Siti Dakhylina Madkhul takes us on her unforgettable journey to the magical island of Kalimantan….

Anyone setting out to complete a lifelong dream would be excited. 

When a good friend and I confirmed that “This is it…We’re actually going to Kalimantan to get up close and personal with orangutans’, it was still a blur.  As if someone had just put a million dollars in my bank account.  It wasn’t going to feel quite real until I could see, smell and touch it.

Like other eager travellers – Mila and I refused to be called tourists – we set about putting plans into action, or rather actioned to plan.  It didn’t help that we were an ocean away; she in Melbourne, Australia, and I in Lombok, Indonesia.  We found out three seconds into our so-called planning that adventures to  Indonesia’s jungle heartland, Kalimantan the world’s third largest island, can be both a lucrative and highly attractive tourism industry, the preceding quality being followed by the latter.

Turning our noses up to the ‘Here’s-one-we-prepared-earlier’ tourist packages, of which there are easily dozens being promoted on the internet, we decided, somewhat foolishly, to scrimp on our savings and trek about our own way to find the world’s greatest apes.  After all, we rationalised, as human beings do when they’re a) they think they know it all, and b) a couple of stupidly naïve tourists disguised as travellers, “We speak Indonesian, we look Indonesian, and together we have a world of travelling knowledge between us!!” 
As I had said to Mila over a crackly telephone call, “Pah!  Who needs these $200 USD a day tours, when we can just arrive and do it like the locals?!” 

Little did we know at the time, that the right thing to do was to remember that we spoke English with a twang far too strong to belong to Indonesian residents, we looked like we walked straight out of a Kathmandu clothes catalogue, and neither our combined experience nor wisdom had ever come close to knowing how to travel to any land of the orangutans on our own.

And with that my dear reader, welcome to our trip to Kalimantan 2009.


Click here to go to "Kalimantan Blog"



You can also join Siti at Festival Indonesia on 25 October at Federation Square where she will host the Festival’s spectacular closing ceremony.