Borneo Adventure

After 29 hours of travel, we finally arrived in Balikpapan around 1100 on Monday the 7th. We were able to get 5 hours of shut-eye and a shower at a transit hotel in the Singapore airport which was much appreciated. Our first day in Balikpapan was pretty much a blur. The town of 500,000 seemed strangely deserted. The majority of the population is Muslim and during the hours of 4:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. everyone is fasting, praying, and laying low, due to the month long religious holiday called Ramadan. Four times throughout the day you hear the call to prayer echoing across the city over loud speakers from the near-by mosque. Balikpapan is primarily an industrial town catering to the oil, mining and lumber industries. There is basically no tourist info structure here and therefore is not much to do. The majority of people here speak no English and the few that do speak very little. We had an extra day to kill in Balikpapan before heading on to Tarakan to start our dive excursion, so we attempted to see a little bit of what little there was to see. There were no organized day tours, so we selected a couple of locations off a brochure in the hotel and hired a driver for 4 hours to check them out. Our choices were slim. We ended up choosing the crocodile farm and the local market. Our driver, Mr. Budi spoke almost no English, but was able to take us to the locations that we indicated on the brochure. We first went to the crocodile farm where for $1.00 we were shown several small enclosures packed with crocodiles in a small amount of very stagnant water. For another dollar you could buy a chicken to throw to the poor buggers who would scramble to get the prize but only one would emerge the victor. In addition to the crocs there were two chained up elephants, 3 monkeys and several snakes, all in equally sparse cages. It was a sad set-up, so we quickly moved on to our next attraction, the market. To sum it up, there were lots of little stalls filled with tacky trinkets, and the persistent smell of raw sewer. We didn’t linger there either.Tomorrow we move on to Tarakan, and hopefully some spectacular diving. We’ll post the diving update in about a week.