The Balanga Museum (Museum Balanga) is the provincial museum of Central Kalimantan and the place to spend an hour before heading upriver to a Dayak village. Inside are ethnographic exhibits on the region's indigenous peoples — costumes, jewellery, weapons, ritual objects — and outside, in the grounds, are reconstructed traditional buildings.
Labels are mostly in Indonesian with some English. Closed on Mondays. A small entrance fee is charged.
A story
Balanga takes its name from the ceramic jars that Dayak families pass down as heirlooms and use in funeral rituals. The collection covers the major Central Kalimantan Dayak groups — Ngaju, Maanyan, Ot Danum — with reconstructed longhouses in the grounds, original sandung (ossuaries for the second-burial bones), and an unsettling display of mandau headhunter swords. It's the single best introduction to Dayak culture you'll get in the city.