Friday, December 28, 2012

Rustic Indonesia

21-27 April 2012

Banjarmasin, Kalimantan, Indonesia

One week trip to nowhere!

NOWHERE

Conducting workshops on client-site, we were meant to be taking the company propeller plane from Balikbapan to Tanjung, which would have taken about 45 minutes and some serious praying. However, we couldn't fly in over the weekend as the pilot was off-duty, so we ended up with a 10 hour car ride (maniac driving over potholes!)through the Indonesian countryside. To this....

Exterior

You know how professional photos lie......

Seriously...my first thought when I saw this was YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!

Still...credit where it's due--good effort to doll-up the building in happy colours! 

And as we would soon find out, this was the most modern building in this sleepy town-- certainly the only one with lights on after 8pm(say nothing of wi-fi or alcohol!). Really appreciated the hotel's creature comforts after I saw the only other hotel in the village.





We certainly needed a drink after that long car-ride! But drinks in Indonesia only mean one thing for us--- Avocado (MW drank so many on the first day, the hotel ran out for the rest of our trip *&^%$!)



We had a really good time with the hosts, who insisted on bringing us out to try the local specialties - bakso, lamb satay, local halal tze char, and beautiful bebek with fresh chilli. Yums! So whilst there wasn't much by way of sights, we experienced the food culture of Tanjung thoroughly. Delicious!!!

With no entertainment to be had (after entertaining the client, work emails and finishing all three chapters of The Hunger Games), this is what we did..



On the last night, we had to get up at the ungodly hour of 2am to drive to the airport for a 7am flight or some such nonsense. Turns out they had grossly overestimated the time we needed for the drive, so we ended up 2 hours early, and had to snooze in the airport, but not before they confiscated my lump of gold (i mean coal) which was a souvenir dammit!

All in all, a very educational trip, and a fantastic client to work with, but we still were very happy to get back to civilisation (aka Soekarno-Hatta -- hey you can't blame the city-starved city-slickers!) for massage, shops and good ol'...




'Malam!

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