Believe it or not but were are very excited to be writing our first blog post during our (still young) journey around the world. Luckily, we can reassure our beloved followers that we have arrived in good circumstances and that everyone is feeling alright.
Taxi trip
Two days ago, we arrived at the airport of Banjarmasin a city in a district named Kalimantan. Something we learned during our flight to Borneo, thanks to a Ukrainian businessman, is that we were actually landing in the biggest city of the whole country. Keeping this in mind, we knew we were at the point to discover a lot of things during our first stop. Using a Taxi seemed the easiest way for us to get from the airport to our little hotel so we took the first one we saw at a bus. Our Taxi could actually be seen as a van, because we all had to fit in it with our fairly heavy luggage. The first thing the driver told to us was that our overnight stay was located at the other side of the city and that it would take us about an hour to get there. At first we were a bit sad to hear that we had to travel another hour before we could finally take some rest but what we didn't know at that point was that it would probably be our most informative taxi ride that we would ever have. Very quickly, we got into an intense chat with the driver (Lucas was his name by the way) and we got to know that Borneo is actually not a country by itself. Hereby, we mean that Borneo is a country that is ruled by three different governments. The Indonesian and Malaysian government are the two main regulators in Borneo but there's also the part Brunei which can pretty much be seen as the real Borneo. At that moment we were in the Indonesian part of Borneo and we would also visit the Malaysian part, which is pretty much known for its phenomenal nature. Brunei only covers about 1 percent of the total surface of the country so it's not our intention to specially visit it. After about half an hour, some of us asked for some air-conditioning because it was quite heat but as expected, the old van didn't have any. The climate in Borneo is typical tropical, with no real seasons. The heat, in combination with the humidity made it very difficult for us to adapt to the local climate. Of course there was also a lot of sight-seeing during the trip and the first impression you get down the streets is... poverty. It definitely was not a surprise for us to encounter a poor country but streets looked dusty and polluted, some houses were very crappy and standing way too close to each other, people were sometimes hardly dressed and so on. It looked like some kind of third world country, but we don't know if it really is one... The amount we had to pay at the end of the taxi trip confirmed our thoughts about the actual poverty in Borneo because we hardly had to pay something. Though we gave Lucas a little fee because he drove us safely and because he was one hell of a nice guy, just like most people we met in Borneo!
Visiting Banjarmasin
In the late afternoon we still had some time left before darkness came and we decided to visit the most attracting spots in the city of Banjarmasin. When scanning the city centre, we were a bit disappointed because we only found a few things that were worth to seeing. We saw some typical eastern palaces but other than that we only saw some typical Asian streets with a lot of chaos. After our disappointing city trip, we decided to go back to the hotel to eat and sleep because the next day could turn out very exhausting for each one of us (the food in the hotel was a bit special and really spicy, but luckily everyone liked it).
Nature Day
Waking up sweaty, hearing the rain rattling against the window, ... this has got to be Borneo. We planned this day to be our nature day. We did some research before we departed and the main conclusion was that whoever visits Borneo has to take a look in the jungle as Borneo is known to be one of the most beautiful countries in the world when it comes to nature. We packed our bags, because it was our last an only night in this hotel, and we took off to meet our guide who would guide us through the jungle all day. We departed with an old little boat on the river Kapuas together with some other tourists on which we navigated to the pure jungle of Borneo. The first minutes in the jungle were really breathtaking as we saw huge trees everywhere, you could hear at least hundred of animals at the same time and the fauna was also quite impressive. As we kept on walking through the wild jungle everything became even more impressive and one of us spotted a Bornean Oerang Oetan sitting in a tree, it was awesome. We asked some information about the monkey to our guide but he said he would give more information later. About 10 minutes later, all the awesomeness of the jungle changed into a huge shock. There was an area of about 10 football fields that was just... empty. The guide explained to us that the government cuts masses of wood every day and that was a huge disappointment for us. At this point our guide began a long sad story about the deforestation. To make a long story short: Borneo's main export products are palm-oil and especially plywood which means that trees are being cut very rapidly. You can say that the government has no choice because that's the only way to receive some income but the disadvantages of the deforestation are incredibly large. In the first place, a lot of animals lose their habitat due to the deforestation and animals like for example the Oerang Oetan might extinguish in the near future. Another fact is that rain forests are very important for the whole world. Borneo is together with the Amazon and some other jungles one of the main lungs of our planet. This problem could be described for a lot of other countries too and we just hope that somebody does something about this before it is too late. In the late afternoon we arrived back at the place where we departed. We thanked and paid our guide, greeted the other tourists and went to a place where we could take a bus that would bring us to our next destination, the city of Kuching. We were all pretty exhausted and as we were travelling towards Kuching, it felt like we were all thinking about the fact about how crazy our trip actually had been so far. Hereby we mean that we were all pretty surprised about how different this world looks in comparison to our dear western society, even after just two days. We already saw a lot of the misery that Borneo unfortunately has to serve but we've also experienced some moments where we thought, it should be like this in Belgium too. Once arrived at Kuching, at our place where we would spend the night, we didn't feel like doing something serious anymore so we just ate a cosy dinner and afterwards we watched some tv and went to bed.
Kings of Kuching
We actually woke up way too late this morning as a result of our tiring day yesterday and we just felt like it was the right choice to just spend the rest of the morning in the hotel, playing some parlour games, watching some tv and chatting with some other tourists in the little hall. Of course after we ate our delayed breakfast, we went out to see the city centre of Kuching and to our surprise, the weather was quite well as it was not raining for once. Our expectations about the city were rather high as we hoped to compensate the sourish feeling about the previous city we discovered. Of course that sourishness only counts for the architecture and decency. Before we departed we asked our friendly hostess to advise us some of the hot spots in the city centre. She told us that there were a lot of cosy places but the things to watch, in her opinion, were definitely Fort Margherita and the Sarawak museum. We decided to visit the museum first. When we arrived there, the first thing that stroke us was the fact that the museum actually looked a lot like the western style when you look at it from the outside. Once being inside, we got faced with, once again, very weird Asian constructions but we really liked as it's always something completely different as you would see in Europe. Satisfied as we were after our museum visit, we walked our way through the city to our next goal: Fort Margherita. While walking through the city it was remarkable that this city seemed to be much more alive than the previous one because there were markets all over the place and people seemed to be optimistic and happy but probably the weather was also a deciding factor in all this. When we finally arrived at Fort Margherita, we got slightly impressed by the authenticity of the building. Of course there was a guide present who told us a very long story about the Fort and there were actually a lot of boring parts in it but the interesting part was when he explained a lot about the fight between the Indonesian, Malaysian and Bruneian people for the authority in that part of Borneo. After this very entertaining city trip we decided to go all the way back to our hotel and that's where we are at this moment, finalizing our first blog. In about half an hour we will go for dinner but after that, we will go out tonight to throw a big party in the city centre and we are looking forward to that because we really don't know what to expect. We hope that you guys learn a lot from these kind of blogs. Make sure that you stay tuned at our blog because in a few days, we will have probably already posted our next blog. Whether we will still be in Borneo or not by our next blog, that's a question that has yet to be answered! Cheers!
Taxi trip
Two days ago, we arrived at the airport of Banjarmasin a city in a district named Kalimantan. Something we learned during our flight to Borneo, thanks to a Ukrainian businessman, is that we were actually landing in the biggest city of the whole country. Keeping this in mind, we knew we were at the point to discover a lot of things during our first stop. Using a Taxi seemed the easiest way for us to get from the airport to our little hotel so we took the first one we saw at a bus. Our Taxi could actually be seen as a van, because we all had to fit in it with our fairly heavy luggage. The first thing the driver told to us was that our overnight stay was located at the other side of the city and that it would take us about an hour to get there. At first we were a bit sad to hear that we had to travel another hour before we could finally take some rest but what we didn't know at that point was that it would probably be our most informative taxi ride that we would ever have. Very quickly, we got into an intense chat with the driver (Lucas was his name by the way) and we got to know that Borneo is actually not a country by itself. Hereby, we mean that Borneo is a country that is ruled by three different governments. The Indonesian and Malaysian government are the two main regulators in Borneo but there's also the part Brunei which can pretty much be seen as the real Borneo. At that moment we were in the Indonesian part of Borneo and we would also visit the Malaysian part, which is pretty much known for its phenomenal nature. Brunei only covers about 1 percent of the total surface of the country so it's not our intention to specially visit it. After about half an hour, some of us asked for some air-conditioning because it was quite heat but as expected, the old van didn't have any. The climate in Borneo is typical tropical, with no real seasons. The heat, in combination with the humidity made it very difficult for us to adapt to the local climate. Of course there was also a lot of sight-seeing during the trip and the first impression you get down the streets is... poverty. It definitely was not a surprise for us to encounter a poor country but streets looked dusty and polluted, some houses were very crappy and standing way too close to each other, people were sometimes hardly dressed and so on. It looked like some kind of third world country, but we don't know if it really is one... The amount we had to pay at the end of the taxi trip confirmed our thoughts about the actual poverty in Borneo because we hardly had to pay something. Though we gave Lucas a little fee because he drove us safely and because he was one hell of a nice guy, just like most people we met in Borneo!
Visiting Banjarmasin
In the late afternoon we still had some time left before darkness came and we decided to visit the most attracting spots in the city of Banjarmasin. When scanning the city centre, we were a bit disappointed because we only found a few things that were worth to seeing. We saw some typical eastern palaces but other than that we only saw some typical Asian streets with a lot of chaos. After our disappointing city trip, we decided to go back to the hotel to eat and sleep because the next day could turn out very exhausting for each one of us (the food in the hotel was a bit special and really spicy, but luckily everyone liked it).
Nature Day
Waking up sweaty, hearing the rain rattling against the window, ... this has got to be Borneo. We planned this day to be our nature day. We did some research before we departed and the main conclusion was that whoever visits Borneo has to take a look in the jungle as Borneo is known to be one of the most beautiful countries in the world when it comes to nature. We packed our bags, because it was our last an only night in this hotel, and we took off to meet our guide who would guide us through the jungle all day. We departed with an old little boat on the river Kapuas together with some other tourists on which we navigated to the pure jungle of Borneo. The first minutes in the jungle were really breathtaking as we saw huge trees everywhere, you could hear at least hundred of animals at the same time and the fauna was also quite impressive. As we kept on walking through the wild jungle everything became even more impressive and one of us spotted a Bornean Oerang Oetan sitting in a tree, it was awesome. We asked some information about the monkey to our guide but he said he would give more information later. About 10 minutes later, all the awesomeness of the jungle changed into a huge shock. There was an area of about 10 football fields that was just... empty. The guide explained to us that the government cuts masses of wood every day and that was a huge disappointment for us. At this point our guide began a long sad story about the deforestation. To make a long story short: Borneo's main export products are palm-oil and especially plywood which means that trees are being cut very rapidly. You can say that the government has no choice because that's the only way to receive some income but the disadvantages of the deforestation are incredibly large. In the first place, a lot of animals lose their habitat due to the deforestation and animals like for example the Oerang Oetan might extinguish in the near future. Another fact is that rain forests are very important for the whole world. Borneo is together with the Amazon and some other jungles one of the main lungs of our planet. This problem could be described for a lot of other countries too and we just hope that somebody does something about this before it is too late. In the late afternoon we arrived back at the place where we departed. We thanked and paid our guide, greeted the other tourists and went to a place where we could take a bus that would bring us to our next destination, the city of Kuching. We were all pretty exhausted and as we were travelling towards Kuching, it felt like we were all thinking about the fact about how crazy our trip actually had been so far. Hereby we mean that we were all pretty surprised about how different this world looks in comparison to our dear western society, even after just two days. We already saw a lot of the misery that Borneo unfortunately has to serve but we've also experienced some moments where we thought, it should be like this in Belgium too. Once arrived at Kuching, at our place where we would spend the night, we didn't feel like doing something serious anymore so we just ate a cosy dinner and afterwards we watched some tv and went to bed.
Kings of Kuching
We actually woke up way too late this morning as a result of our tiring day yesterday and we just felt like it was the right choice to just spend the rest of the morning in the hotel, playing some parlour games, watching some tv and chatting with some other tourists in the little hall. Of course after we ate our delayed breakfast, we went out to see the city centre of Kuching and to our surprise, the weather was quite well as it was not raining for once. Our expectations about the city were rather high as we hoped to compensate the sourish feeling about the previous city we discovered. Of course that sourishness only counts for the architecture and decency. Before we departed we asked our friendly hostess to advise us some of the hot spots in the city centre. She told us that there were a lot of cosy places but the things to watch, in her opinion, were definitely Fort Margherita and the Sarawak museum. We decided to visit the museum first. When we arrived there, the first thing that stroke us was the fact that the museum actually looked a lot like the western style when you look at it from the outside. Once being inside, we got faced with, once again, very weird Asian constructions but we really liked as it's always something completely different as you would see in Europe. Satisfied as we were after our museum visit, we walked our way through the city to our next goal: Fort Margherita. While walking through the city it was remarkable that this city seemed to be much more alive than the previous one because there were markets all over the place and people seemed to be optimistic and happy but probably the weather was also a deciding factor in all this. When we finally arrived at Fort Margherita, we got slightly impressed by the authenticity of the building. Of course there was a guide present who told us a very long story about the Fort and there were actually a lot of boring parts in it but the interesting part was when he explained a lot about the fight between the Indonesian, Malaysian and Bruneian people for the authority in that part of Borneo. After this very entertaining city trip we decided to go all the way back to our hotel and that's where we are at this moment, finalizing our first blog. In about half an hour we will go for dinner but after that, we will go out tonight to throw a big party in the city centre and we are looking forward to that because we really don't know what to expect. We hope that you guys learn a lot from these kind of blogs. Make sure that you stay tuned at our blog because in a few days, we will have probably already posted our next blog. Whether we will still be in Borneo or not by our next blog, that's a question that has yet to be answered! Cheers!
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