Friday, May 2nd, 2008
Just finalised a trip to Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), I’m going to be travelling around visiting remote tribes, some of which may never have met any Westerners before. I leave early next week and I’m quite nervous/excited. I’m going with an Indonesian who is studying the different languages, he doesn’t speak much English, so hopefully this is really going to be good for my conversational Indonesian!
Some more photos from the local market…
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
One of the perils of living in Jakarta is that it can be difficult to find attractive locations to relax in at the weekend, away from the smog, bustle and people.
AirAsia recently came to the rescue by opening up a cheap new route from Jakarta to Kota Kinabalu which is in Malaysian North Borneo, near Brunei. There’s a massive mountain on the doorstep which is a popular climb, many national parks and also some beautiful islands 10 minutes from the mainland which was our choice of activity.
The islands allow camping, and although they can be a little busy at the weekend with snorkellers and day-trippers, at 4pm everyone disappears leaving almost nobody else there. Bliss!
The diving and snorkelling is reasonably good, we got to see a turtle, some rays, and all the other usual fish that you see in Malaysia.
A word of warning… we have had some bad experiences with Kota Kinabalu Backpackers Lodge. We originally hired a tent from them which turned out to be broken. This was quite annoying as you can imagine, but they had borrowed the tent from someone else in turn and couldn’t get any refund from the original lenders. They had seemed like nice people nonetheless so we decided to stay with them for our second visit.
All guest houses in Kota Kinabalu offer to pick people up from the airport for free, so we had arranged this in advance but we realised after some time at the airport that we had been forgotten about. When we made our own way by taxi to them, they claimed that they had not received the final email which had the flight details. I was successfully copied into the email which had been sent by my other half, it’s pretty rare for an email to just disappear and not reach it’s destination. Nonetheless, we said we would stay if they drove us to the airport on our way back out as the taxi fare is almost half the cost of the room.
After a VERY long time talking, it was agreed that we would get a lift back to the airport and we would hold back the money we had spent on the taxi until we could be sure that we were being taken and they gave us a receipt which clearly said that we would pay the remainder later. It took a lot of persuading to get to this step, we were exhausted and using up vital time in our 2 day weekend break.
We went out for a meal, when we got back we were told that there had been a misunderstanding and that we had to pay everything in full straight away. The girl who had promised us that everything was sorted out went back on her word and made out that we had misunderstood her (despite the receipt) because a family member was giving her a hard time for not taking all our money in one go. In the end, we had to leave and find another place to stay late at night.
Basically, the people there are generally nice but completely useless if anything goes wrong, and have shown that they will go back on their word. Not impressed with a place that rents out broken tents, forgets to pick people up from the airport, and kicks people out late at night after going back on an agreement.
I didn’t take my DSLR, just a Panasonic point and shoot (also with underwater housing).
Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park is just off Kota Kinabalu. You can see the mainland at the top left of the photo. Here, the plane is over Gaya island, we stayed at Mamutik island which is the tiny one near the centre of the photo. You can just see the beach where we pitched our tent. The island is almost opposite the airport on the mainland, and it’s a 10 minute speedboat journey from the jetty. Amazing!
Me, taken by Kate
Kate
A great angle of Jakarta from the sea, you can just see Monas on the left hand side above centre.
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
Each day that I go to the local market for photos, I take a different lens. Today, it was my very wide-angle lens which caused people to get a bit alarmed when I got in really close for a photo!
Seconds before she burst into tears because of the scary man with the big camera! Oops.
