Balikpapan

Day 1 – Not what it said it was on the tin

Waking up early we were met by Dessy for our tour of Pankanlan Bun village, walking along the narrow streets seeing village life she then put us all aboard a motor canoe for a trip up and down the river.  I can’t say I was too happy about this as the boat sat very low in the water and Shell and I were carrying our day packs with all our valuables in!! But thankfully we stayed afloat and travelled up and down the riverbanks watching early morning village life go by.

 

Returning to the hotel Dessy had some presents for us all in the form of various keyrings and Tanjung Putting National Park T-Shirts (Yeay a clean T-Shirt!!).  We then had breakfast and said our goodbyes to Martin and Brigit before being collected for our airport transfer.

 

At the airport we were met by Dessy who told me she didn’t have any joy trying to get my Swiss Army Knife so I asked her if she could send it on.  Then she promptly produced my knife saying she was able to contact someone she knew in the airline office late the previous evening and they had opened early to get it for her – what a joker!! (But above and beyond helpful!).

We then checked in and waited for our flight, it was quite a strange flight as it was more like a bus journey as we made two landings at different airports for passengers to disembark and board before finally arriving at our destination airport at Balikpapan.

At the airport we were looking for a taxi to our hotel when Shell spotted a courtesy car with our hotel, so we managed to get a free transfer with him – result!!

After checking into the hotel and dumping our gear we found that we were a little way out from the main bar/restaurant area and after going to their bar and finding the prices to be stupidly overpriced we decided to head out.

Crossing the road we hailed down a Bemo (a public minibus thing) and got a ride down the road to the ‘lively’ area.  We soon found the seafront which has a number of bar/restaurants along a boardwalk but it was pretty deserted.

As we had been travelling for a while, we found the bar that seemed most open and stayed there for a while to have some food and drink.  As it started turning dark the bar started up some karaoke music on a big screen and I think they must have clocked me as they started to put a few rock numbers on.

A while later and a couple of beers more and the owner encouraged me to get up and sing a song, I duly obliged by belting out Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding’ (Again) to an empty bar, whilst the owner took photo’s of me.  It seemed to go down quite well with the staff and non-existent audience.

 

In our guidebook it said that Balikpapan was the most lively/vibrant city in Borneo/Kalimantan however I think the writer was being very flowery with her words or had lived in a cave all of their life.  In truth it was just a city and we gradually realised that there wasn’t going to be much to do here.

At some point we booked another hotel closer to this area for a couple of days (to decide on our plan of action) then we headed back to our hotel by Bemo bus to watch some Soprano’s and have an early night.

Day 2 – Smelly and frustrated

Having the luxury of coffee/tea making facilities we made use of these before checking out and moving to our new (and cheaper) hotel down the road.  We could see it was cheaper when we got to our room and two Gecko’s had beaten us to it!!

Running extremely low on wearable clothes we googled nearby laundry’s and set off on a bit of walk in blistering heat only to find after ½ mile that the laundry did not exist and we could not find anything in the area, it looked as though we were going to have to remain smelly for a while.

 

As it was so hot we returned to the waterfront and got some drinks whilst we tried to research any trips they had around Balakpapan as we saw they had a sun bear sanctuary somewhere nearby.  But after some time scouring the internet we could find nothing that we could book or any clues on what to do other than an alternative river trip which was a poor alternative to the one we had just done and very overpriced.

Getting a tad frustrated we ordered some food and tried to decide on what to do, either cut Indonesia a bit short and fly to Malaysia or check out the Island of Sulawesi and its famed hanging graves.

In the end we thought we would look into Sulawesi and headed back to the hotel to do some research.  We found a couple of tour operators that did small cultural tours and so we sent off some E-Mail’s about dates and availability.

Day 3 – Sorted!

In the morning we headed for the breakfast area where there was pretty poor buffet style fair which we tried to make the most of before returning to our room.

We had had some response from the Sulawesi tour companies where we could start in a few days so we booked that up and organised our flights, the only thing now was to draw out enough cash to pay for the tour!!

Having sorted that problem out we were now pretty hungry so thought we walk up the road and grab a naughty Kentucky (Note – Kentucky is pretty crap in Indonesia).

Trying our best to make the most of Balikpapan we jumped on a Bemo Bus in search of the stretch of beach that was on our map which was supposed to be nice.  After overshooting our stop and getting the driver to stop we walked back and eventually found the beach, it was empty and not particularly nice.  To make matters worse the cafe on the beach did not serve beer!!

 

With no beer option and being very hot we caught another Bemo bus and headed back to the bar/restaurant waterfront and stayed there and had a few beers, happy in the knowledge that we were moving on tomorrow.

 

Later in the afternoon we returned to our hotel to relax a bit before returning to the waterfront in the evening to grab some food before going back for the night.

As you can see by the length of this particular blog, we won’t be returning to Balikpa-pants anytime soon and neither should you!!