The crossover from Malaysian Borneo to Indonesian Borneo happened to be by ferry. The two countries are part of the same land mass but as we stepped off our boat, herded along with a noisy throng of bustling locals, it felt like we were arriving in a different world.
Kalimantan is a much poorer country than Sabah and doesn’t come with all the visitor conveniences and the ease of movement. What it does come with however, is bags of character and we instantly felt that exhilarating sense of being pleasantly out of our comfort zone.
As we’re so far behind on our blog (almost 3 months or something ridiculous) I’d like to just get to the point and concentrate on one day, the number one contender for best day of our trip. I’d like to, but I guess I should quickly fill in a bit of story to get us there..
We wanted to go to Derewan Island, off the east coast of Kalimantan, and had been working at getting other travelers involved in order to manage this. To cut a long story short we had managed to arrange a speedboat to take us and a girl called Yanna, an ice cool but friendly Czechoslovakian lone traveler who we met on the ferry. So, shortly after dawn one morning we were driven in a beat up bemo van to a pier where we jumped on board a tiny speed boat with two locals who we had never met and sped off like we had just been recruited to the A-Team.
At first it was a rush of adrenaline pounding off in a chartered boat to some distant paradise island, but as we bounced off the choppy waters, each slap of the concrete like benches we were sat on compressed our spines and we realized that three hours of this ride wasn’t going to be much fun. Our knuckles were white from clinging on and our bottoms were red from the spanking and even the driver stopped now and again to reposition the boat’s only lifejacket he was using as a cushion under him.
It was a horrible journey but boy was it worth it. As we finally slowed down, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a perfect circle of green and yellow had appeared on the horizon
.
Derewan Island is my favorite place in the world. An island that you can walk right around in an hour, inhabited by the most friendly, laid back people we have had the pleasure of coming across. The beaches are golden and you can swim out in almost any direction and bosh! you’ve found a coral reef teeming with sea life.
The place we were staying at, the Losman Danakan Homestay, had a pier of its own that stretched right out to the edge of the coral. We could walk to the end of our place, spot one of the many huge sea turtles and just jump in for a snorkel with them before heading further out to dive into the reef. The water was like a warm bath and so buoyant that you didn’t even need to tread water, you could just float there and watch the underwater world swim by. In town we just wandered around greeting locals and eating freshly caught and barbequed delicious fish in a sunny daze.
In short it was the closest thing to paradise we’ve seen, such a simple happy life these people are living and we realized quickly that the 2-3 day time scale we gave ourselves was going to be scrapped. If they only had cash points or internet or banks there I’m not sure Bali or Lombok would have happened.
People here take it really easy. Angie was always in stitches with the super friendly, ever so slowly moving workman who was ‘fixing’ one of the rooms near to us. First he would pass with a single screw in his hand, gave a gentle nod to us as he happily made his way to his place of work. Ten minutes later he would pass again and reappear from the main house with a screwdriver, ready to take the long sunny walk down the pier to apply it to his last load. This would happen all day and the room he was working on didn’t seem to change a bit the entire time we were there.
But anyway.. In between enjoying this amazing community we were trying to organize another speedboat to take us for a day trip to some other islands, even further away from the mainland. Day after day we had something organized but woke up to be told that the sea was too rough away from the Island, even though it was flat calm where we were.
One night a group of eleven French people arrived back from a trip, and with only around eight other travelers on the island this seemed a big event. A Danish couple who we got on really well with had got talking to them and learned that they had hired a fishing boat for three days and had slept on the boat at night. By this point we were gagging to get to the other islands and ‘Plan B’, as we called it sounded like a good adventure as a fishing boat would be able to go out on more choppy waters.
Together we approached the captain of the fishing boat and, with the help of one of the Frenchies translating for us, managed to organize a two day trip to our islands. Sadly when we spoke to him the very next day he decided he was knackered and wanted to relax at home instead, Arg. In desperation we found another random fisherman who, as far as we could tell from the tiny scrap of Indonesian we were using to communicate, was up for taking us on our adventure, Joy.
We spent the next day with our fellow boat trip travelers; Mess, Amily and Yanna, wandering around the Island looking for supplies to last us the two days at sea. With options pretty limited we ended up with lots of eggs, rice, noodles, two gallons of water (getting this water was an adventure in itself but that’s for another day), five bottles of the most expensive beer ever (with only one villager keeping beer she could charge what she liked), fishing wire and hooks and a fresh but smelly fish which we were assured would coax out bigger catches on our trip.
I spent the night before the big day waking up to the sound of crashing waves and angry storms and felt that the morning would bring more bad news. Happily though everything came together and the best day of our trip started with a home made coconut doe nut type thing from our hosts, a perfectly calm sea and the news that we were most worried about, our new captain had turned up with a boat and was waiting at the end of our pier.
We were all so bubbling with excitement as we loaded our supplies onto the ship that none of us questioned the sea worthiness of our rusty nail and dodgy scraps of wood creation with a roof made of old rice bags. We had our ship, the sun was shining and the five of us set off with our new captain and his assistant friend in top spirits.
We gathered in the middle of the boat to toast our good fortunes but soon the sound of the clunky old diesel engine was so aggressive we all moved to the tip of the boat with wide smiles as we made ourselves comfortable on pillows borrowed from the homestay. That first 2-3 hour simple journey was a euphoric time, blue skies, cooling breeze and good company.
We approached the first island of our trip slightly confused. We had come to stop at this beautiful circle of dense green around 20 meters from the wooden jetty and the waves here were much more choppy. The captain and his friend spoke only a few words of English and our Indonesian was similar but we finally figured out that the tide was too low and they wouldn’t be able to get closer. The boat was rocking as we threw on flippers and snorkel gear and jumped into the sea to swim for shore, passing over a huge coral reef, again filled with slippery little beasts.
We took the walkway to the center of the island and eventually the bush opened up to a huge beautiful flat calm lake which we had first found out about on the ferry to Kalimantan. By freak of nature and a lack of natural predators, jellyfish have evolved in this lake to have no sting. This meant you could jump in and snorkel with thousands and thousands of these alien like creatures in complete safety.
At first it was really strange to touch one; the texture, the way it reacted to your touch, but soon we were pinging them about to each other and diving down to touch the bigger, translucent ones. At certain points in the lake it was like you were swimming in jellyfish, not water, it was so dense in there. With the volumetric light flowing from above and the absolute silence once our ears were under the water it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
When we made it back to the boat our captain had boiled up a kettle of tea and we ate the lunch boxes provided by our homestay, a rice and cold fish concoction. Next we jumped back in the sea to snorkel around the coral reef that circled the entire island. The reef dropped more than fifty meters below us, forming a wall of sea life that we could explore.
Next we headed off to the second island, where we planned to spend the night. On the way we got out our fishing hooks and wire. The captain spotted us fumbling around and took over, untangling the mess and creating a kind of fishing rod out of an empty water bottle.
As we were approaching the second perfect circle of island paradise a cry came up from the captain and the boat turned sharply to the right. ‘Manta! Manta!’
I’ll never forget that cry or the glee with which it was executed. Manta rays were very rare at that time of the year and we had heard that the Frenchies had never spotted them
in many trips to the islands.
We pulled up fairly close to these huge sea beasts as they were close to the surface and frantically got our snorkel gear on with the captain shouting go! go! go! keeping his arm pointing in the direction we needed to take. The first time we jumped in with such ferocity and made such a noise that the manta were scared away and slipped down deep into the ocean below. We scrambled back into the boat and the captain set about tracking them down for another attempt. The second time we lost sight of them and, each of us swimming off in different directions, they slipped away easily.
The third time was very special. All five of us had managed to get into the water and follow the finger of the captain. We all somehow made it right up to one of these amazing elegant stealth bombers of the sea and floated in a semicircle as it slowly turned and rose and fell in the water for what seemed like five minutes but what was probably twenty seconds. An incredible sight made all the more special due to the excitement and unexpected nature of the find. We spent some time searching around the waters, hearing the ‘Manta!’ and bombing in with varying success. It was great fun and it seemed like the captain was enjoying the hunt as much as we were as we had to ask him to give up and crack on with the next part of our day.
The final island was the most beautiful of the lot and I’m running out of superlatives to describe them all, but yeah, not a bad spot. This time we could come right up to the pier and as we headed towards the beach a man came from the bush and walked towards us like he was expecting us, I guess he was watching our ray search. A friendly Indonesian bloke, I can’t remember his name but he was the ranger of the Island and looked after the sea turtles that visited.
This was a tiny island that for some reason the turtles from miles around had chosen as the spot to always lay their eggs. These were turtles with good taste. With only the ranger, a handful of helpers and ourselves on the island it felt a privilege to be greeted and given a tour of the preservation operation. That night we were invited to join the ranger on his circuit of the island and by moonlight we wandered around watching turtles digging holes, helping the ones who were stuck in tight spots and checking that eggs were laid in spots that were not easily accessible to predators.
At the end of our circuit the ranger brought out a bucket of tiny scrambling freshly hatched baby turtles, a blurry flurry of little legs trying to swim out to the sea. At only around 20cm long they were far more powerful than they looked and struggled in our hands, until we laid them down on the sand a few feet from the sea. The five of us lined them up, counted to three and let them off like a race but the silly buggers ran off in random directions, and sometimes circled back on themselves so we had to intervene and more or less chuck them into the sea. No wonder the turtles needed help round here.
And so our long old day was nearly at an end and we cooked up some rice and cracked open a beer on board what was going to be our bed for the night. Then the most annoying pests to twitch their ugly little heads throughout our entire journey crawled out of the woodwork and scuttered through our rubbish, our food and over our feet. I hate cockroaches. At least when you’ve got rats they keep themselves to themselves and generally fear you. Not cockroaches, they just don’t care.
We put up with them for a while, still buzzing from our days adventure, but the final straw for me came when I went to have a sip from my beaker of beer only to have me nose tickled by the twitching antennae of a drowning roach. We were really looking forward to sleeping on a boat with the stars as our ceiling but decided to try other options. The beach was looking inviting until we realized that the crabs were out in force so we headed back to the hut where the ranger and his helpers slept. Thankfully they were really welcoming and we set up bed on the floor with a fresh cup of tea and let the tiredness take over to drop us into deep slumber.
I awoke in the middle of the night to the dripping of the hole in the roof above us. There was a ferocious storm going on outside and I realized how lucky we were that the roaches had got the better of us and we weren’t out in the boat. As I nipped into the kitchen to get a pan to catch the leak I then remembered that the captain and his friend were still out there and my stomach turned.
The next morning brought a beautiful calm day once again and me and Mess headed out of the hut wondering how our ship and captain had managed to get through the night. I guess it was nothing to them as we found them fishing happily off the side of the boat, they gave us a wave and started picking up the anchor.
I realise this is once again turning into quite a long ramble so just to say we had a peaceful journey back. We snorkeled in hammerhead shark territory, Mess caught a fish using our improvised rod, the sun shone and we generally took it easy as we headed back to Derewan.
So, a truly amazing day in possibly the best week of my life. I haven’t had time to write about everything I’d have liked that happened in Derewan; the crazy Canadian headteacher and his lady, swimming after the flying fish, the great water hunt, the stonefish discovery etc. I haven’t laughed out loud so much since I was a kid and don’t remember ever feeling so at ease with life. I only hope if we ever make it back there again that there are no easy access tourist ferry ports, there are no cash machines, there is still only one person who sells beer on the island and life is still simple and easy.
Somehow I doubt it though so perhaps we should make sure we never visit again and always remember our great boat trips.
