Take the highways, for example. Malaysian highways are usually about 3 lanes wide. But in Kalimantan, from the time we entered Indon land from Kuching, the highway is only one lane in each direction with no divider. It's like a trunk road all the way... but for some reason they call it a highway.
My team and I were driven by the estate manager drivers about 3 hours along this so-called highway before we reached our destination. Not unexpectedly, our drivers were happily overtaking whatever cars or bikes they could, and driving at at least 80 km/hour throughout this small, koochi single lane highway. After the first hour or so, I stopped freaking out quietly in the back seat and decided to just go to sleep and hope I wake up in one piece. Strangely enough, when I asked one of the managers if accidents were frequent, he said there are very few accidents. And I also did not notice ANY roadkill on the roads throughout my stay there, even though I saw heaps of dogs, chickens and other animals wandering just metres away from the road. Which either means that drivers in Indon make more effort to avoid animals that wander on the road... or animals in Indonesia are smarter than animals in Malaysia and they don't go onto the roads. I'll go for the second theory, just coz' it's more fascinating. I, for one, can't stand seeing roadkill, so I'm pretty glad it doesn't happen much there. And speaking of roadkill, just today while stopping at traffic light at Taipan on my way to work and when the light turned green, I saw suddenly a kitten rolling out from under the car in front of me as it started moving. The kitten flopped over right onto the dotted line between lanes, but I couldn't see how it was as I had to move my own car past it while yelling "Aaaargggh!!! Don't roll over the kitty!!!"... supposedly to the drivers behind me, but they couldn't hear me anyway. I wasn't sure if I should stop to help it or just keep on going coz' I might've been late for work... but thoughts of the poor kitty trying to crawl off the road amidst oncoming traffic got to me. I quickly parked my car at the housing area nearby and came back to the traffic light to try and save the kitty from being run over again if it was still alive... but as I watched it from the side of the road to see if it was moving or breathing, it showed no sign of movement. I suppose it was already dead, so after a while I decided to go back to my car. In hindsight though, I didn't see any wounds or blood on it, so I should've just gone and taken it off the road to make really sure it was dead, and at least let the dead kitty rest in peace on the grass instead of being smashed up by other cars...but oh well. *Sigh* Roadkill make Carol sad. :(Anyway, back to the story of my trip to Kalimantan. Another thing about the roads is that they aren't maintained too well. While the supposed highways are not so bad, there was one road leading into the estates that we had to go through that was really super bumpy coz' there was a gazillion and one potholes in it. It was kinda like a souped up Motion Master (I swear, after working here, I don't ever need to pay for a Motion Master ride at Genting ever again. Riding through bumpy estates roads is well more fun). I took a video of my ride out through this road, and uploaded it here
Unfortunately, my Share on Ovi site temporarily doesn't allow direct streaming of videos, so you can only go to the link and download the video to watch my super bumpy ride. Sorry for the trouble!
Trying to communicate with the locals in Indonesia was also an interesting task. Malay and Indonesian words are mostly the same... but some words in Malay mean something completely different in Indonesian. On one day, we were talking to the estate staff about the amount of fuel they use to run the estate vehicles, and they were going on about their 'mobil-mobil menggunakan solar'. I know 'mobil' there means car... but when they talked about 'solar', I was wondering if the cars there had solar panels attached and they ran on sunlight instead of fuel. While that would have been a cool idea, common sense told me that it was more likely that they weren't talking about solar panels... and eventually I figured out that 'solar' means petrol. And if you're wondering, solar energy is called 'suria' in Indon. And NOW you know....
Along the way back from one of the estates my team had to visit, our drivers decided to take a slightly more interesting route. We went into this area of forest where we saw a few animal enclosures with deer, crocodiles and orang utans. Deer are pretty boring, so I didn't bother to take pictures of them, but I caught some cool pics of the others residents.
There was another smaller orang utan in the same enclosure with this fella (I think it's a mother and daughter) but the smaller one didn't seem too sociable that day.
Perhaps she was having PMS that day or something. Whatever it was, I didn't stay too long to find out coz' after some time, Mama Orangutan started grabbing some big rocks and was giving me and my colleague standing at the edge of the enclosure some weird looks. Seems like she was about to throw them big rocks at us... like I said, we didn't hang around long enough to find out coz' we both ran off as fast as we could to safety.My team and I got the pleasure of staying at the mess hall within one of the estates. If you think folks going into the estates have only dingy shacks to stay in, think again. Most of the time, they have guesthouses which are pretty comfy and so far. The mess hall we stayed at had a large screen tv where we got to enjoy satellite tv (that has even more channels than Astro!), computer with an extremely slow internet connection but I could still play games on it, and a pool table. I think I played about 20 games of pool the whole time I was there... some by myself just so I could work on my sucky angles. I played against the estate manager, and lost 4 out of 5 games to him... most of which when I only had one ball left to hit in. That was quite annoying.
One thing I really like over there is their orange juice, which they call 'es jeruk'. I had a taste of it at lunch one day, and the juice was made of pure mandarin juice, with the pulp and all still inside, and it was sooooo much better than the fake orange juices we get over here. And after conversion, I think the drink cost less than RM2, whereas it would probably cost at least RM4 here, or some even more insane price as a result of the fuel price hike (good that the price has gone done, but I highly doubt the prices of anything else is going back down, so doesn't really make much a fantastic difference).
By the way, I also had the unfortunate experience of having to take MAS instead of Air Asia to Kuching, so we could get into Kalimantan from there. And I have to say the MAS food was SOOO bad... We had a choice of french toast or roti jala for breakfast, and I chose french toast. The french toast was tasteless, the bun was dry, the yogurt had the blah taste of cheap food...
much as I don't like wasting food, I have to say that the stuff they let us eat on MAS can't really categorized as food. It's more like weird stuff we can put in our stomachs to reduce our hunger. Go Air Asia anytime. You gotta pay for the food, but at least the food is palatable. And if you travel for work, you get to claim for the meals too. Yay!
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