C. sp 'Lingga Island' spathes

These are some miscellaneous photographs of the spathes of C. sp. 'Lingga Island' collected by my explorer friend from various locations on the island. Note the distinct colour variaiton.

appearance of cultivated C. cf. striolata 'Gunung Besar'

The new leaves of C. cf. striolata 'Gunung Besar' cultivated in my tank are light green in colour.

These are the germinated seeds, slightly less than 1 month old.

Attached below is a photograph of a pot of C. striolata from Sungai Assan Sarawak for your ease of comparison.

inside the kettle of C. cf. striolata 'Gunung Besar'

The below is a photograph of the inside of the kettle of C. cf. striolata 'Gunung Besar, South Kalimantan'.

To compared to that of C. striolata 'Sungai Assan, Sarawak', see below.

The food of South Kalimantan

Our  first meal in south Kalimantan was supper after we managed to rent a car. We had Maggi Goreng (fried instant noodle) in one of the road side warung (casual outdoor restaurant).

We had Banjar Cuisine for lunch the next day. You pick a pre-cooked main dish (either duck, fish or chicken, etc) displayed within the glass cabinet, the store will heat up the main dish by barbequing it and adding some tasty sauce on it.

Plain boiled vegetable would be served with chill based sauce as dip for the vegetable.

A bowl of plain fried shallot soup would be served as well.

This was the chicken main dish I ordered with some additional serving of vegetable.

We had the same type of cuisine for dinner as well. The rice was served in a plastic drain container.

The chill sauce was sweet and had slices of tomatoes added to add on a sour after taste. I had a scrawny duck thigh as the main course.

The 2nd morning breakfast was ate in another wooden road side warung. Coffee was standard Java style coffee with hot water added directly to grounded coffee powder in the cup.

We had dry instant noodle and this was the first time I had seen instant noodle prepared in the below shown method. The seasoning packet was extracted from the main noodle packet, with hot water then poured into the main packet and resealed with the fork. All these packagings were placed in a bowl and filled up with hot water too to further heat up and cook the noodle. After a few minutes, the hot water would be poured away and the seasoning mixed into the softened noodle......

We had Banjar cuisine for lunch again, I had BBQ snakehead this time round.

Dinner in a small warung on Gunung Besar consisted of rice with fried shallots, fried brinjal and sambal chilli fried chicken.

The food in Kanbangan was slightly different, the rice was seved in ketupat form (rice wrapped in a woven palm leaf pouch and boiled). I had sambal chilli fried chicken again as well as 10 sticks of chicken satays served with thick peanut sauce.

Each stick of satay had alternating layers of chicken meat and chicken skin, somewhat similar to Japanese yakitori, very sinful!

Along the road in one of the bigger town near to the airport, there were some road side peddlers selling boxes of snacks to vehicles passing by. We bought a few boxes and found out that the snack was actually kelepon, quite delicious!

 

Thats all regarding food of south Kalimantan!

C. cf. striolata 'Gunung Besar, South Kalimantan'

In the morning of our last day in south Kalimantan, we located another stream on Gunung Besar with cryptocorynes growing submersed therein.

The cryptocorynes seemed to be similar to the ones we found in another larger river on Gunung Besar. We found a specimen with an attached spathe.

The unopened spathe seemed similar to that of C. striolata, with a long twirling tail at the top of the limb.

The stream bed was sandy and the cool water had high pH of 7.5 to 8.0.

The leaves had a mix of brown and green colour on the upperside and were purple in colour on the underside.

Some of the leaves only had a small green dot at the base while the rest of the leaves were brown in colour.

Long rizhomes were present to help these cryptocoryne be firmly attached to the base of the fast flowing stream.

The spathe opened on the way back to the airport, it opened too widely such that the slit extended well below the throat level.

I managed to record a video of the cryptocorynes under the fast flowing water.

Gunung Besar, the "big mountain"

We managed to find a very good map of Kalimantan in one of the hotel where we stayed over. I took a photograph of South Kalimantan area as shown below. The mountain range running north-south shown in the photograph is known as Meratus Mountains with its highest peak, Mount Besar at altitude 1,892m.

There are many roads of various sizes leading up this mountain from all sides, some roads are accessible by car or motorcycle while others would require you to travel on foot. You would probably need no lesser than one week to properly search the entire mountain. However, we did not have such luxurious time.

From far away, some of the hill peaks seemed to be grass peaks.

When we approached nearer, I was surprised that the "grass peaks" were actually dry version of paddy fields on top of the hills.

Below are some photographs of the mountain range.

They are many rivers running down all sides of this mountain range. From the information found on the Internet, it seemed that C. hudoroi could be found on the southern side of the mountain while C. striolata could be found on the western side.

There are many pockets of houses on the mountain belonging to the deyaks there.

One of the house was sunning cinnamon barks on the front porch.

Most houses we passed by on Gunung Besar had many different types of fruit trees grown around them. One of the locals climbed a few trees at amazing speed to pluck some fresh fruits for us to try F.O.C.

You would not want to eat mangosteens bought from the supermarkets anymore after you tried these fresh mangosteens harvested directly from the tree. Sweet!

The local told us that this fruit is called Binjai with white juicy flesh. It tasted a little like sour mango or soursop, very exotic taste. We were told that this fruit is added to their chilli paste (I will introduce the food of south Kalimantan separately in another post) to enhance the taste, a cheaper alternative for the poorer people would be tomatoes instead.

I did not catch the name of this fruit. It should be somewhat related to the mangosteen family due to the similar apperance of the interior of the fruit. It was subtly sweet tasting.

The duku fruits harvested straight from these trees were very sweet too.

Yummy.