The Islands — Sepanta

On the previous episode of Sepanta’s blog, Stephen and Sepanta were just about to head to the Derawan Archipelago off the eastern coast of Borneo.

After a tumultuous night at Embassy (great club name), we awoke to catch our morning flight to Berau, a city on the eastern side of Kalimantan. From there, we took a taxi for 2.5 hours to Tanjung Batu, a town on the coast through some of the most stomach-challenging roads. After that, it was a bumpy boat ride to Derawan Island (the closest of the islands in the Derawan Archipelago), but we finally made it and settled in for the night at a hostel-like place called Pelangi. We went to nap at 6pm, and woke up the next morning.

Derawan Island is an interesting place. We’d been expecting something of a backpacker’s haven, but realized pretty quickly that we were the only ones staying at our hostel that night (30+ rooms), and we didn’t see any foreigners for a couple days. The island has most of the infrastructure for tourists (almost every house is a “homestay”, almost every kitchen is a “restaurant", etc), so it was very strange being there pretty much alone. We spent the next few days trying to figure out what exactly people on Derawan do…it turns out that most of them just cater to tourists, which made it even more strange that there was no one else there. Basically it was a village of people doing almost nothing…we’d come to the right place.

People taking pictures with us per usual.

We rented bikes for the day and set off on a loop around the island to explore…that took about 20 minutes. The island was smaller than we expected. Back where we started, we began to look for a scuba instructor. Our main reason for coming to the Derawan Archipelago was for the highly-rated diving and coral reefs, and we were hoping to get scuba-certified during our time there. We went to about 5-10 places (all of them), and as it turned out every single dive instructor was out of town. Bummer.

Pretty sweet sunset view from our hostel though.

Lionfish being AHHH GET OUT OF THE WATER!!!

Having a beach day with this 5 ft monitor lizard.

One thing you should know if you decide to go to Derawan and stay at Pelangi is that they have karaoke, 24/7 (I am exaggerating). In fact, it might be more accurate to say it’s a karaoke bar with some hostel rooms. There was karaoke when we went to bed, and there was karaoke when we woke up…usually with just the 3 people that worked at the hostel. We began to have a love/hate relationship with it.

Thursday night, a few Indonesian guys showed up, and after talking to them we found out one of them was the owner’s nephew, and he visited almost every weekend. They invited us to go fishing with them the next day and then we went to bed.

20 minutes later, they pulled us out of bed to go drink their bottle of whiskey, and after finding out that Steve and I had been in an a cappella group in college, they made us join in on the karaoke. A few Bon Jovi songs later our voices were gone and we went to bed for real.

It's Steve's liiiiiiife and it's now or neveeeeer

The next day, we woke up and hopped on their boat. They took us to their favorite spot, a completely uninhabited island that was essentially just a sand bank in the middle of the ocean. Crazy. We frolicked for a bit and then headed back to land.

Romantic private island time with 6 dudes.

Later that afternoon, we got ready and went fishing. They informed that they ran out of fishing poles and that I would have to fish “manual”. I ended up ruining Stephen's and my streak of no fish by catching a giant travelly (that is the name, I’m not bragging about the size), and we had it for dinner a few hours later. The owner of the hostel was also on our boat, and every time he got a bite he would yell “Strike, man!” (some of the little English he knew). So we started calling him Strikeman and are going to send him a Superman t-shirt.

After the fishing trip, Steve and I decided to buy them beer as a thank you and went to the local store. Only problem is they sold them individually for 25,000 rupiah ~$2, which works when you buy individually but here in Indonesia they don’t really make deals. After a good 15 minutes of haggling, we made literally 0 progress and ended up paying $60 for 30 beers. Most expensive 30 ever.

The rest of our time on Derawan we pretty much alternated between sitting in the sun and swimming in the water. The sea life was very diverse, and we saw lots of turtles, starfish, fish of all kinds, and other things.

Steve eating more ikan bakar, this time with a shirt.

Though we were unable to find a dive instructor, we still wanted to check out the other islands in the archipelago, the main ones being Sangalaki, Kakaban, and Maratua. We booked someone to take us on Monday, and decided we’d stay in Maratua the last 3 nights of our trip. We hugged Strikeman goodbye and went on our way.

On our way to Sangalaki, we tried to find whale sharks but had no luck. As we learned, they like to come close to the fishing traps that are set up in the ocean, and that’s where we looked. Unfortunately, when the moon is full, less fish fall for the traps since they’re able to see the nets better, and therefore whale shark sightings are also rarer because they don’t hang out near the traps as much. So no whale shark but I did get this picture.

Following that, we went to Sangalaki, which is famous for its manta rays. During the high season, apparently the ocean goes black with as many as 50 or 100 manta rays. From our boat, we could see about 6 or 7, and Steve and I jumped in and swam with them. Crazy creatures, big and peaceful.

After Sangalaki, we went to Kakaban Island, which is famous for its “Stingless Jellyfish Lake”. Most of the island is taken up by the lake, and other than that is virtually untouched (other than a dock and walkway to the lake). It basically looked like the island from King Kong. Steve and I went to the lake and swam around with the jellyfish, which were everywhere. We accidentally hit a few while we were swimming around, but surprise, they didn’t sting. It was really eerie because the water was pretty cloudy, and as you swam, jellyfish would suddenly appear around you and then disappear behind you. They’re pretty creepy. After about an hour, we headed back to our boat to be dropped off at Maratua.

I'm pretty sure dinosaurs live here, but we didn't see any. — I'm pretty sure dinosaurs live here, but we didn't see any.

Maratua is the largest of the islands, and also not very accessible, though there are a couple resorts on the island. It contains 4 villages, but the island itself doesn’t have electricity (everybody runs personal generators). However, the government is building an airport there to the frustration of some. We were glad we were getting to go before the airport was completed, since the island will likely change a good bit in the next few years.

We checked into the Maratua Guesthouse (being by a good bit the youngest people there) and set off to explore the island. Maratua was much larger than Derawan, so we decided first we needed bikes. We walked to the nearest village, 2 km away, and found the one bike rental on the whole island. The bikes were set at 25,000 rupiah/hour (~$2), which is okay if you’re getting an hour, but we were looking to get 2 days. But like I said, they don’t really make deals in Indonesia so the guy maintained that that was the price regardless of time. After about an hour of haggling and playing soccer with his 4-year-old kids, we got it down to 500,000 rupiah for the 2 days and left grumbling while he sat there with his stupid sunglasses smoking his stupid cigarette counting the money we handed him. We headed out on a loop of the island. It was much bigger than we expected.

Maratua is long and skinny and by the time we reached one end, the sun was already setting. What we thought had been 3 km had actually been closer to 15 km. We began the hour-long journey home and were within a few km when it got completely dark. Fortunately, a family on a motorbike was nice enough to drive behind us so we could use the light from their headlight.

Here is a lesson - don’t bike at night, kids. Karma is real. Throughout our trip, I’d made fun of Steve for tripping and getting stitches. We went up a hill and as I tried to slow down, my front wheel went into a hole, and my front brake made the back of the bike go straight up and do a perfect front flip on top of me. My hand was bleeding pretty bad, and the motorbike dad took no time getting off and demanding me to ride the motorbike with his daughter back to my guesthouse. I said no I’m fine but he didn't budget so I did.

Reenacting the fall the next day (and almost getting run over by a truck in the process).

When I got to the guesthouse, I began cleaning out the wound, only to find there was a rock stuck pretty deep inside. Having seen plenty of movies where the character has to at some point remove a bullet, I grabbed my pair of tweezers, took a deep breath, and dug out the rock. There was tissue hanging out and everything!

I decided I should go to the hospital…only thing was I was on a pretty remote island so it was more of a “hospital”. I motorbiked to the same village wand waited for Dr. Berri to show up. He was about my age. He anesthetized, cleaned, and stitched up my hand, and sent me on my way. $15.

Unfortunately, this meant no snorkeling for me on Maratua, which has some beautiful reefs, but I got to hang out on the beach for the next 3 days. We met some great people, shared stories, and ate chocolate pancakes and nasi goreng (fried rice) to our heart’s content. Steve did the best snorkeling of his life as I watched from shore.

The following day, Steve went to get his stitches removed by Dr. Berri. We showed up to the "hospital" again, and someone called Dr. Berri over (he was in the middle of a badminton game). He and his boys arrived drenched in sweat, and his entourage watched as he removed the stitches. Then we all took pictures together.

On Thursday, Steve and I made the reverse trip from Maratua back to the airport by boat and car, filming a guerrilla rendition of our old a cappella group's theme song in order to feel in touch with the reunion that had just happened in Boston a couple nights before. We then said our goodbyes. Steve continued on to Tanjung Selor (definitely a name out of Lord of the Rings) and then on to Malaysia, and I'm heading to South America with an extended layover in NYC. But not, of course, without one last night at Embassy.