But one of the most defining aspects of their culture was how they used nature as their source of life for centuries.
That's what I'm on the hunt for.
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Palangkaraya.
It's quite a large.
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it's quite a large city.
There's a lot of space, so the roads are really wide.
The sidewalks are really big.
There's a lot of space to move around in.
I've also found a family who has taken mein for a few days, so I'm super grateful for that.
But I'm looking forward to getting out of the city and start exploring the villages.
All.
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travel to the villages kind of start from this city.
It's really hard.
I've been hearing, toget from one village to the other without kind of coming back to the mainroad to the city, because all the roads in between kind of don't exist yet.
But I'm really curious then what it looks like out there, and the kind of things I'm going to be seeing, and the people I'm going to be meeting, so.
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Super excited! From the very start of my trip, most Dayaks I met were from the Ngaju tribe, and predominantly Christian.
And while as expected, there wasn't much nature to experience in the city, I did get my first taste of Dayak cuisine, and glimpses of the ingredients from the jungle, or as they call it, “sayur alam.
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On my first drive to a village, I saw what was once dense rainforest was now rows of oil palm trees.
As far as I could see for hours on the road.
Villages are forced to source their fruits and vegetables from the market in the city three hours away.
Fish and shrimp that were once abundantin the rivers are now being farm-raised in the city, frozen and driven out instyrofoam boxes to the villages.
So, hello from Desa Tumbang Manhute.
It's about four hours away from Palangkaraya, and I tagged along with the Borneo Institute because they work with villages in this area and have a really good relationship with the people here.
So I've gotten a really greatintroduction to the locals that way.
And it's a great village to be in, becausethis area of Kalimantan is where the village still owns the land around them, so it's easily accessible to find everything wild that I could possibly imagine.
A lot of the women here.
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were so willing just to take me on a walk and show me different plants that you can use to eat, and also answering any questions I have about their local cuisine and how to make certain things, so it's been a really great place to be.
Pretty remote.
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no cell phone reception.
I'm lucky that they have listrik, or electricity, here.
And the weather is just as I expect 40 kilometers away from the equator.
Super hot and humid with a lot of mosquitoes, but.
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I'm pretty used to it by now.
And I'm having a great, great time here.
I actually super love village life apparently!
And it was the villages around herethat introduced me to real Dayak culture and tradition.
Hello, from the middle of the Bornean rainforest! My.
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the bike that I've been riding on.
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something's wrong with the gears.
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so kind of stuck right now at the moment.
But it's early in the day, so there's still a lot time to figure it out before it gets dark.
I'm really glad I've been able to seethe true Bornean rainforest without any.
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any human interference, besides me being in it.
It's just so beautiful here.
The water is still clear, the birds, you can hear the insects.
The trees are so high.
Don't even need my sunglasses when I'm hikingin there because it's completely shaded.
But it's really beautiful.
I'm so glad I canbe here and see.
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see the real thing.
Finally, this is where I foundwhat I was looking for.
The biodiversity of plants from the rainforest and the cuisine that developed from it.
Taking a walk with villagers was a lesson in theplants eaten from nature.
The small markets in this area sold the variousroots, shoots and leaves that are a big part of the traditional Dayak diet, and nothing I had ever seen before.
Like their method for preserving meat, the starch they ate before rice existed, or how they celebrated the rice harvest when it was cultivated.
It was some of the most diverse food I had ever eaten in Indonesia, simply because of the ingredients they harvested and how they lived.