Following a great time at Sungai Kinabatangan, Sarah and I made our way to the Malaysian Borneo border with Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). We arrived in Tawau on Saturday night, with the plan of getting the ferry from Tawau to Tarakan, Kalimantan on Sunday and flying from there to Jakarta the following day. Unfortunately, none of this went to plan.
We soon found out that no ferries leave on Sunday so we had to push everything back one day. At the ferry building on Monday, all ready to go, we were warned that no ferries go to Tarakan, only to Nunukan, which was not far enough into Indonesia where we could fly to Jakarta. We were finally able to catch the 4 hour ferry to Tarakan on Tuesday. To add insult to this adventure, there is absolutely NOTHING to do in Tawau and is probably one of the dumpiest places ever. The hotel we stayed at was disgustingly dirty and I've never wanted to not give an establishment my money so badly. The one highlight, if you can call it that, of Tawau was on Sunday night roaming the streets we came across a local Chinese school's 88th anniversary celebration which we were graciously invited to watch. It was a pretty funny site with young students dancing to American hip-hop music and other similar performances, but, unfortunately halfway through the performance the power cut out so the event abruptly ended.
On Tuesday we happily arrived in Tarakan where we planned to stay the night, awaking early Wednesday to catch a flight to Jakarta. At the airport, all flights to Jakarta were full for the day (even though online flights were still available) so our options were either to fly to Balikpapan (in Kalimantan) and stay a night there and fly to Jakarta the following day, or wait one more night in Tarakan to fly directly to Jakarta. Since Tarakan was pretty dead as well, we decided to get the flight to Balikpapan, stay there the night and then fly to Jakarta on Thursday. After a short flight, on what looked like an airplane from the 1980's, we arrived in Balikpapan at 12:15. We then headed to the airline offices to seek out a flight to Jakarta the next day. Finally in our favor, they informed us that there were flights to Jakarta the same day at 12:55 (why they told us in Tarakan there were no flights to Jakarta from Balikpapan today, I will never know) and that we could still make it.
Well, we made it!! I'm now in Jakarta and excited to be here since the last 5 days or so I've been in small towns with absolutely nothing to do. It's also the beginning of Ramadan here, so it should be exciting/interesting to be here for that (even though things will certainly slow down during the day).
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| Shit hotel in Tawau...the Shining?? |
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| Downtown Tawau |
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| School Anniversary |
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| Kids dancing to "Single Ladies" by Beyonce |
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