Borneo (Kalimantan) - Nabucco

Nabucco Island 

We left Kutai completely elated at the sightings of the Orangutans but also completely filthy from 4 days in the very humid jungle. We got a shared taxi back to Balikpapan and caught a flight to Berau where we were met from the plane by the driver of our next destination. We had decided that for a (very early) birthday present/treat for me we would go to one of the ‘paradise’ island resorts off the east coast of Borneo in the Palau Derawan Archipeligo. The driver took us to the jetty where we then got a 3 hour speed boat to the Island of Nabucco. It all felt very VIP especially after 4 months of backpacking and having freshly emerged from the jungle! When we arrived there was a welcoming party to greet us and we were given cold flannels before being shown to the bar where a fresh coconut was waiting for each of us. The island itself was tiny and about as close to a Robinson Crusoe type island as you can imagine, you could walk around the whole island in 10 minutes and it was surrounded by turquoise clear water and white sand. We stayed in 1 of about 8 wooden chalets, all with direct sea access so in the morning you could literally go snorkeling from your front steps – pretty amazing! As you can probably tell we have nothing but praise for Nabucco and following along the same trend… the food was amazing too! We had half board and each evening enjoyed a 5 course gourmet meal in the restaurant overlooking the sea. A mixture of Indonesian and European cuisine, the food was very original and delicious!

View from the restaurant

View from the other side of the restaurant....

We stayed for four days, spending 2 days diving and 2 days just enjoying the island – reading, sun bathing, playing board games and snorkeling. Mike also spent a lot of time harassing the resident coconut crab who every time anyone came close would crawl back into his hole. Unrelenting though Mike sat patiently outside the hole every night in the dark waiting for it to come creeping out so that he could shine his torch at it and have yet another  good lookJ

Baby coconut crabs

The adult coconut crab was huge!

The diving was really good, the visibility was the best we’ve had and we saw lots of turtles and a huge school of barracuda amongst many other things.

Banded angel fish

Huge conch 30cm long

Giant school of barracuda in the background

There were turtles everywhere!

All in all a brilliant four days… the only embarrassing thing was that not only were we the only backpackers obviously not used to the luxury…the only people to enquire about discounts… the only people on half board who skipped lunch to save money but we were also the only people who when it came to paying our bill couldn’t because our online banking wouldn’t do international transfers!!!Luckily after numerous telephone calls (on their mobile because ours wouldn’t work!) we managed to get everything sorted but it was a slightly awkward ending to say the least!!

The next couple of days were spent making our way from Kalamantan to Malaysian Borneo and the journey once again took a lot longer than we had anticipated. Our transfer back to the mainland from Nabucco dropped us in Berau, a small port town with nothing really to do other than move on. Arriving too late on the Friday to get the morning busses out however, we stayed one night and booked a flight for the next day to Nunukan. We had been advised that the quickest route to the Malaysian port of Tawau was via Nunukan, which sits on the border of Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo. Apparently if we got the morning flight and headed straight to the port we would be just in time for the ferry. Actually we arrived to find out that we had missed the ferry by about 5 hours and that as the ferries didn’t run on a Sunday we would have to wait until Monday morning! We had thought Berau was small and didn’t have much to offer…Nunukan was much, much smaller and had nothing to offer! We stayed in a very dark and dingy little room, with a window that looked onto an alley. 

Although probably being the shabbiest place we’ve stayed yet, it was very, very cheap and the little old lady who owned it was quite a character! Despite these two pros however, we were both thoroughly fed up that we were going to have to waste a whole day there…and to make matters worse just as we were thinking at least there’s a TV to watch, someone came into our room and removed it! Our despair was short lived however when the same man returned with a much bigger TV for us and we turned it on to find that the newly started London Olympics was on!! We couldn’t believe it and spent the next 48hrs in our dark room watching highlights of the opening ceremony as well as various sporting events – feeling somewhat nostalgic about London! Unfortunately just as we were getting into the mens cycling where team GB were favourites to win, someone changed the satellite channel and we had to watch Indonesia playing badminton but it was the Olympics all the same.

When Monday came round we emerged from our dark cave and caught the ferry to Tawau. Waiting in queue to get our visa we realised we had no money at all to pay for it…luckily not only were we ushered to the front of a ‘foreigners’ queue but also our visa was free anyway so we needn’t have worried – we were already beginning to really like Malaysia J A helpful guy pointed us in the right direction and we were soon on a local bus on the way to Lahad Datu, our first stop. One thing that was noticeably different between Indonesia and Malaysia as soon as we arrived was that everyone spoke English, which made it so easy to travel around. From Lahad Datu we got a transfer to the Kinabatangan River – our first tourist destination, which completed a total of over 4 days travelling from Nabucco! 

Sunset over Nabucco

Sunset again over Nabucco