Balikpapan

Balikpapan exists because of oil. Seepages along this coast were known to local people long before a small company called Mathilda drilled the first well on 10 February 1897, a date still kept as the city's anniversary. The Dutch firm Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij followed with a refinery, tank farms and a company town, and a place of a few fishing villages turned into an industrial port with imported labour from Java and elsewhere in the archipelago. The bay's depth and shelter made it valuable well beyond the oil itself.

That value made it a target. Japanese forces landed in January 1942 after the Dutch set fire to the installations, and the city spent the war as an occupied oil centre; Allied bombing flattened much of it. On 1 July 1945 the Australian 7th Division came ashore near Klandasan in Australia's largest and last amphibious operation of the war, and major fighting went on until about 21 July. The city was left in ruins, and memorials to both the Australian landings and Indonesian resistance stand in the town today.

Reconstruction was slow until the oil boom of the 1970s, when Pertamina expanded the refinery and foreign companies set up bases here for exploration offshore and in the interior. Coal followed in the 1980s and 1990s, and the city became the business and logistics capital of East Kalimantan, even though Samarinda is the provincial capital. Since 2019, when the government chose the hills inland for Nusantara, the planned new national capital, Balikpapan has been the main airport, port and construction base for the project.

Few residents can trace long ancestry here, and the city knows it. Javanese, Bugis, Banjar, Buginese-Makassarese, Toraja, Batak and Dayak communities all arrived for work, along with Chinese traders and, for more than a century, foreign oil staff, and the result is an Indonesian city rather than a regional one — Bahasa Indonesia is the common language, and food, mosques, churches and temples come from everywhere. Clan and hometown associations are strong, and people often describe themselves by the island they came from.

The oil and mining industry sets the tone: shift patterns, company housing, safety culture and a professional middle class with money to spend on restaurants and cars. Balikpapan has a national reputation for cleanliness — one of its nicknames is an acronym for clean, magnificent and comfortable — and residents take a certain pride in rules being followed here more than elsewhere — rubbish collection, green spaces and the protection of the mangroves on the bay are civic causes.

Custom is mainstream Indonesian Muslim, tempered by the mixed population. Ramadan is observed publicly, mosque loudspeakers mark the day, and dress in the city is modest even while the beaches are relaxed. Evening life is domestic and food-centred: families along the seafront, coffee with friends, fish on the grill and a slow walk once the heat has gone out of the day.

About 760,000 people live in the city itself, in a strip between the sea and the forested hills. The city has no farmland to speak of and imports most of its food, largely from South Sulawesi and Java. Employment runs on oil refining, gas, coal logistics, shipping, construction and the services that support them, with the Pertamina refinery on the bay the single largest presence; the building of Nusantara has added contractors, engineers and speculation about land prices.

Housing ranges from gated estates in Balikpapan Baru to dense kampung streets climbing the hills, where drainage and landslides after heavy rain are recurring problems. Wages are high by Indonesian standards and so are costs; workers on rotation to offshore rigs and inland mine sites pass through constantly, giving the hotels and the airport a rhythm of their own.

The day starts before six, with prayers, school runs and the early shift; the middle of the day is hot and quiet; and the coast road jams again in the late afternoon. Water supply, traffic and the pressure that the new capital is putting on housing and infrastructure are the persistent local concerns, alongside arguments about protecting the bay's mangroves and the forest corridors that still reach the edge of the city.

Seafood is the reason people eat out here. Mud crab from the mangrove creeks is the signature — cooked in black pepper sauce, in chilli and tomato saus padang, or as kepiting soka, soft-shell crab fried whole — alongside prawns, squid and whole fish grilled over coconut husks and served with sambal, lime and rice. The large open restaurants behind the seafront specialise in it, and the Klandasan market supplies them each morning.

Everyday food is a mixture of the archipelago. Javanese warungs sell soto and gado-gado, Banjar kitchens brought soto Banjar and fish cooked masak habang across from South Kalimantan, Bugis and Makassarese cooks make coto and grilled fish with dabu-dabu sambal, and Padang restaurants are everywhere. Nasi kuning, turmeric rice with fish or egg wrapped in banana leaf, is the standard breakfast bought on the way to work.

Local snacks lean on bananas and fish. Pisang gapit is banana flattened, grilled and covered in palm-sugar sauce; amplang, crisp crackers made from fish and tapioca, are the usual gift to take home, along with mantau, steamed buns eaten with crab. Durian and its Borneo relatives appear in season, and the coffee culture is strong, from sweet iced coffee at a roadside stall to the cafés of Balikpapan Baru.