The walk along the riverfront was fine. The city has invested on a park along a good stretch of the park, which is very popular among lovey dovey couples. The illumination is just right, and the views of the river at night are spectacular (across the river there is a beautiful mosque and other illuminated buildings).
Dinner was a different matter all together. Smarty pants Irvan let his fingers do the walking and found a fish restaurant whose specialty is fish head soup (an acquired taste to be sure, but he claimed it was a Samarinda specialty) that had two thousand 5-start reviews in Google. In retrospect we should have smelled a rat, for if it is too good to be true it probably isn't. When we got there the place was practically deserted and the waitresses looked at us like hungry wolves. With plenty of smiles they produced an elegant menu, with the fish head soup at the top, and a lot of annotations in small print. Irvan ordered a small portion for me, and a side dish of shrimp in sauce, veggies, rice and drinks, and we settled down to wait. Service was prompt, and the waitress approached us carrying a terrine the size of a small tub, where several pieces of fish head floated in a yellow broth. Turns out each piece was "a portion" so the price of the soup was nine times the per portion price, for grand total of 300,000 rupiah! With the added cost of the other things ordered the meal ended costing over 400,000 rupiah, about four times what we would normally expect to pay for dinner. Arghh :(
Next time Irvan claims to have a good restaurant in his phone I will take the phone and feed it to him for dinner.
The following morning we had breakfast with the folks from the local BMKG meteorology team, who were glad to give us some ideas about where to go to visit the Mahakam River. We settled for two destinations. The first one, to the west of Samarinda was the upper river town of Tenggarong, and the second one, to the east of Samarinda was on the edge of the delta.
Getting out of Samarinda was trying because of the large number of scooters, which dart to the left and to the right without really noticing what they get on the way off. I felt like a battleship surrounded by a fleet of fast small boats maneuvered by drunks and lunatics Once out of the city the traffic became lighter, and in crossing to the west we went up and down steep ridges formed by the tight folding of a Mesozoic (?) sedimentary sequence, not unlike the tight folding of the mountains around Monterrey in northern Mexico. Once we got to Tenggarong we were delighted to find a clean and peaceful river town. We visited the museum of the original rulers of this part of Kalimantan, walked along the river, and sat to take a cup of coffee with an old timer. We learned that fresh water dolphins can still be seen playing in the river (just like in the Amazon), and that occasionally a large salt-water crocodile moves upstream from the delta (dangerous!). The river itself was placid.
We then headed east to the delta, but once again had to traverse the crazy traffic of Samarinda. I had managed to avoid hundreds of collisions when, almost at a standstill, wham! a stupid scooter drove into my fender and punched a hole in the plastic. Rats! After that I was a bit spooked, and Irvan jumping at each close-encounter didn't help at all.
A little rattled it was not so easy to enjoy the drive through the delta, which like other deltas I have visited (the Nile, the Mekong) is flat, green, and not precisely spectacular. Once we reached the end of the road, at a large fisherman's village with more than their fair share of tugboats, we went for a walk admiring the spirit of these folks who build their houses on stilts, made friends with the local gaggle of kids, and watched in silence as a giant coal barge was tugged down the channel toward the Makassar Strait and the waiting colliers that will transport the coal to Java, Sumatra, and China. Not a super scenic place, but I am glad we came to sense the pulse of the place.
For you geologists, don't miss the opportunity of checking out the Mahakam Delta in Google Earth or Copernicus. It is a fantastic vision.
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