Borneo part 2: Kalimantan
Indonesian Borneo: Pontianak and Dayak longhouses
The bus journey from Brunei to Pontianak, all the way out in Western Borneo, took a good 24 hours. I started regretting that I had decided to travel this way as soon as I got on the bus, but I wanted to see Kalimantan, the Indonesian side of Borneo, and this was the only overland route. Malaysia and Indonesia share a long border, but oddly enough there are only two usable border crossings, both of them on the far West of the island. There are no direct flights from Brunei to Kalimantan, even ignoring the cost and environmental impact of flying.
The bus service was run by the Indonesian state-owned operator DAMRI. As soon as I got onboard, I felt like I was leaving wealthy, orderly Brunei and going back to Indonesia’s organised chaos. It soon became clear that the bus’s engine had a problem. During the first part of the trip the driver kept stopping, opening up this large quadrant in the front of the bus, and fiddling with the knobs and bolts inside. At least he remained good humoured, as did the passengers.
As we drove through Brunei, we saw lush tropical vegetation on both sides of the highway. Brunei’s jungle is particularly well-preserved, since the country has not had to rely on logging like Malaysia and Indonesia have. Once we crossed the border with Malaysia, the jungle became much less pristine and untouched.
The coach had a bathroom, but it was essentially unusable. Fortunately we made frequent stops at little Malaysian rest stations. The other passengers were Indonesian migrants going home, and a party of Bruneians going to Pontianak for a wedding. They were all curious about me; this is not a journey often undertaken by Westerners.
After travelling all night through Sarawak, we arrived at the Entikong border crossing the follow morning. We only had to get our passports stamped to cross from Brunei to Malaysia, but we had to take all our luggage off the bus and put it through a scanner before we could enter Indonesia.
Pontianak
We arrived in Pontianak in the early afternoon. The city had the feel of provincial Indonesia. It looked considerably poorer and less sophisticated than Kota Kinabalu, not to mention Brunei. And yet it is the capital of the province of West Kalimantan, and the biggest urban centre on the Western side of Indonesian Borneo, with around 6-700,000 people.
I spent my first two nights in Pontianak in a kost, an Indonesian dorm-style lodging where you have your own room, but share a kitchen. I found it through airbnb. It turned out to be a big mistake. The room was tiny, with basically just a mattress on the floor and a TV that didn’t work. There was, thankfully, a working AC. The bathroom, which was shared, had no hot water, still considered a luxury in much of Indonesia. At least the room was cheap, and the staff were polite and friendly. After two nights I moved to a still cheap but half-decent hotel, where I had hot water.
Typically for Indonesia, if you want to find proper supermarkets, international food or a fancy modern atmosphere in Pontianak, you need to head to the malls. The city has a few of them. The huge Gaia Bumi Raya Complex, completed two years ago, would not be out of place in Jakarta or Bangkok. Outside of the malls, however, you find the usual Indonesian cityscape.
The city is traversed by the wide Kapuas river. There are impoverished neighbourhoods on stilts on either side of it. There is only one bridge across the river, and it is permanently congested. If you need to cross, it can take 20-30 minutes in a car. When I visited they were in the middle of building a second bridge right next to the first one, which would clearly be an excellent development.
Pontianak is located exactly on the equator, a distinction it shares with Quito in Ecuador and a couple of cities in Brazil and Congo. In one of the city’s northern suburbs you can find the “Equator Monument”, or Tugu Khatulistiwa (the Indonesian word for equator comes from the Arabic khatu alaistiwa'). The monument used to mark the exact spot where the equator passes, although due to plate tectonics and the precession of the equinoxes, the line has actually shifted a few dozen metres to the South.
Pontianak has one of the highest percentages of ethnic Chinese of any Indonesian city, with around 30% of the population sharing that origin. There are Chinese temples, and there is an area of the city in particular where most of the restaurants and the faces are Chinese. Having said that, I personally felt less of a Chinese atmosphere than I did on the Malaysian side of the island, perhaps due to the fact that few actually seem to speak in any variety of Chinese.
Apart from the Chinese, the city’s population is made up mostly of Malay and Dayak. The Malay traditionally live along the coast of Borneo and are Muslim. The Dayak used to live mainly in the jungles of the interior and follow their own traditional beliefs. Nowadays many live in the cities too, and most have converted to Christianity.
Just like many places in Indonesia, Pontianak has a sultan of its own. The Pontianak Sultanate was officially dissolved in 1950, but it still exists informally. It was founded in 1771 by the son of an Arab preacher from the Hadhramut who allegedly descended from the Prophet Muhammad. The Dutch arrived soon after, but the Sultanate cooperated with them and managed to maintain its rule over the area.
During the Second World War the Japanese invaders quashed all the Malay Sultanates and the traditional elites of Borneo with appalling violence. The Sultan of Pontianak was arrested and killed, alongside many of his relatives and various traditional leaders and scholars. Only one of the sultan’s sons, Syarif Hamid Alkadrie, who was in Jakarta at the time, survived the massacre. After the war he became Sultan Hamid II.
When the Dutch lost control of the archipelago, the new sultan supported the project of a federal Republic of the United States of Indonesia (RSI), to which the Dutch transferred their sovereignty in 1949. The sultan, a memorable figure, was a minister of state for the RSI, and he even designed the Garuda Pancasila, Indonesia’s national emblem which is still in use today.
The new federal republic lasted only a year, when it was replaced by the unitary Republic of Indonesia, the one that currently exists. The Pontianak Sultanate was formally dissolved, and became part of the province of Kalimantan. The sultan opposed this, and he ended up throwing in his lot with an ill-fated coup attempt led by Dutch adventurer Raymond Westerling.
Westerling, who was in fact only Dutch on his father’s side and was born and raised in Istanbul, arrived in Indonesia in 1945 as a Dutch officer and become known for his brutal counterinsurgency tactics. By 1950 he was in command of the APRA militia, a ragtag collection of Indonesians disgruntled at the prospect of a Javanese-dominated unitary state, Eurasians and natives who had fought on the side of the Dutch, and even a few Muslim fundamentalists.
Westerling’s plan was to put Sultan Hamid II in charge of an interim federal government in Jakarta. In fact the coup was quickly defeated by the army, Westerling was smuggled out of the country with the help of Dutch forces and ended his days in a Dutch village, while the Sultan was arrested and sentenced to eight years for his involvement.
After Hamid’s death in 1978 the post of sultan remained vacant, but in 2004 a successor was chosen and the institution was resurrected. Just like in Ternate and Tidore, which I visited earlier this year, the democratisation of Indonesia led to a push to revive this sort of local tradition. The sultan of Pontianak no longer has any official role in government, just like all other Indonesian sultans except for the one of Yogyakarta, but he still enjoys a certain respect locally.
I visited the sultan’s palace while I was in Pontianak. The palace is a simple yellow wooden building, yellow being the colour of Malay royalty. In front of it there are 13 old Portuguese and French-made cannons. Within the main hall there is the throne of the sultan and presumably his wife, and a display of historic photos and objects. You do not need to buy a ticket to enter, although a retainer quickly appeared and suggested I leave a donation in an old vase, which I did.
Next to the palace is the Jami Mosque, built in traditional Indonesian style, with multi-tiered pyramidal roofs, rather than Middle Eastern-style minarets. Both the mosque and the palace were first built in 1771, when Pontianak was founded on that spot and the sultanate was established.
Apart from the palace and the equator monument, Pontianak has few things to see. There is the Cathedral of St. Joseph, a huge Catholic church built in a European style, which was opened in 2015. The cathedral sits quite incongruously in the middle of the equatorial city. The old Catholic church, built in 1908, had become far too small for its flock. While Pontianak is majority Muslim, there are quite a few Christians too, both among the Chinese and the Dayaks. It seems to be the case in Borneo that the biggest, most impressive buildings are always religious, whether they are mosques, churches or Chinese temples.
I checked out Pontianak’s nightlife while I was there. It mostly seems to revolve around the cafes in the central Jalan Hijas street, and it does not involve much alcohol, not surprisingly for Indonesia. There is also a bar scene, but it is somewhat more hidden and niche. On Saturday evening I ended up going to the bar on the top floor of the Harris Hotel, where all the local grindcore bands were holding a concert. It was full of local youngsters, including girls in hijabs, wearing t-shirts of heavy metal bands and moshing under the stage.
Saham
While in Pontianak I also organised a trip to see the Dayak longhouses, for which I hired a guide I found through Facebook. My guide, a woman in a blue headscarf, came to pick me up on Saturday morning with a car and driver in tow. We drove out to a place in the countryside, a 4-5 hour drive from Pontianak. In fact it took even longer, because the car’s AC was broken and we had to stop along the way to get it repaired.
The guide was surprised I was travelling in Borneo alone. She said she occasionally got groups of foreigners on “adventure tours”, and people from embassies who would just visit the replica longhouse in Pontianak, but she had never guided a foreigner travelling alone through the region. It is indeed a little visited area; I had seen no other Westerners in Pontianak.
As we drove through the countryside, the guide told me a bit about herself. She came from a village in the area. Her family was of Javanese descent; her grandparents settled in Borneo as part of Indonesia’s “transmigrant” programs, which mostly compelled Javanese to move to other less crowded parts of the country. Her grandfather was a veteran of the war against the Dutch, and was given a plot of land in Borneo.
Interestingly, she told me about the violence that convulsed Indonesian Borneo in the late 90s. Around 1997-98, as Suharto’s regime fell, Indonesia saw a wave of ethnic and religious strife all over the archipelago. In Borneo, this took the form of the Dayak fighting against the Madurese. The latter group originate on the island of Madura, off the coast of Java, which has a reputation as an arid, impoverished and devoutly Islamic place.
Large numbers of Madurese moved to Borneo in the first half of the 20th century, under Dutch resettlement schemes. They had poor relations with the Dayaks for a long time, and around 1996 the simmering tensions exploded. By most account the Madurese had the worst of it. The Dayaks have a headhunting tradition which was abandoned a century ago, but in this circumstance it resurfaced. Gangs of Dayaks went around beheading Madurese, and in some cases they symbolically ate the hearts of their victims. A few thousand people were killed.
My guide said she wasn’t in Borneo at the time, because she was going to high school in Java. However, her mother was in her native village. Gangs of Dayaks would go house by house, and would identify whether people were Madurese by smelling them. She insisted they are able to do this. Luckily it worked in the case of her mother, who was determined not to be Madurese by her smell.
At that point the driver chipped in, speaking Indonesian. He said that when the unrest happened he was six year old, but he remembers a man carrying someone’s hacked off head through his neighbourhood. The violence had clearly been widespread and terrifying, and the state was unable or unwilling to do much to stop it.
While my guide didn’t witness it herself, she turned out to believe some rather odd things about what happened. Apparently there are Dayak warriors who have supernatural powers. There are men who live in the depths of the jungle who have tails, and they came out into the open when the fighting took place. This is what she told me, with no sign she was joking.
She also told me that the Madurese were unpopular because of their tendency to steal stuff. Apparently in their culture land is provided by god, and everyone has the right to freely take their share of what it provides, or so she said. While she didn’t endorse the violence, she did say that it taught the Madurese a lesson, and afterwards they stopped stealing. I had read previously that the Madurese have a bad reputation in many parts of Indonesia, and this seemed to confirm it.
Driving through the Kalimantan countryside, it was hard to imagine this kind of horrific violence taking place there (but then I guess it always is). What was noticeable, on the other hand, was that the Indonesian general elections are coming up. The roads were lined with party flags and posters of the candidates. Some villages were full of the red flags of the PDI-P, the party of current president Jokowi, with the angry black bull the party has as its symbol. Other villages were full of the blue flags of Gelora, a smaller party with a more Islamic bent that is supporting the main contendent, Prabowo.
After driving for hours we reached our destination, the village of Saham, where a longhouse is located. Traditionally many Dayak lived in longhouses, long wooden buildings used as communal homes for entire villages. They have become much rarer today, as people have moved into free-standing wooden houses.
In Saham there is a traditional longhouse in the middle of the village that is still in use, although most villagers now live outside of it. My first impression of the longhouse was that, as the name suggests, it is indeed very long. It could well have been 50 metres in length. It was raised a few metres off the ground with stilts. Inside, the longhouse was divided into a long communal area on one side, and a row of separate living quarters for individual families on the other side. Not all of the units looked inhabited, but some were. There were lots of local children playing in the communal area.
The longhouse occasionally receives visitors, although not often or at least not from the other side of the world, judging by the surprised looks I received from its inhabitants. I was taken to a meet an old lady who had a collection of paintings and artwork with Dayak themes in her living quarters. They were created by her husband, a local artist who has passed away. The pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the wall made it clear that she was a Catholic, as I think the whole village must be.
The old lady showed us her little garden behind the longhouse. She told us that when she was young the forest used to be full of monkeys, but nowadays you barely see any. Borneo is full of species that live nowhere else in the world, but logging and palm oil plantations are seriously threatening the island’s rich biodiversity. Indonesia plans to move its capital from Jakarta to Borneo next year (although to a completely different part of the island), which will cause lots of newcomers to arrive. It will probably be another blow for the island’s ecosystem.
I was taken to another local family living just beside the longhouse, in a wooden home. They were preparing for an engagement ceremony in the evening. The walls also had plenty of Catholic images. The living room was full of people sitting on the floor and snacking, while in the kitchen the women were cooking. I was struck by the old-fashioned cooking arrangements, which involved an actual fire with logs. The men were keen to chat with me, either in the little bits of English they knew or in Indonesian.
Everyone in the village was wearing modern clothing, except for an old lady I saw walking outside of the longhouse, draped in a traditional dress and carrying a basket on her back balanced by a strap round her forehead, the traditional Bornean way. People were not performing their ethnicity, but just living their lives, which is much more interesting. Those who live in the longhouse are not all Dayak, either; when the old lady determined that my guide was Javanese, she said that there is a Javanese who married a local and moved into the longhouse with their spouse.
Dayak is in fact an umbrella term that includes a number of different ethnic groups that call Borneo their home. Originally the word was invented by 19th century Dutch and German authors to designate all of the non-Muslim peoples of the island. In Indonesia the term is now used by everyone, including the Dayak themselves. The particular village I visited is inhabited by Kendayan people. There is no single Dayak language; every group speaks its own language, and nowadays usually Indonesian as well.
Once we got back to my hotel in Pontianak, my guide spotted some local men she knew drinking coffee in the hotel bar. I was invited to join. It turned out the men were local activists for the Ummat Party, and so was my guide. The party, which is gearing up for the elections, was having a conference in my hotel. I didn’t immediately realise it, but the party is in fact Islamist-populist, and holds some pretty questionable views (ummat is Indonesian for ummah, the Arabic terms for the worldwide community of Muslim believers). Nonetheless, the men were friendly enough and didn’t dress or look like obvious Islamists.
I spent the following day hanging out in Pontianak, but I had already had enough of the city. My next destination was to be the town of Singkawang, further up the coast.