Early Evening Rainbows

Smoky season is definitely over!  The skies are constantly changing--clear and beautiful one minute, pounding rain the next, then clear again.  Visibility is almost unrestricted over the jungles of Borneo-- that is if you're not fighting to get around a line of rapidly building tropical thunder storms!  But more on that in a later post.

Starting a few weeks ago we've been getting wonderful, huge thunderstorms, day and night.  I love weather!  I love watching it from the porch, from the plane--from anywhere.  It's always fascinated me, and being a pilot is a bonus b/c I get to see a lot of it up close.  Over the last few weeks we've seen a rather strange weather phenomenon several times over...all from the comfort of our tiny, little porch with a very limited view of the horizon.

As the late afternoon sun (about 30 minutes before sunset) shines up through the super high levels of moisture and ice crystals in the cirrus clouds, framed in the foreground by the tops of massive, developing thunderstorms over the mainland of Borneo, it creates gorgeous rainbows--well sort of.  Technically they're not true rainbows, but you get the idea.  They're very colorful and constantly changing.  These are a few of the freeze frames that I've grabbed to give you a glimpse of what they look like.

Isn't our Creator amazing?!

Idul Adha

On Friday, Muslims began celebrating Idul Adha.  Here's a few shots from around Tarakan.

All About the 206

For more than a month our Kodiak as been grounded for some maintenance issues.  In the meantime we have a second, new Kodiak that's been sitting in Papua stuck in the importation process.  And we've also been rationing flight time on our Caravan that we'll be sending to MAF Papua in exchange for that second Kodiak (we have to save enough time for the ferry flight over to Papua before it's next inspection comes due).

So for the past month or so it's been all about the Cessna 206 again here in East Kal.  When I got here we had five 206's, three turbos and two normally aspirated.  Over the next couple of years we added a Grand Caravan and then a Kodiak, and got rid of our two normally aspirated 206's.  We kept the three turbos.

The Caravan has been a real heavy hauler but can only go into a handful of our strips.  The Kodiak fits in the middle--it can go into almost all of our strips and carry almost double a 206 load with far greater margins.  But we still have several strips that are just to narrow or short and slippery for the Kodiak at this point, though several are in the process of being expanded for the Kodiak.  So even though over the past few years the Kodiak has robbed the spotlight from our 206's, they've continued to be an important part of our operations and ministry here.

Well, for the past five weeks the 206's have reclaimed the spotlight, as we've been doing heavy flying transporting tons of food, medical supplies, national church pastors, government teams, community development flights, etc. etc., and all without help from the Kodiak and only minimal help from the Caravan.  But I'm glad to say that the Kodiak is now back up and running and starting next week it will be retaking the lion's share of the interior flying.  Our maintenance guys have been working flat out and doing an awesome job during a very busy time for them!

In other news, the smoke has finally cleared out.  There were several weeks over the past month, when forward visibility was nil, and you could barely see the ground directly beneath the airplane due to chokingly thick smoke coming on the winds from other parts of Kalimantan.  We still managed to mostly keep flying, but the stress level is a lot higher in weather like that, so we're thrilled that smoky season is now over and the skies are clearing.  This picture was taken just as the smoke began to lift and reveal all of the mountains in the Apokayan region.  For weeks it was nothing but milky, brownish soup out there in every direction you looked.

Borneo Ecotoursim

There are still large areas, of completely undisturbed, virgin jungle in Kalimantan.   I've had the wonderful opportunity to see much of it from both up high...

...and down low.

Some of it is just so unbelievably rugged, that it's completely untouchable.  There's an area south of here where the flat jungle plains end abruptly in a wall of solid, vertical stone.  It's strange.  On one side--it's flat as far as the eye can see.  And then, there's a shear wall, hundreds of feet high stretching in a perfect line for many, many miles.  And on the other side of the wall...seemingly endless, extremely sharp-looking, spires--packed together so tightly that there's absolutely no way you could navigate through there.

The only signs of people are on the very outer edges of the walls.  These rock formations are dotted by hundreds and hundreds of caves--from very small to absolutely massive in size!  A few guys come by foot a very long distance to collect birds nests from the caves that are "accessible" on the outer edge.  The small, translucent birds nests that are plucked from the high ledges of the dark caves are prized as a delicacy, eaten in soup by mostly the Chinese.  They're worth a ton of money--I'm told, more than gold by weight.

But once you get past the outer edges, it's like a scene from another planet on the "inside".

This swampy lake is totally surrounded by a fortress of those rugged pinnacles.  I have to wonder how many people, if any, have ever been there on foot?

Many of the villages we fly to are located in or near a large area of protected forest called the Kayan Mentarang National Park.  This protected area is the largest in all of Borneo, and one of the biggest protected areas in South East Asia.

It's a highly diverse and beautiful area, sporting a wide variety of both plant and animal life.

I've had the unique privilege of hiking through some of the most remote parts of this wilderness.  It's a truly beautiful place.

There are very few tourists who make it out this way...let's face it, we're a long way off the "beaten path".  And getting to Tarakan is only the starting point.  You still have to get interior, and then from there, to one of the locations from which a trek can begin.  But all of my experiences have been very memorable.  If you're interested in finding out more about this type of thing, I recommend you check out the Borneo Ecotourism Website.

You can also check out some of my posts from a few of the treks that I've taken over the past few years:

Half Alive--Borneo Trek 2011 (Part 1) - 9/13/11
Borneo Trek 2011 (Part 2) - 9/17/11
Borneo Trek 2011 (Part 3) - 9/26/11

Jungle Trek 2010 (Part 1) - 5/15/2010
Jungle Trek 2010 (Part 2) - 5/16/2010
Jungle Trek 2010 (Part 3) - 5/19/2010
Jungle Trek 2010 (Part 4) - 5/19/2010

We're Alive!  Jungle Trek Day 1 - 5/23/09
Jungle Trek Day 2 - 5/26/09
Jungle Trek Day 3 - 5/29/09
Jungle Trek 4 - 6/4/09
Jungle Trek 5 - 6/10/09

Search my blog and you can find more--trips to Lalut Birai, hunting pigs, etc. etc.

Thunderstorms

Here's a shot of an early evening thunderstorm over Tarakan this past Sunday evening.  We've been getting some real whoppers lately! 

You win some you lose some

The other day I rode along in the Kodiak as a passenger.  One of our newer Kodiak pilots was planning to do checkouts at four of our interior strips along with our chief pilot.  I was lugging around 25 lbs of camera gear with a plan to capture some of the action in both video and still shots--seeing as how most of our MAF footage of the Kodiak is outdated now that it has a pod.  

But things didn't go according to the plan.  In fact, that's a huge understatement!  I think the Chief Pilot summed it up best when he said something to the effect of, "Well, that had to be one of the least productive days of flying in all my years here."  It seemed like virtually everything that could have gone wrong did--the weather, the airstrips, the camera gear, the loading, etc. etc.  We only got one of the four checkouts done, and that one only barely happened, and I almost got left behind.  But that's a story for another day.

I'll spare you all the details, but it was a bum day photographically as well--at least as far as airplane shots went.  And it culminated with the destruction of my Canon G1X.  (Ahhh, it pains me just to mention it.)  But I digress.  Anyway, despite all of that, I did manage to grab a few random shots in the middle of all of the mayhem.  (With the 7D)  Below, the village petugas (airstrip agent) prepares the passenger loading and manifest.

If you're especially perceptive you may have noticed that in the vast majority of pictures showing people gathering and/or carrying barang (stuff) from the airplanes (on this and other posts) the people doing the carrying are most often women.  That's because it's typically considered the womens' job (among many other things!) here to do so.  The women never help to actually unload the plane--that's always done by the men and the pilot.  However, I almost never see the men actually carrying the stuff to the village (which can be quite far away in some cases).  That's almost always the women.  The lady below is preparing her pack laden with supplies from the flight to carry to the village.

The stuff has been divided into piles of approximately equal weight.  Each of the ladies will carry one pile to the village.

People gather to watch the plane, and to greet the arriving passengers and say goodbye to the departing ones.

I chose to do all the shots in B&W on this post, b/c it sort of seemed fitting for the mood of the day.  But don't feel too sorry for us.  Even on a "bad" day we still have a whole lot to be thankful for.  We all made it back safe and sound (minus my camera) and that's always a good starting point.  It's really a blessing to be able to be here serving the people of Kalimantan, even when things don't seem to go to well!

Underwater World (2 of 2)

I wish I had an underwater case for my good DSLR, along with some good lighting options.  But those are crazy expensive and well beyond my reach!  So it always proves to be a significant challenge and frustration to capture even a small glimpse into the magnificent beauty of God's creation underwater.

Above the glistening surface of this often unseen water world, a boy glides almost effortlessly towards home, his catch secured in the bottom of the home made canoe.

Below the surface, things are never so "quiet".  The water teems with life!  It's constantly changing--the color of the water, the shapes, the fish, everything is in motion.  It's overwhelming at times just to try and take it all in, let alone trying to capture it in freeze frames.  But use your imagination and you can hopefully picture the symphony of life that we got to see this time around.