Indonesia 2025. Day 8. The new capital, Nusantara

We are heading south, past Balikpapan, to eventually spend the night in Tanah Grogoth. But to get there we took a detour to go past Nusantara, which is destined to be the new capital of Indonesia. The road to get there was not much different than the one we used yesterday, although with a lot less potholes, so I have a hard time imagining the new capital to come into being anytime in the next 30 years. Imagine my surprise when out of the middle of the Kalimantan jungle we saw several high rises, the headquarters of the Indonesian Intelligence Agency, a gleaming City Hall where some sort of ribbon cutting ceremony was under way, a couple of official looking buildings, what looked like a big stadium, and the alignment of a four lane highway. So I am going to cut my estimate to sometime in the next 20 years, particularly given that the new Indonesian President is in an austerity kick. From what I saw, it is going to be a fine capital city.

Today is a Muslim holiday, Idul adha, that celebrates the moment in which Ibrahim was going to sacrifice his son Ishmael, and Allah stayed his hand and asked instead for the sacrifice of a lamb. The celebration thus revolves around the immolation of a goat, lamb, or cattle, and the distribution of the meat to the members of the family. From our standpoint, however, the important part is that everything is closed, including the petrol stations, and as usual we ended with an almost empty tank. Ah, but here the enterprise of the Indonesian home-makers came to our rescue, because with so many scooters milling around, several houses offer 1-liter bottles of petrol for a small markup with respect to the gas station. So, we simply pulled to the porch of a house that had gas bottles on display, bought six liters, and we kept going.

To break the monotony of the trip we cut across a plantation of oil palms to reach the beach. The plantations are very vast, and this particular one shielded from prying eyes a (perhaps illegal) coal mine. Irvan tells me that working in this plantations is dangerous because there are all sorts of poisonous snakes in the undergrowth, and every season there are reports of workers being bitten.

Once we got to the beach we found a regular fair in full swing. Maybe it was the holiday and the long weekend, but there were tons of families walking under the shade of the coconut palms, children playing in the water, and a fair with games and food all along the beachfront. People are the same the world over when it comes to enjoying the beach. 

An interesting structure under the palm trees is a metal building with rows of round pipes, maybe 10 cm in diameter, sticking out of the sides. Irvan tells me it is a swallow "house", where swallows build nests by the thousands that at the end of the hatching season are harvested by the community and sold at high prices to Chinese traders for the famous Swallow Nest Soup. I prefer not to dwelve into the details of the way swallows build their nests.

We made it to Tanah Grogoth under dark clouds as the sun was setting down, ready to find the hotel I had booked through Booking.com. Alas, the said hotel didn't exist, and after circling the posted address time and again I had to accept I had been duped. Fortunately the second hotel we tried in downtown had an available room and were able to settle down for the evening.