What are your hobbies: culture, animal watching, culinary, fishing, boating, hill climbing, or just enjoying the view to relax? Everything is in here! In the middle of the Heart of Borneo!
Kapuas Hulu Regency, West Kalimantan is a conservation district of which more than half of the total area of Kapuas Hulu, which is 29,842 km², is a protected area. There are two National Park areas, namely Danau Sentarum covering an area of 1,270 km² and Betung Kerihun covering an area of 8,000 km². These two national parks have a rich diversity of unique fauna and flora such as orangutans, proboscis monkeys, hornbills, sentarum langurs, the original habitat of super red arowana fish, tengkawang (Illipe nuts), iron wood, black orchids and others.
In addition to biodiversity, tourists can see the culture of the Dayak Iban and Embaloh tribes as well as the Malays who are in the Danau Sentarum National Park area and its surroundings. The Dayak people still live in traditional longhouses and still adhere to their customs and culture in their daily life. So that there are many traditional celebrations that can be found in this area such as gawak or traditional parties after harvest, weddings, traditional ceremonies to start farming, traditional ceremonies for healing the sick and so on.
The Dayak and Malay tribes have a traditional way of cooking food which has always been passed on, for example, cooking in bamboo, using flavorings, from natural ingredients such as certain types of leaves for cooking, they also have various foods from the forest such as mushrooms, bamboo shoots, ferns, various types of fish, river snails, river prawns even if you are lucky you can try to eat the most popular sago worm and wild boars.
In well-maintained forests you can also find various types of local forest fruits such as various types of durian with various colors, various types of mangoes, various types of rambutan, various types of forest nuts and others. You can ask local people to take you into the forest to collect various forest fruits, especially during fruit season.
To enjoy tourism in this area, there are some of the most desirable places to visit such as Sepandan Island on Danau Sentarum, Kedungkang Hill, Tekenang Hill, Semujan Hill to enjoy the landscape view of Danau Sentarum from a height. You can choose the closest to the furthest route between 15 minutes to 2 hours to the location. In the Betung Kerihun National Park area you can take a boat upstream of the Kanyau river which is a rapids river but the water is clear.
To reach this place, from Jakarta you can fly to Pontianak which is the capital of the province of West Kalimantan, then from Pontianak, you can continue flying to Putussibau which is the capital of the Regency or if you have time and want to see from land the forest scenery of Kalimantan, you can choose to take the bus with a travel time of 13 hours. After arriving at Putussibau you can continue the journey for 2 hours by car to the city of Lanjak where you can enter the Danau Sentarum and Betung Kerihun national park areas. If you depart early in the morning from Jakarta, you will arrive in the afternoon at Danau Sentarum on the same day.
