local band that covered Western rock ‘n roll hits—everything from Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘N Roses to Rage Against the Machine. They did one of the best “Killing in the Name of” renditions that I’ve ever heard.

By the time I headed back to my guesthouse it had started to rain, and the rain continued all night and into the following morning. The annoying thing about rain in Bali is that it washes all the trash from the alleys and makeshift garbage dumps into the ocean, so when I got to the beach around noon to continue my surfing education I found the water littered with plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and even toothbrushes—hardly the image Bali seeks to promote.

I surfed anyway, but by mid-afternoon the waves had died down to almost nothing, and the veteran surfers on the beach told me that the “swell” wouldn’t be “working” for several days. I thanked them for the lesson in surf lingo and made plans to head north to the central mountains the following morning.

I rented a motorbike from my guesthouse for Rp 30,000 (~$3) per day, packed a small daypack, and set off the following day, passing first through the hip clubbing area called Seminyak and then through Bali’s largest city, Denpasar. After Denpasar the landscape changed drastically; asphalt, concrete and billboards were replaced by palm trees, rice terraces, and locals dressed in traditional Balinese garb. I was back in the Bali I loved.

I rode north through some of the most beautiful rice fields I’d ever seen, and gradually the terrain got hillier until I had to downshift to third gear and continue that way for the rest of the journey. The weather changed, too; the blue skies and intense heat of south Bali were replaced by clouds, cool mist, and, eventually, steady rain. Luckily my daypack was small enough to fit on the motorcycle seat flush against my back, so my body blocked the rain and my camera, books, and extra clothes remained almost entirely dry.

I took a few wrong turns on the way up the mountain—the maps in my guidebook were too general to be of much help on these back roads—but eventually I reached my destination: Danau (Lake) Bratan, set in a valley surrounded by several dormant volcanoes. I’d spend the afternoon and night here and continue north the following morning.

I checked into a cute guesthouse with a sweeping view of the lake and the mountains and then headed down to the shore of the lake to have a look around. Perched on the shore of the lake was Pura Ulun Danu Bratan, which is supposedly a very important temple for Balinese Hindus. Dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of the waters, the temple plays host to pilgrimages and ceremonies by Balinese who wish to ensure a plentiful supply of water for their villages. Fittingly, the holiest part of the temple sits on two islands just offshore and seems to float on the water that it blesses.

After wandering around the temple for a bit, I drove my motorbike back toward town and stopped at the enormous fruit market that lay just off the main road. The lush valleys in central Bali are perfect for growing a wide array of fruit, and just about every type I could imagine was featured at the market. The fruit from this part of Bali supplies most of the resorts and restaurants near Kuta.

By this time the rain had stopped, so I got back on my motorbike and drove through the mountains to two lakes a few kilometers northwest of Danau Bratan—Danau Buyan and Danau Tamblingan. The road took me along the ridgeline high above Danau Buyan, and the view down onto the lake and the surrounding farming villages was spectacular.

At this point the sun was drifting lower in the sky, and not wanting to drive down the steep mountain road in the dark I hurried back down to Danau Bratan and arrived at the shore of the lake just before sunset. But with only a few kilometers to go before I reached my guesthouse, I ran into a procession of a few hundred locals that was taking up the entire road. I inquired as to what sort of procession this was and learned that it was a funeral procession for an important citizen who had recently died, which seemed strange given all the cheering that was going on (and some of the members of the procession even waved at me and asked me to take their picture). Perhaps it’s the Hindu belief in reincarnation that made this funeral a joyous rather than a somber affair? If this was a particularly virtuous man, then I suppose he’ll be reborn as something even better next time around?

The following morning I ate breakfast at my guesthouse with a guy from Las Vegas (the rare American sighting in Southeast Asia), and then I visited the Bali Botanical Gardens, which were on the lower slopes of one of the mountains surrounding Danau Bratan. My guidebook gave the gardens rave reviews, but I was a bit disappointed with the general lack of flowers. The green plants were plentiful, sure, but I was hoping for bright tropical flower blooms—after all, if I just wanted to see green plants in Bali, I wouldn’t need to visit any botanical gardens.

Around 10am I set off for Gunung Batur, an active volcano about 20km due east of Danau Bratan. That’s 20km as the crow flies—but because the terrain in between Bratan and Batur is nothing but rugged volcanoes, there isn’t a road that connects the two places. To get to Batur I’d have to drive north all the way to the coast, and then drive east along the coast and back up the mountains to Batur.

Despite the roundabout route I’d have to take to Batur, the journey was still only about 80km, so I expected to be at Batur in a little over an hour. But the ride turned out to be far slower than I expected, first due to the steep, tortuous mountain roads that took me down to the coast, then the heavy traffic I hit in Singaraja, Bali’s second largest city, and finally the sharp climb back up the mountains to Batur. But all the changes in altitude did provide me with spectacular views of the island—from the 2000m peaks above Danau Bratan I could see all the way down to the north coastline, and from the 1700m road around Batur’s crater I caught views of south Bali all the way to Kuta. And with the drastic changes in altitude came abrupt changes in climate—the Bratan highlands were cool and damp, the north coastline hot and dry, and the Batur highlands cool again, but not quite as wet as around Bratan. I got rained on a bit during my descent to Singaraja, but the climb back to Batur was dry.

I reached Batur just after noon and stopped by a famous temple that was once buried by an eruption of the volcano. It was here that I ran into the worst money-grubbing touts that I’d met in all of Bali. To visit the temple, I was required to wear a sarong and a sash, both of which the touts were prepared to loan or sell to me at some ridiculous price. Fortunately I had a sarong in my bag that I was using mostly as a towel, but I still had to get my hands on a sash. Figuring I’d never need the sash again, I told the ladies that I wanted to rent one, and asked how much it might cost to use it for half an hour or so. The response? Twenty thousand rupiah—just over two dollars. While that might not seem like much, it seems a little ridiculous when you consider that I paid only Rp 10,000 to buy the sarong I was wearing, and that the sarong used about fifty times as much fabric as the sash. By my estimation, the sash should cost Rp 1,000-2,000 to buy, and less than that to rent, but, wanting to be done with the whole thing, I offered to pay Rp 1,000 to rent it for a half hour. But the ladies wouldn’t give it to me for anything less than Rp 10,000 even though I sat there and bargained for fifteen minutes. It wasn’t until I told them that I didn’t even really care about visiting the temple and walked back to my motorbike that the price quickly collapsed to Rp 1,000. I think that’s the first time I’ve had to use the walk-off since India.

It was only later that I realized why the touts were so bad around Gunung Batur—apparently, this is a big stop for the big luxury buses that drive package tourists around to see the sights of Bali. The touts here are used to charging ridiculous prices for everything and getting away with it, so it takes a good deal more effort for someone like me to get a fair price.

The temple, ironically, turned out to be nothing special, and after a quick fifteen minute visit I continued along the road that looped around the rim of the volcano crater to the village of Penelokan. It was here that the views got particularly good—looking down into the crater, I saw first green farms built on the hillside, then black lava flows left over from the last eruption, in 1994, and then the giant black cone rising up in the center of the crater. In addition, the section of the crater to the east of the cone was filled with water, forming the attractive Danau Batur.

I admired the view from Penelokan and then ventured off on a side road that took me down into the crater and to the shore of the lake. I had planned to stay the night in a village beside the lake, but so many touts approached me trying to sell bracelets and cheap artwork while I ate my lunch that I decided I had seen enough. I’d leave Batur to the package tourists. On a side note, the lunch was quite good—fresh fish directly from the lake. If only I’d been allowed to eat it in peace.

I set off from Batur around 1pm and planned to arrive in Ubud, about 40km south, by two. This time the roads were fairly straight and well-paved, so I made good time for the first 20km, but then I hit a powerful rainstorm that seemed to come out of nowhere. The rain stung my skin but, feeling macho, I kept riding until it was coming down so fast that I could hardly see where I was going and my bag was getting wet. Apparently I’m not quite as much of a tough guy as I’d hoped.

I waited out the rain under the roof of a roadside stand and practiced some Bahasa Indonesia with the storeowner, who didn’t speak a word of English. The popular first question to ask foreigners seems to be “Sudah lama Bali?” which translates literally as “Already long Bali” but means “Have you been in Bai long?” In general Indonesian is a very efficient language—many words are understood and thus omitted. For instance, there is no “to be” verb—it’s always understood. Also, verbs don’t change for tense, nor do they change for subject—“makan” means (I) “eat,” (he) “eats,” (I) “ate,” and (I had) “eaten” (the last would translate “sudah makan,” or “already ate”). All this makes things quite convenient for people like me who are trying to chatter like the locals without any formal training.

Eventually the rain stopped and I continued on to Ubud, and by the time I arrived the sky was blue and there was no sign of rain in any direction. The weather here changes more rapidly then anywhere I’ve ever been.

Some of you might remember that I spent a good amount of time in Ubud last year attending the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Indeed, I was here for nearly a week in September 2007, but I was so busy attending the many festival events that I didn’t get a chance to see much of the town itself. Ubud is a beautiful and wonderfully relaxed little town, and it’s become the counterpoint to Kuta for both package tourists and backpackers. Packed with local artists, fine restaurants, and traditional culture, and surrounded by verdant rice fields, it’s no surprise that Ubud has already been “discovered”—it’s now the second most popular destination in Bali after Kuta.

I tried to check into the bungalows I had stayed in last year, which were set off a quiet side road overlooking the rice fields, but they were already occupied and I had to settle for another place closer to town. In general, though, accommodation in Ubud is a pleasure—for Rp 50,000 (just over $5) you can get a spacious private bungalow surrounded by rice fields or gardens and including hot water and breakfast in the morning. Even for Southeast Asia, that’s a steal.

One of the main attractions in Ubud is the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, which is home to three temples and over 100 Balinese macaques, a breed of the most successful family of primates on earth (after humans, of course). I hadn’t visited the forest on my last visit, so after checking into my bungalow I immediately set off for the place, which is just south of town. The monkeys look cute and harmless at first glance, but in reality they’re anything but. I bought a few bananas at the entrance to feed to them, and as I pulled them from my bag two monkeys jumped on me and ripped two of them from my hands. These monkeys are greedy, aggressive, and seemingly quite well fed. And if you come too close to their babies, they bare their teeth and hiss at you. Not exactly the type of animal you’d want to take home as a pet.

I wandered around the monkey forest for half an hour before the sky darkened and then opened. I sprinted back to the ticket booth to protect my camera and made it underneath the shelter just as the rain really started to come down. Once again, I hadn’t seen the change in weather coming at all—only an hour before, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I was hoping the rain would go as quickly as it had come, but an hour later I was still standing under the ticket booth and the rainstorm had turned to a thunderstorm. Sick of huddling under the ticket booth and resigned to getting wet eventually, I put my camera under my shirt and ran back to my bungalow. By the time I got there my clothes felt as if they had just been submerged in a pool, but I’m happy to say that my camera is just fine.

As it turns out my decision to run home was the right one because the rain continued for the next several hours, until well after dark. Thankfully I had brought Love in the Time of Cholera along, and with the thunderstorm raging outside my bungalow proved quite comfortable (and waterproof).

The following morning I did some more exploring in the monkey forest, but by mid-morning rain was threatening again and I decided to head south to the arid Bukit Peninsula (south of Kuta) in hopes of dry weather. The journey from Ubud to Ulu Watu, on the southwestern tip of the island, took me about two hours, and I’m happy to say that I managed to outrun the rain.

My destination in the Bukit Peninsula was my favorite beach in the entire world—a place known as Lemongkak to the locals and “Dreamland” to the few foreigners who have managed to find it. This is the beach on which I had spent my 25th birthday, and the same one I visited a couple weeks later with Natsumi. I had some friends there and was looking forward to seeing everyone again. But most of all I was looking forward to spending the next two days on an isolated beach surrounded by cliffs, covered in clean, white sand, and fronted by turquoise water and waves perfect for bodysurfing.

I had picked up a more detailed roadmap of south Bali in Kuta, and it looked as if I could take a shortcut to get to Dreamland, so I made a few turns and came at the beach from a new direction. I wasn’t positive that I was going the right way, but I figured that I could always turn around and go the old way if the new one didn’t work out.

When I reached the end of the road that would supposedly take me to the north side of the beach, I came upon a construction site—what looked like the beginnings of a hotel being built on a cliff, and cranes and construction workers everywhere. Clearly, I had taken a wrong turn. I retraced my path and made for the beach in the longer, old-fashioned way.

But as I approached the beach from the road I had driven twice before, I saw the same cranes I had seen only a half hour earlier. I wondered how I could have taken a wrong turn again this time, and then it hit me—this was the beach. The cranes were sitting on the very sand that I had stood on to watch the sun set on the night of my 25th birthday. The construction of the hotel was taking place directly on top of the bungalow I had slept in only six months ago. I felt sick to my stomach. What had happened to this place?

I climbed down to what was left of the beach, and the scene got even worse. The beach was littered with plastic bottles, empty bags of potato chip, and candy bar wrappers. A channel had been cut down the middle of the sand, and it was filled with dirty water and floating refuse. All of the simple bungalows and restaurants that used to sit on the sand were demolished.

I asked the construction workers what had happened, and my suspicions were confirmed—someone had bought the land, realizing it was a truly beautiful spot, and had begun building a luxury hotel on what used to be a beach used by locals and a few foreign backpackers. All the bungalows and food stalls had been demolished four months ago, and the foundations of the hotel were laid two months later. I felt as if I wanted to puke.

Dejected, I got back on my motorbike and drove a few kilometers south to another beach—one not quite as attractive or private as Dreamland had been, but still a peaceful spot. I spent the afternoon on the beach (which was littered with trash that had presumably floated down from the construction site), and that night I hung out with some surfers who were staying in the bungalow next to mine. I told them about the terrible happenings at Dreamland, and they said they had heard about it only yesterday from the owner of these bungalows. I immediately jumped up and went to find the man, desperate to find out whether he had any more information about the place. Sure enough, he did; the land was not bought by just anyone, but by the family of Suharto, the recently-deceased corrupt dictator that ruled Indonesia for 30 years. How fitting that his family should be the one to ruin this perfect place—first he robbed his country blind, and now his family is using the profits to destroy the country’s natural beauty. Lovely.

I spent the next day at Pantai Suluban, the beach that I had settled for after finding Dreamland in a state of ruin. I made a few side trips around the peninsula—one to an important temple called Pura Luhur Ulu Watu that is set on the cliffs overlooking the crashing waves below. While visiting the temple I ran into some more friendly macaques of the same breed as the ones in Ubud, and these guys were just as friendly—one jumped on an old woman, ripped her glasses off her face, and escaped into a tree, whereupon he proceeded to chew the glasses into a gnarled mess. I felt lucky to have only had my bananas stolen.

Eventually I made my way back to Kuta in time for one more night of revelries before my flight to Jakarta. I went to dinner with the Swedish girls I had met back in Vang Vieng, Laos—they had just come from Singapore, and were headed next to Australia and New Zealand. Their only problem was that they were almost out of money, and Australia isn’t particularly easy on the wallet. They said that most likely they’d need to cut the trip short and return to Scandinavia, where they’d proceed to work for two more months before they had enough money saved to travel for another five. I didn’t feel particularly sorry for them.

As I packed my bag for my flight to Jakarta, I found myself leaving Bali with far less trouble than I had last fall. Bali was almost perfect last September—blue skies all the time, pristine beaches, and, most importantly, I was seeing everything for the first time. My return during the rainy season meant foul weather, trash in the ocean, and disappointing development. I still consider Bali to be the closest thing to paradise that I’ve ever experienced, but this time around I managed to spot a few blemishes as well.