Bumi Samarinda

Looking at my recently ‘recovered’ hard disk, I saw a collection of photos of my trip to Balikpapan and Samarinda. Balikpapan is back in the news in Brunei as possibly AirAsia want to operate more intra Borneo flights.

Back in the late 90’s, RBA had regular and frequent flights to Balikpapan and were well used but apparently for the wrong reasons. I won’t dwell too much on it. It was abruptly stopped.

Back in 2003, we went on a fieldtrip to Samarinda with Dr Rock. The trip had to go through Jakarta before catching another flight back to Borneo to Balikpapan. With all the recent troubles with Indonesian airlines, I would not dare to do it again. Balikpapan is the birthplace of oil industry in South East Asia. This is where billions have been pumped out and in fact the amount of oil and gas is similar if not more than what Brunei have. But it also suffers from what is called ‘the curse of the black gold’. The place remains relatively undeveloped and all the money goes somewhere else. Nonetheless Balikpapan is undoubtedly the cleanest city in Indonesia, won the award several times.

Our place of adventure was further down in Samarinda, a 4 hour bus ride from Balikpapan. Most of the locations could only be accessed by boats. So we ended up spending about 2 or 3 days floating and whizzing through the mangroves of the Mahakam Delta. It felt like the sceneries in the Vietnam war film 'Apocalypse Now' where most of the film scenes were around assult boats patrolling the Mekong river and its tributaries. Mixed in with the visit are some side trips to the local villages, a humbling experience. Samarindan seem to have similar dialect as Brunei. This is not surprising as Brunei once spread its wing, or rather its influence over the whole of Borneo. The highlight of the trip was also the food – the lobsters and ketam goring belada which Samarinda is famous for. The lobster and crabs were really fresh coming from the day’s catch.