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Kalimantan
comprises roughly the southern three-quarters of
the equatorial island of Borneo, the
third-largest island in the world after
Greenland and New Guinea. Despite exploration
and development, many areas of Kalimantan are
almost untouched by the Western world. Maps of
Kalimantan's river-laced interior still excite
the imagination. On the political map, the
Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah and the
sultanate of Brunei lie to the north, occupying
the top one-quarter of the island. The territory
makes a unique travel experience for the more
rough and ready traveller.
Tourist facilities are relatively undeveloped in
Kalimantan, and visitors are few. Those
Westerners you do meet are leftovers from the
oil and wood booms of the 1970s, their jobs
gradually being taken over by Indonesians. Good
roads are found only in the oil and timbering
centres and around big coastal cities. Travel is
restricted in some areas, as are border
crossings into Malaysia. Although travellers may
arrive here to visit interior Dayak villages and
wildlife reserves, most natives will take you
for an expat worker. Expect to encounter
officialdom wherever there are navigable rivers,
airstrips and roads (though most roads shown on
maps don't exist). Good roads run between
Banjarmasin and Samarinda and around Pontianak,
but rivers are the main transportation arteries.
There are airports in the major cities, and
airstrips throughout the interior serviced by
commercial flights and missionary aircraft.
Most of Kalimantan's population predominantly
Chinese and Malays live near the coastal areas.
Javanese, Buginese and other Indonesians come
here to find work, competing with other
Indonesians, and even other nationalities, for
skilled jobs. Under Indonesia's massive
transmigration programme, tens of thousands of
Javanese and Balinese families have been brought
in to settle the island's hinterlands. 'Dayak'
is a collective name for the 200 or so different
tribes that comprise the island's native
peoples. Living inland along the banks of major
rivers and tributaries, they make up almost half
of the territory's population. Each tribe has
its own tribal name and speaks its own dialect.
Contrary to myth, the Dayak race is
light-skinned (resembling the Chinese) with
rounded, well-featured faces and slightly
slanted eyes. Mountain Dayak tribes are
physically imposing, taller than most Asians,
heavily muscled and weighing 75 kilograms (165
pounds) or more. Numbering in the millions, the
Dayaks have traditionally lived upriver in the
hill areas' thriving as hunters, gatherers and,
more recently, as slash-and-burn hill rice
growers.
Since the 1970s, the government has encouraged
them to take up wet-rice cultivation and to
produce such cash crops as rubber, pepper and
cloves, kerbau, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks and
a few goats are kept. Recent exposure to the
forces of modernization is changing many aspects
of traditional Dayak life. The Indonesian
government is abolishing multiple-family long
houses and replacing them with modern,
single-family dwellings, a drastic change in
village life. Tattooing, mastery of traditional
crafts and the custom of wearing huge bunches of
metal ear-rings to elongate the earlobes are all
disappearing. Few Dayaks hunt with blow-guns and
poison darts or spears these days preferring
instead home-made Daniel Boone-style flintlocks.
Though there are occasional unexplained
decapitations in the more remote regions, the
traditional practice of head-hunting has
officially ended. Increasingly, young Dayaks
leave their villages to work for timber and oil
companies or take menial jobs in Kalimantan's
boom towns. Children of wealthy Dayaks study
engineering, forestry and other subjects in
Indonesian and European universities. |
