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Indonesia

June - August 2024
A 59-day adventure by Under Roof & Mark Read more
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  • Indonesia
    Day 1–6

    Sanur

    June 19, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ 🌬 28 °C

    Sanur, where Br1aley was mistaken for first my sister and then Franc1e’s mother.

    We made an inadvertently good decision booking a villa instead of a resort. All around the south end of Bali are holiday villas owned by foreigners who have a roster of local staff on standby - the one we booked would be one of the older ones and appears to be owned by someone who loves fibreglass, mosaics, and mosaicking over fibreglass. Did you know fibreglass could be made into beds, tables, shelving, chairs, doors, desks? It was a bit ramshackle but 100% wonderful and perfect for the kids with a pool and a lush walled garden, serviced by a young man who popped in daily to pick up fallen petals and sweep the sand.

    We have been on high alert for mosquitoes since reading about cases of dengue fever being on the rise. The kind of mosquitoes that carry dengue are active during the day according to one source, and during dusk / dawn according to others. I’m sure I’ll be able to find a piece that says they’re active at night too. We found heaps of other helpful advice: Mosquitoes are less likely to bite when you’re near a fan, in air conditioning, at the beach, when it’s raining. Dengue is worse the second time you get it. If you get the same strain. Or a different strain. There is / isn’t a vaccine. We are / aren’t eligible for it. There’s no dengue in this area anyway. Dengue’s everywhere. We’ve done all the reading, and we’ve sprayed everyone, all the time, with the local spray everyone uses here. Still we’ve seen mosquitoes land on freshly sprayed skin under a fan. We are doing what we can, but we (two of us) still have a few bites. Much as the garden at the villa was lovely, it did have standing water around some of the sculptures. This would be banned in Malaysia and Thailand where they are taking more active measures to control the spread of dengue, but Indonesia isn’t quite as proactive. Supervising the kids in the pool meant bundling up head to toe in a sarong.

    We mostly stayed close to the villa in Sanur, so a few beach trips - down a wonderful boardwalk that stretches the entire length of Sanur beach, which was about half hotel frontage with glossy Western cafes overlooking the beach and half local areas with fishing boats, stalls, local eateries and lots of kids and dogs. We are being as careful around dogs as we are around mosquitoes, there is rabies here. Some of the strays are being vaccinated but there’s no way of knowing which dogs are safe and which aren’t, it’s hard enough to work out which are pets and which are strays.

    We were there during a full
    moon and a local kite festival which was based at Sanur Beach, some kites were hundreds of metres in the air which gave us a visual indicator from miles away for where we were staying. Shoals of scooters are the preferred mode of transport for most (not us with small kids and no motorbike licence) and it wasn’t unusual to see scooters driven with one hand on the controls and the other hand clutching an oversized kite like a hang glider. Temps stayed around 28-30 which is on the cool side for Sanur.

    Waterbom is the loveliest waterpark we’ve ever been to - clean with plenty of shade and places to sit. But very expensive! We felt compelled to spend most of the day there to justify the price. It felt more like Singapore than Indonesia, until we saw a few people landing off the speed slides and being bounced metres in the air off their inflatables. We avoided those slides! M0ses was terrified to go down a particular slide, but he also REALLY wanted to. We were so proud when he overcame his fears and went down it - at the end he let out a lengthy yell of victory and relief that he was still alive!

    I confess I am having trouble reconciling the romanticised pop culture Bali with the reality, which is somewhat grittier. There is a lot of litter in the streets and washed up ocean rubbish on the beaches. Plastic everywhere and after years of NZ not having plastic bags it is always a surprise to see them elsewhere. No recycling. Bali’s water supply, for all that it is among the purest in the world at source, is terribly polluted because of the mass pressure on already poor pipe infrastructure. Everyone drinks bottled water rather than filtering, creating more waste, (although if I’m honest even once we filter and purify the tap water it still tastes foul so I can see why bottled water is preferred). Our NZD are very welcome and are making a tangible difference to the lives of the people here but it’s an uncomfortable feeling to also be part of the problem.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    2
    Day 6–10

    Gili Air

    June 24, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 28 °C

    Well, this is just living the dream!! Gili Air is GORGEOUS. Relaxed, warm, easy to get around, there’s coffee. And the sunsets!

    The Gili islands are three little jewels just off the coast of Lombok, east of Bali. Gili Trawangan is the most developed and is known as the party island, Gili Meno is the quiet one in the middle and Gili Air, closest to Lombok, is where we landed. Family friendly and just developed enough. We opted to get a driver to Padang Bai, a two hour drive further up the coast and ferry from there, which reduced the crossing duration by an hour or two. Alas, the car that arrived was patently unsuited to transporting five of us plus driver and luggage. He cast around in vain for a while looking for a rope to tie our bags to his roof, in the rain, when we finally sighed and put Francie on my lap for the journey with the bags taking up the rear seat.

    We decided to bring soft duffel bags rather than suitcases - one each plus a daypack and that’s it. The kids have the 50l Macpac duffels and Mark’s and mine are 90l with convertible straps so we can wear them as backpacks if required. We have already been grateful for our luggage decision several times in the first week. At the ferry we had to carry our own bags down a muddy rutted alley to the jetty, then off again into a dirt road at the other end, neither of which would have been fun with a wheeled suitcase.

    The ferry crossing was rough but not, I’m told, anywhere near as rough as it gets - it’s some of the deepest water in the world after all. Sometimes it pays not to google these things beforehand. The Lombok Strait is an infamous stretch of deep water where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet. In the last ice age, when sea levels were 200m lower and animals freely roamed the Indonesian islands as part of Sundaland the Lombok Strait was still water and separated Australasian from Asian species. This is the Wallace line so called after Alfred Wallace a naturalist who figured this out in 1859. It was choppy. The “buy some drinks” onboard service rapidly changed to plastic sick bag distribution. What was surprising was the lack of screaming and relatively late onset of retching noises. The kids did way better than the adults; sleeping while we clutched white knuckled and the fast boat bucked and lurched in the rough seas.
    Needless to say we made it and it probably was an average crossing for the crew who no doubt had seen way worse conditions. The shipping company cannily gets you to buy a return fare in advance to stop you from bailing and flying back. Let’s just say the return trip is not highly anticipated. Thank goodness for Sealegs.

    Gili Air has no motorised transport so on arrival we hired two drays to take us to our villa. These are called cidomos which is an etymological mishmash of Sasak, Balinese and Indonesian, one language per syllable:
    - ci (short for Sasak word cika = handcart)
    - do (short for Balinese word dokar = pony cart) and
    - mo (short for Indonesian word mobil = car)
    You can hear them coming around the streets because they have a string of bells attached to the cart. They shall have music wherever they go! They also, blessedly, have a little hammock strung under their tails so the laneways (not really streets, some are sealed alleys but just as many dusty dirt tracks) aren’t full of horse dung. Weirdly this is not the first island we’ve been to recently where horse carts are the main form of transport - on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron the streets were very mucky. The horses look healthy (to my untrained eye) but Francie noticed a driver hitting a horse with a stick so we haven’t been on one since.

    We hired bikes to get around - no helmets - and it’s just the best feeling rolling around this little island paradise in the heat with the odd sea breeze at our backs. On the first day we did a long ride while Mark took some work calls and the kids grumbled about the quality of their bikes and walked them instead, but by the end they were riding around the sand like they’ve been doing this all their lives.

    The Gili islands are deeply religious and the call to prayer, which is rhythmic and calming, rings across the whole island from the mosque. For all that, there is definitely a bit of a hippie vibe with ads for trance parties and techno dances under the full moon. We read that it’s also a magic mushroom hotspot, but weren’t offered any “extra toppings” on our pizza. M4rk was excited to see that there was a healing centre around the corner from our villa that offered ecstatic dance, and judging by the noises coming from behind their fence when we went past later in the evening there was certainly at least one form of ecstasy taking place. The flipside of this vibe means eco-friendly and sustainable. Steel straws, reusable bags and some wonderful vegan food. Love it.

    There are so many good things about Gili Air but the snorkelling has been the absolute best. Turtles, right off a beach that we picked at random. Lots of them! Not at all afraid of humans, although it was depressing to see people crowd around them and touch their shells. Not cool. At that point we swam off to see all the other amazing variety of fish and we thought they were probably feeling grateful they were not turtles. In terms of marine life this area is among the most biodiverse in the world - so many kinds of fish, and in such quantities. We were all so enthralled by the snorkelling off the beach that we hired a boat the following day to take us for some more - for some reason we call it nokonoko, not sure where that originated, probably a child couldn’t pronounce “snorkel” at one point. We headed off to the neighbouring Gili Meno and Gili Trawangan in search of some reef nokonoko. Being able to jump off a boat instead of swim out from the beach meant Franc1e could get up close and personal with the turtles, she counted seven! She likes to nokonoko in bursts of about ten minutes so it was great for her to be able to jump back in the boat while the rest of us continued. M0ses would be happy to nokonoko for hours on end, he loves that it’s so peaceful underwater and of course he loves having complete independence about which direction to go. And Br1aley our water baby brought along her waterproof phone case which was worth its weight in gold as you can see from the pics. Off Gili Meno we visited an underwater sculpture designed as a coral garden, which was installed as a way of creating awareness about reef health. It’s a popular Insta spot and we got several fins in the face while viewing. There was also quite a strong current so we didn’t stick around long, but glad we went. Given it’s an art installation I don’t mind being amongst a crowd of viewers, after all I love seeing support for the arts on dry land so it would be hypocrisy to complain about the Insta-influencers here.

    Unfortunately the nokonoko off the boat also came with a small but itchy dose of sea lice, which are not lice at all but tiny jellyfish that swim about inside your togs stinging whatever they can find. Probably better to get them inside your rashie than your bottoms. Franc1e also had a wasp sting at our villa one evening, on her little hand. Classic Franc1e, the child who gets bitten by everything. She’s the reason we paid out of pocket for rabies vaccines before we left NZ. It was panic stations at the time as she was screaming, didn’t know what had hurt her and we couldn’t see any culprit in the dark. Even with antihistamines and hydrocortisone cream it was swollen and itchy for a few days but didn’t stop her doing anything. It’s a bit nerve wracking not to have the instant knowledge of what might have hurt her on her hand, at this time of night, in this town, in this season. We would take that knowledge for granted at home.

    On our final night we stopped in at a tiny bookshop we’d seen in passing, hoping to swap one of the kids’ books for a new one. We were out of luck. Almost all of the books were in European languages - the English section was about the same size as the Estonian section - and the few children’s books in the English section were actually not in English. M0ses found what looked like a graphic novel but was, in fact, a very odd graphic biography of Steve Jobs. He swapped it for a true facts book and took it back to the villa where he stayed up late reading it (“Mum, what’s pot? What’s LSD?”) then declared at the end: “Steve Jobs created my LIFE”.

    We have had such a dreamy time on Gili Air that we’re wondering if we made a mistake doing something so incredible this early in our trip. Pretty sure nothing else is going to come close to this.

    Also: too many videos and pics for one post. I’ll load another post with the overflow.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    Day 9–10

    Gili Air - extra pics

    June 27, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 29 °C

    Overflow pics / video from Gili Air as the app will only let me load 20 pics and 2 videos!

  • Indonesia
    Day 10–13

    Ubud

    June 28, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ☁️ 29 °C

    Thank goodness the ferry trip back from Gili Air was on a far calmer sea. We arrived back in Bali headed for a few days in Ubud.

    We were picked up at Padang Bai by the same driver we’d had in Sanur - a long way out of his way but he offered us a sharp price and we liked his random bursts of chat. En route to Ubud he offered to stop at a small family-run coffee farm for us to visit. He told us, unprompted, about the kickback system for the drivers and tour guides where if he brings a certain number of groups to a tourist activity per year he might get a gift such as a free T-shirt. Such a pittance. We were very happy to contribute towards his annual free T-shirt and said yes please.

    The coffee farm was interesting, and yes we tried the civet / lewak coffee. The civet itself was having a snooze on his little platform (being nocturnal) but of course there was no way of knowing whether the coffee in front us was produced in the intestines of this particular animal. The lewak coffee tasted unremarkable, but we bought some of their vanilla coffee and saffron tea. There was also an elderly fruit bat who lived at the farm and appeared quite happy to be handled (by the owner, not by us!) which I thought was cute until it sneezed and I later spent some time googling whether you can get rabies from being in the vicinity of a sneezing bat. Needless to say there is no definitive answer.

    The owner pressed us on NZ, said we were lucky to live by the sea and asked if we swam and surfed every day. No we said, far too cold. Ahhh he said, that’s why you so white!

    It took an extraordinarily long time to get to Ubud after that. Traffic was hideous and I mean hideous, almost all tourists. We noticed the driver was relying heavily on Google, which wasn’t showing that some local roads are closed at various points during the day. The topography of Ubud is such that if you miss a turn, it’s a very long way around to get to the same place from the other direction. He was starting to sweat and the kids were very grouchy (they were also parroting “wrong way, turn around” in Indonesian on repeat, as it kept blaring out from his phone); an awkward ride. We tipped him more than the cost of a T-shirt, but from now on we’ll be hiring drivers who are local to the destination.

    We had a hot and tiring day down the main shopping drag, picking up only the bits and pieces we needed and stopping for refreshments in beautiful cafes with incredible gardens. The food has been world class. As for the shopping, it is hard for the kids to get used to the idea that we literally can’t carry anything else, so aren’t buying souvenirs. If we buy something new we have to get rid of something else. The kids did end up with a new book each (Steve Jobs was a short term wonder) and M0ses had had his head down ever since. At lunch M4rk said he’d put the book away so M0ses could finish his pizza and M0ses asked could he put the pizza away instead so he could finish his book?

    For us the highlight of Ubud was a tubing trip through caves built during the Japanese occupation in WWII. It was very tame and the guides did a wonderful job faux-scaring and also reassuring the kids. Neither of my concerns (low-hanging spiders and dirty water) materialised. We saw the odd bat flying overhead and Br1aley had a gecko crawl up her ankle, but there were no spiders; the water is very clear and cold as it drains off a lake close by. Both little kids elected to take their own tube rather than share and both declared they’d happily do the whole thing again immediately. Fried rice lunch in a remarkable open air building on the side of the terrace was very welcome, and the kids took the opportunity to pose in the Insta-seats overlooking the deep river valley below. The jungle in the background is on the other side of the ravine. It’s easy to take amazing photos here, but it’s rare not have to pay for the opportunity.

    We are headed to a fishing village next which promises to be the opposite of Ubud: remote, quiet and almost entirely populated with locals. We have a whole month there so the next update might not be for a while! Mānawatia a Matariki in the meantime.
        Read more

  • Indonesia
    2
    Day 13–20

    Sumberkima 1

    July 1, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ☁️ 29 °C

    We are staying for the month of July in Sumberkima, in a tiny fishing village where we are the only non-locals: https://sumberkimabeach.com/beachvilla-ayu/

    Our villa was set up in a community effort as an alternative source of income for the locals since depletion of the fishing stocks. Our local host, the lovely Ayu, has a family house a few doors along. It’s quite fancy as far as fishing village housing goes, but there are several other nice houses along this strip too, a quiet relief because I was anxious about the disparity. It’s a very special spot and I have been pinching myself that we actually made this happen. When I first booked this villa some time ago - a full month because there was a great discount for stays of a month or more - it was our line in the sand; we had a date and a location! Once those were locked in we could work to make everything else fall into place.

    Village life is noisy and peaceful at the same time. It’s a very small village of just one street - all the houses on one side, then there’s a dirt road, then a narrow strip of dirt / trees / shelters, then the beach. It’s a fishing beach rather than a swimming beach, so the boats are all moored directly opposite the houses. The shelters (“bale” - yes, just like fale and whare!) are raised platforms that catch the sea breeze so are nice and cool, and they’re where the older and younger members of the families spend most of their days. Our villa doesn’t have a bale but like all of the houses here our living areas - everything apart from bedrooms and bathrooms - are open air, and there’s a little low concrete fence separating us from the dirt road. This means at all times during the day there are several families living their lives in the neighbouring bales right in front of us, and likewise we are subject to the same kind of goldfish effect. After Penrose Street with its gate and high fence this felt quite uncomfortable at first, especially in the first few days when we were curiosities - children with blue and green eyes! Locals either looked away or rushed out of their houses to touch the kids. After a week it’s kind of nice.

    The local kids are on school holidays (as are we, technically) so we get a lot of HELLO MISTER and HELLO BOY etc when they come past, which is often. M0ses has been very jealous to see them zipping up and down the road on scooters driven by kids younger (or at least, smaller) than him. We also have fishing and marine diesel trucks coming past, as well as chickens, rooster, cats, dogs and the odd cow. There was a great fuss when a chicken, chased by a kid, tried to fly away and flew into our window, knocking itself out in the process and leaving a pile of black feathers - and blood - on our floor. We got the kid to come and take it away and I’m not going to guess where it ended up but Franc1e, not quite connecting chicken the animal with chicken the food, was very upset it had been hurt. That was quite a graphic lesson for her.

    It was difficult to anticipate how far we would be away from things like cafes, supermarkets etc before we arrived, and we got here still unsure what we’d do for transport. Aware there are no rental agencies on the side of the island we considered hiring a car in Denpasar and driving over the island, but looking at the traffic in the southern part of the island we quickly decided that would be a stupid idea. The traffic is honestly mad. We’re also not going back through Denpasar, so returning a car there would be difficult. Everyone else uses scooters but they’re out for us because we don’t have NZ motorbike licences (should have thought of that two years ago) and we don’t want to end up Givealittle-campaigning ourselves back to NZ to recover from an uninsured Bali scooter accident. Plus our kids are not exactly the type to sit up and sit still on scooters. We thought naively we might hire bikes once we got here. Well, we got here (Ayu’s cousin Komang collected us from Ubud) and realised it is genuinely quite remote - we would definitely need more than bikes and in any event there are no bikes anywhere, let alone kids’ bikes. We asked Ayu whether she thought it might be possible to hire a car after all…? She pointed to Komang’s car and said, Can you drive a manual? You can share that one with my family if you like, we’ll use it on the days we need it and you can use it all the other days. Will cost you $20 per day you use it. Dear reader, we jumped at the opportunity. Traffic up here is still a little bit mad, but there’s way less of it. (Side note for lawyers, we’re not insured to drive it but we are lawfully allowed to drive it so would have health insurance coverage in the event of accident. Damage to the car wouldn’t be covered but at our speed / level of caution we’re prepared to take that risk). It’s the only car in the village.

    We made a list for the first week of things in the area that Br1aley wanted to do before she went back to NZ, and set about ticking them off. I suspect the rest of the month will be rather quieter! We kayaked from our door out past the fishing boats to the little floating fishing huts where the action happens - we’re still not entirely sure what action, but they tie the boats up to the huts during the day so something must be happening out there. We took a snorkelling tour to Menjangan Island where there are native deer wandering around quite peacefully and the coral reefs were out of this world. There’s something so magical watching M0ses head out over the drop-off following a particularly colourful fish, a real pinch yourself moment. It looked like something out of National Geographic. The amount of plastic rubbish in the sea was depressing though. The locals say it’s a combination of run-off from the rivers and the currents from the Bali Strait, but it’s hard to tell. There’s much less waste in the north west than the other parts of Bali we’ve seen, but far more in the ocean. Feeling a tickle on your leg in the water and realising it’s a plastic bag rather than a jellyfish was not actually all that comforting.

    Pemuteran is a little town about 10 minutes’ drive from here where we’ve found some really interesting things, including a little turtle hatchery set up some years ago on the grounds of a dive resort after a noticeable decline in turtle numbers. Locals get cash in return for bringing turtle eggs for safekeeping until the turtles get to three months when their shells harden off and they’re ready for release. You can pay a donation to hear about the conservation work, and if you time it right you can watch the afternoon feeding. They had tiny turtles that were only six days old and hadn’t been fed yet, through to some nearly ready for release. A couple of turtles in a separate basin had significant physical disabilities and needed hand-feeding, which the kids were very pleased to do: they just had to hold the fish in place for the turtle to bite it, which was actually more difficult than it sounds. On our trip we are trying hard to stick within ethical guidelines around the treatment of wildlife, but it’s not always easy no matter how much you research in advance. For example our snorkelling guide at Menjangan picked up a starfish and offered it to the kids to touch (we shook our heads no thank you) and dived down deep to touch the turtles himself. And our snorkelling guide at Gili Air had brought along feed to attract a swarm of fish towards us, which he offered to Franc1e so she’d be surrounded. Perhaps the guides were just reflecting the desires of other tourists? But we felt the interactions were unnecessary and were disappointed at such a casual approach. At the Pemuteran turtle hatchery we ran through a mental checklist - observe not interact? Tick. Set up for conservation first rather than as a tourist activity? Tick (it wasn’t exactly fancy). Contact with the turtles only where necessary? Tick. Only professionals in contact with the animals? Well, not quite. Perhaps having the kids throw the fish in the main tanks rather than hold it to hand-feed the turtles with disabilities would have been better. So the hatchery was overall positive for us, but still a bit of room for improvement in terms of animal welfare. Unfortunately there are so many wildlife experiences billed as tourist activities in Bali - lots of big ticket items that the kids would probably have loved, but that we’ve swerved. We did enjoy a guided drive through West Bali National Park though, seeing and learning about black monkeys, macaques (grey monkeys), several species of deer, wild pigs, some massive monitor lizards and the famous and critically endangered Bali starling. Feeding the animals in the national parks is prohibited which means they’re not at all aggressive, just occasionally mildly curious. We did spend days afterwards wondering how on earth Japanese deer got all the way here until we realised the guide had actually been saying “Javanese". Another wonderful experience was our little boat being joined by a group of dolphins on the way to Menjangan Island - this was totally spontaneous and joyful both for us and the dolphins! We were so excited we didn’t even have time to get photos.

    After a week Br1aley headed back on the long trip to Denpasar to catch her flight back home. We were so sad to see her go and spent the day in a very quiet mood. She had written letters to the kids as well as diagrams of all the things she would miss about them, which they read a few hours after she left and it made them cry all over again. She is so much fun to have on trips and often comes up with new and cool things for the kids to do. We will miss her. Although the kids’ demands for Coke Zero have reduced now they don’t see someone drinking it every day.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    113
    Day 20–27

    Sumberkima 2

    July 8, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 30 °C

    Two weeks in Sumberkima Beach and the golden weather continues!

    It has indeed been a quieter week with fewer touristy things, more beaches, and M0ses’ birthday. Our original plan for his birthday had been to take the ferry over to Java and walk up Kawah Ijen for a glimpse of the famous "blue lava” (in reality, blue flames which are a result of hot air combined with sulphuric gas emissions). We missed out though! A series of small earthquakes close to the volcano led to increase in alert level, which means a wider exclusion zone at the summit of the mountain. You can’t see the flames from further away so the trip was off. The guide is hopeful we might still be able to go, but if the alert levels are anything like Ruapehu’s it would be pretty unusual for it to lower in the next fortnight.

    The back-up birthday plan was to take a boat out to a desert island close to where we’re staying and have a picnic afternoon tea there. We made a rookie error though and agreed to have prizegiving (ie gift opening) after breakfast instead of our usual family tradition of just before dinner. His birthday presents included four books, and given he’s been a bit starved of reading material all he wanted to do for the rest of the day was rip into them. By lunchtime he was onto his second book and we knew the boat trip wouldn’t be happening. I made a disaster of a cake out of packet brownie mix ‘cooked’ in a frying pan over a pot of boiling water, as we don’t have an oven. After about an hour and half it still wasn’t cooked so I flopped it onto a plate anyway and covered it with instant whipped cream (made from another powdered mix) which was truly as bad as it sounds. I disguised the pile with sprinkles and candles and wafer biscuits and M0ses gobbled it up quite happily! His assessment was that it tasted as good as last year’s cake, go figure. He chose dinner at a restaurant we’d already been to although he wanted a better seat this time to catch the incredible view, and was pleased when he got the absolute best seat in the house. Happy birthday M1ggy M0ses!

    We did the boat trip out to the desert island the following day instead: Gili Putih is a tiny comma-shaped lick of sand which looks like it would quadruple in size at low tide. In a curious twist it’s white sand, unusual in this area of black sand beaches. It was super shallow close to the island which necessitated a long - and slightly stressful - walk from the boat in knee deep water, trying to watch out for sea urchins and starfish in the seagrass. On the island itself there are a couple of banged up old shelters, a swing, and a bamboo frame which looks like it would be very romantic if you had some mosquito net curtains to hang from it. For the most part we had the island to ourselves! And now we know what we’d take if we were ever marooned on a desert island: ice for our drinks, and more snacks - ideally not the “mystery flavour” chips I had chosen. It felt strange to have such a perfect little atoll right next to such a busy fishing hub - we passed lots of floating fishing huts on the 10-minute boat trip and there was a lot of fishing boat traffic. The locals were probably wondering what on earth was so terrible in our lives that a tiny bit of sand in the middle of the sea was so appealing.

    We are still getting to grips with food here. You may be aware that at home I like to keep a very full pantry at all times. The first thing I do when I arrive anywhere new is head to the supermarket. Here, we couldn’t find a supermarket. We found small superette-type shops that carry a similar kind of range to a large service station in NZ. We found fruit stalls. We found warehouse-type shops that carry home goods with a limited range of groceries. We found shops with unlabelled bulk bins full of ingredients I don’t recognise. The absence of an oven here is a further complication. This has been quite daunting for me. I can’t feed the kids snacks all day, and they’re pretty good with tasting new foods but this is all new and they’d mostly prefer to eat things they’re familiar with. Let me tell you, we are eating a lot of eggs! We also found a tiny bakery where they hand make all the daily bread themselves in the heat and their wholemeal bread is delicious…. but getting there in the car is tricky. So yeah, we’re not starving, but the whole issue of food is a work in progress.

    This is an area where marine conservation efforts have been in place for a while and are having some tangible results. We all borrowed snorkelling gear at Pemuteran beach and flippered out to have a look at the Biorock coral sculptures. What a cool thing! It’s a coral reef restoration project where steel frames have been laid on the seabed inside the bay as a base for new coral to grow. Then they run a low-voltage solar-generated electrical current through the structures (you can see the solar panel in one of the pics) which sounds odd - and how on earth did someone think to try that? - but has been proven to accelerate coral growth by up to five times, and even reverse the decline of previously damaged coral. A small piece of existing live coral is planted onto the structure, and the electrical current causes a chemical reaction creating a limestone-type coating on the steel which helps the coral to stick. Within a ridiculously short period (months) the coral takes root all over the whole structure and inevitably, marine life returns. We were really impressed. Just as impressive, they carry out regular beach clean-ups and have bags available for anyone who feels the urge to pick up the rubbish they can see. There are no public rubbish bins in Bali (unless there are but we don't recognise them? Very happy to be contradicted here!) so this was refreshing. We did our bit.

    We’re nearly a month into our trip, and halfway through our stay at Sumberkima. I had thought we might be bored here; we’re not. It’s wonderful.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    11
    Day 27–33

    Sumberkima 3

    July 15, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ☀️ 28 °C

    One thing which has blown our wee minds is how relatively cheap things are here. We have haggled at the occasional market but generally just pay the list price without complaint because it’s so darned reasonable. At the petrol station, which is fully staffed by a whole team of men running to help you, we took a punt and told them we wanted to put $50 of petrol and they gave us a very strange look. Turns out petrol is $1 a litre (apparently subject to heavy government subsidies), we paid $35 for two-thirds of a tank. Cucumbers are $1. Pineapples are 50c. Icecreams are 80c from the fancy ice cream store in town. Dinner for four at a decent restaurant is less than $40 including drinks, so a main meal is around $5-6 if you pick an Indonesian main and $7-8 for a Western main. You’ll pay more like $60 if you’re eating at a hotel (we’re not). Some of the tourist attractions have differential rates for tourists vs locals - I know DoC does this for hut bookings but it’s definitely worth more widespread consideration in NZ I think. Even the guided snorkelling tours were very cheap - on Gili Air our private snorkelling boat was $120 for five of us for half a day, including all snorkelling equipment, a skipper, and a snorkelling guide. I’m guessing they don’t pay too much in ACC levies or regulatory compliance costs … or wages …. so there’s always a trade-off. It also helps that we no longer have some of the costs we have at home - we could happily live here for months for the cost of rates and insurance on Penrose Street alone.

    Another great revelation has been resort day passes. Pay a fee to use the resort pool / towels for the day, sometimes including use of their private beach and sometimes with a credit for meals in the cafe. We thought we’d landed in heaven when we went to Mimpi resort nearby for $15 each. Beautiful landscaped grounds right on the beach, dive-depth infinity pool, covered shelter with cushions, loungers with as much or as little shade as you need, two thermal hot spring pools (one 38 degrees, one 40 degrees), lunch and drinks delivered to your lounger - all included in the price. And we had it to ourselves all morning! A few more families arrived after lunch but there was plenty of space for all, we stayed for hours. Are we the only folk who didn’t know resort day passes were a thing?!

    We spent some time last week getting the kids’ online schooling up and ready for them to start this week when Term 3 goes back. They’re enrolled in Te Kura (formerly The Correspondence School) as international students which as a State school is 100% free for us as NZ citizens. It was shamefully easy to enrol them given the very strict criteria for entry for families based in NZ, especially for kids who are falling through the cracks of in-person schooling and only have the “psychosocial” gateway open to them, which requires report after report on their learning needs. The modules can be completed online but we thought the kids would prefer printed pages so we had bought a tiny printer to bring with us…. and apparently we packed it into a storage unit (d’uh) in our packing frenzy! So a new printer is on the shopping list for Singapore. And navigating the learning portal has already been a headache so we’re looking forward to our first meeting tomorrow with the Team Leader of the international team.

    One morning last week we were planning to head out after breakfast when a white guy came past on a scooter, peered in and pulled over. He called out to ask if we were living here? No we said, just staying for a bit. He invited himself in and sat down then stayed for nearly two hours just telling us stories about his life. An Australian ex-pat, here for many years. We heard later that the locals thought he must have been a friend of ours, but no it was just a random - and really enjoyable - encounter. It occurred to us that at no other point in our adult lives would it have been convenient to welcome a stranger into our house for several hours at the drop of a hat. The pools and the beaches and the weather are dreamy but the best thing about being here is the time. And the rich conversations it allows. Such luxury.

    Ramona and Beezus stories have been our soundtrack this week as we’ve tootled around the area. What a joy these stories are! Wholesome and hilarious takes on domestic life, kind of like a 1960s version of Bluey. They’re narrated by the drawling Stockard Channing which means we have had occasional interpretation issues, for example re the girls’ aunt: why is Beezus making a potholder for her ant? Is the ant really gay?? I haven’t had any Ramona and Beezus exposure since my own childhood when I remember thinking, perhaps aspirationally, that I was definitely Ramona, not Beezus. Forty years later it is a depressing realisation that I was Beezus all along, which is especially clear now that we have our own little Franc1e, who is absolutely, definitively, 100% Ramona. Highly recommend.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    1
    Day 33–43

    Sumberkima 4

    July 21, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 29 °C

    Final week in Sumberkima and we’re about ready to move on. M0ses is happy to move but Fr4ncie has mixed feelings about leaving. She’s made friends in the village, but, she admits, she does also want to go travelling with her family so … and then she sighs and shrugs. One afternoon at the villa we were just about to head out looking for her when we were shown a video of her sitting on someone’s couch in a house down the street, quite happily munching through a bowl of rice and having a chat, goodness knows if they understood her. We are a bit bemused that such a social butterfly landed in our family but her open and friendly way of embracing the world’s goodness is wonderful to watch. When she’s bored she heads over to the beach to pick up some new treasures (she calls this “scrapping”): a young coconut, some cracked old tiles, fallen flowers. She’s barely opened the bag of toys that she brought with her but will be leaving multiple bowls of her little treasure collections behind. For M0ses too the saddest thing about leaving is that he won’t get to bring his stick.

    He was unwell last week which is always scarier than it would be at home, particularly as he’s not great at describing what’s wrong so it’s a bit of a process of elimination (pun *maybe* intended). For us it's a bit like the feeling you have when your newborn gets sick for the first time and you think, now what? Fr4ncie had a fever a few weeks ago that we were worried might signal dengue (it didn’t, it cleared in a day or two) so we took her into the pharmacy for paracetamol at around 9pm one night - they’re all open until 10 or 11pm. We asked the pharmacist about dengue and she went out the back to bring the doctor through for a chat. We were so impressed. How is it that we can get better health service here in a quiet area of a developing country than we can in Lower Hutt? And for free? So that experience gave us a bit of confidence for if M0ses got sicker (he didn’t, he was fine within 24 hours) but it was still a horrible feeling. We had a few quiet days waiting for him to come right.

    We discovered that not everything in Indonesia is cheap! I tried to send a book back to NZ at the local Post Office - a dusty room with peeling posters from the 80s and a couple of cubbies labelled with local village names - and the official had no idea. He said we could send it from the Singaraja office though (nearly two hours’ drive away) and phoned his friend there who walked him through weighing it, asking me the address etc, then he produced a quote of $65 NZD for the slowest boat to NZ. Non-tracked (which I see on the Indonesia Pos website translates to “untraceable”). Approximately twice the price you would pay NZ Post to send it in the reverse direction, I will never complain about courier pricing again. Yes, he agreed with me, very expensive. Figure I might take it to Singapore and try again there.

    It was also a week of Balinese Hindu ceremonies. Bali is a Hindu-majority island in a Muslim country and while the north of Bali tends more Muslim, we are in a Hindu village. Shrines in all the family compounds and daily canang sari, the offerings to the gods in a little banana leaf with incense and flowers arranged in a specific way. Our final Saturday was Tumpuk Landep, a feast day in the Balinese calendar where machinery and things made out of steel are blessed in a special ceremony, basically thanking the gods that these things exist to make people’s lives easier. We didn’t see the ceremonies but for us this meant the car was out of action because it was off being blessed. It was cleaned up for the occasion and arrived back gleaming, with offerings in its wipers and hanging from its rear view mirrors. When we drove they started flapping against the car and we weren’t sure if it was appropriate to remove them. We saw some beautifully decorated vehicles when we drove through town later and nobody cared that the offerings covered the number plates, there are no traffic police anyway.

    A few days later we were invited to a “baby ceremony”, a kind of Balinese birthday ceremony to bless a two-year-old friend Wisnu - not his birthday in the Gregorian calendar but the fifth time he has reached six months of age in the Balinese calendar (I think?). This will be his final Balinese birthday ceremony before he moves to the less traditional Western style birthdays aged three. Offerings are placed in the family shrine and on the child's bed, including in this case a whole suckling pig. The offerings are blessed by the priest and left there for 24 hours for the gods to feast, after which the family eats the remainder. In truth, dear reader, we were quietly relieved to hear this. The prospect of being offered a serving of suckling pig that had spent a day on a child’s bed in the 32 degree heat was not an appealing one. We were thrilled to be invited to the ceremony but it was just as interesting to be inside a Balinese house and taking part in their household routines. It was a pretty standard house for the area: two small bedrooms off a main room which opens to the front yard, a kitchen to the side. Traditional toilet in the outhouse/s with a bucket and bowl, covered area for scooters to park. Covered shelter out the front and a huge shrine! The family will be moving house shortly to a new build (built in six weeks) as they have favourable loan terms with a 20 year government mortgage. It was a hot day with little relief from the sun and the kids held in there but got a bit scratchy towards the end. M0ses was gifted an udeng, a Balinese hat that he’s kept on ever since (the child does love a hat) and later, Fr4ncie was gifted a traditional Balinese lace top. We had practiced the gracious receipt of gifts (complete with scripts) just in case she didn’t like the top, not being a child known for her appreciation of fancy clothing OR ability to hide her feelings, but to our surprise and relief she liked it.

    Te Kura is off to a good start, building gradually, although we as parents are still in the weeds of the various comms / portals / external websites etc. At this point the kids are gratifyingly keen to do their mahi and are working in decent blocks of time. I’m loving the flexibility to get it done whenever suits us and then enjoy the rest of the day. And also how easy it is to tailor the work to each learner - when the kaiako notices, or we share with her, that they are finding something more challenging, she can review their levels or set extra modules to help with that particular issue. I know, I know, this happens in regular school too, but it feels a lot more immediate and targeted. High five to their kaiako!

    We’re heading over to Java next, travelling by train across to Jakarta with a couple of stops on the way. We’re going to miss having so few people around and being right next to the sea! It’s been great to spend the whole month here and see a bit more of how things work in the village and the area in general.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    Day 43–47

    Malang

    July 31, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ☁️ 25 °C

    We have been trying to tweak our travel days so there’s less grumping, but they're probably never going to be our best days. We broke our trip to Malang up into two days to make things easier: the first day was just driving to Gilimanuk, catching the ferry to Banyuwangi on Java, then a Grab (Uber equivalent) to a hotel in Banyuwangi. I figured we’d be hot and tired so we booked into a nicer place than we usually stay, a hotel on the ocean with a pool. Alas, minor things kept going wrong that added up to a pain in the ass of a day. The kids couldn’t listen to an audiobook in the car as expected because the housekeeper and her family wanted to accompany us to the ferry and we felt it would be rude to play the audio. The kids grumbled. The ticket seller in Gilimanuk couldn’t figure out how to make our NZ passport numbers work in the ticket system. Long wait = more grumbling. When we finally emerged from the ferry, sweating into the Java sun, we discovered the terminal has a Grab exclusion zone. EVERYONE grumbled. We had to carry all of our luggage what felt like kilometres to the pick-up zone, past the non-affiliated drivers shouting at us, on the stinking road - no footpaths - with cars and trucks whipping past at speed. When we finally got into the Grab the driver asked why Fr4ncie looked sad? He said, "wow at six years old she is already travelling the world! I have never been outside Indonesia!” So that put things into perspective somewhat.

    The hotel was nice, the kids had the obligatory first-things-first swim but we didn’t quite manage to shake the irritability, knowing we had to get up at 3:45am for an early train.

    When we got to the train station at 4:25am the following morning it was closed. There were others waiting though so we plonked our things and sat. We were booked on the Tawang Alun service to Malang in Economy class for NZD6 each per ticket, leaving at 5:25am. We knew it wouldn't be fancy for that price (a heavily subsidised service, and almost always fully booked) but when we finally boarded the dismay was real. The seating configuration was 3 across, then the aisle, then 2 across. The seats were bench seats though, not individual seats, facing each other in tight groups of six and four, and of course not built for our chunky Western bodies. It was an uncomfortable seven-hour trip. Fr4ncie was circumspect: “that was an experience”! The scenery was beautiful, skirting Mt Bromo and passing through rice fields. We like travelling through the dusty hen-scratched backyards too, the areas of people's property that don’t face the street but show how they really live. Now that we’ve done a stint in Economy we are thinking Executive class is probably the way to go. Before you ask, that train was the only one that leaves Banyuwangi in the morning and we didn’t want to arrive late in the day, and it only has Economy class carriages.

    On arrival we stopped for a railway station snack to gather ourselves, another tweak to improve the day, before hopping in a Grab. After such a long trip though the snack tweak had marginal success. The kids were tired and still on Bali time (one hour ahead) which meant we headed out for dinner around 4:30pm to a spot right next door to our hotel, the scene of the now infamous chilli incident. I don’t know what made me (and Moses) think it was a pickle but when I said "are you going to eat that?”, it didn’t even occur to me it might have been a chilli. I must have been quite tired too! Dear reader, Moses put the chilli in his mouth and started to chew. I do not have photos of what happened next but let me tell you, it was quite the reaction. Part of his tongue even swelled up and he had a rash above his upper lip where he’d rubbed his lips together trying to get rid of the taste. Of course we didn’t have any dairy or even anything sugary on hand to absorb the chilli, all we could do was feed him cold water to try and numb it temporarily. Needless to say he won’t be trying the “pickle” again any time soon. He describes it as something we will probably laugh about later, but says he’s not ready to laugh about it yet.

    We only had two full days in Malang so tried to spend them doing touristy things, discovering in the process that the city is really only set up for domestic tourism. We headed up into the hills to the massive Jatim Park 1, which is one of three - soon to be four - enormous theme parks with uninspired consecutive names. In its heyday it would have been a marvel! 25 years later, nearly empty on a weekday and with peeling paint and very little evidence that it’s ever been refreshed (let alone maintained), it felt weird and fake and a bit sad. Indonesia seems to be somewhat theme park-obsessed, ironic given there are no large international theme parks anywhere in this country of nearly 300 million. The reviews, all written by Indonesians, talk of Jatim Park 1 with pride. The comments include things like “you don’t need to go to Singapore, it’s all right here in Malang!” or “if you’ve ever been to Sentosa it’s similar to that!”. This is a lie. At the park itself, the Singapore envy showed up in small, rusty tree-shaped structures trunked in planters that looked suspiciously like a hokey copy of Singapore’s Supertrees. We enjoy our lives enough not to entrust them to any ageing and questionably maintained adventure rides but the kids tootled around the kiddie rides, alone, very happily. “Best theme park ever” said M0ses, who hasn’t been to any other theme parks.
    
    After his first taste of tea last week he was quite keen to see a tea factory so the next day we headed high up to the slopes of Mt Arjuna to the Wonosari tea plantation. It is a huge estate that was planted under Dutch colonial rule in 1910. Almost all of the dried leaves are still exported to Europe with Twinings and Lipton its main customers. What a beautiful peaceful environment up in the hills. Again, where was everybody? The pickers had stopped for lunch but we got a guided tour around the plantation and factory, which wouldn’t meet any kind of standard whatsoever in New Zealand. The smell of the factory changed gradually from the bitter leaves drying at one end to the rich aroma of export grade packaged tea leaves at the other.

    Fr4ncie had a backseat nap on the way back which gave us the confidence to go out at night. We headed for the night markets, a kiddie paradise of cheap games and plastic tat. The little boys all sat at the fishing and shooting games and the little girls played at the toy dish washing and cooking stalls. Fr4ncie, like M0ses, opted for shooting and fishing. When the power went out, likely overloaded by dodgy connections, the vendors were ready with LEDs and everyone sighed and sat waiting for it to come back on again. Evidently a regular occurence.

    Apart from the very centre of town, there aren’t any traffic lights here. Instead there are men with flags, sometimes wearing hi-viz, who wave cross-traffic through when it’s time and escort you over the road if you’re crossing. You can slip them some rupiah on the way past. We have come to suspect these are not employees of the city, just random dudes with flags. Tempting to stand out there with a flag and see what happens.

    We have finished Ramona and moved on to Gerald Durrell’s
    My Family and Other Animals. M0ses makes us re-play the turns of phrase that he particularly appreciates so that he can commit them to memory. He said Spiros, the Greek man who sticks to the Durrell family in Corfu, reminded him of the guide at the museum in the theme park: “Did you see that guy Mum? Dad said that guy just wouldn’t fuck off! Dad said that in his best English”.    Read more

  • Indonesia
    Day 47–53

    Yogyakarta

    August 4, 2024 in Indonesia ⋅ ☀️ 30 °C

    If you want to know how to get your kids excited for a 7-hour train trip, I have the answer! Make them sit through a 7-hour train trip in Economy class first, then they’ll be genuinely thrilled to have a 7-hour trip in Executive class. The excitement about having their own seats on the train ride from Malang to Yogyakarta was something else. It was easy and comfortable, $28 each.

    We felt Yogyakarta was a compulsory stop to see the Unesco world heritage sites, so we gave it a week to be on the safe side. Yogyakarta (called Jogja or Djogdja by the locals) is on a cosmological axis so we were expecting something a bit like Sedona, hip modern and new-agey. Hopefully with a walkable central area and great coffee! Well there are plenty of coffee shops but if the rest of it was there, we didn’t really find it. Perhaps we made a mistake in booking an Airbnb in the semi-rural suburbs - this meant a lengthy Grab ride to get anywhere but honestly the things we wanted to see would have been a lengthy car trip no matter what. Eateries were randomly dotted in the middle of other suburbs (not ours alas) with no other eateries around them. The CBD was either a tourist strip of Starbucks and McDonalds or traditional villages, with little in between. We were confused, perhaps we missed the best bits? Either way it was a green city with lots of parks and open spaces, a lot of public art and a young population given the number of universities in the area.

    Borobudur and Prambanan temples were both genuinely awesome. Both were surrounded by a complex of wonderful gardens with picnic spots, viewpoints, information, maps etc, and neither was crowded by visitors; no queues. Really impressive as a tourist activity, as well as the actual temples themselves which were incredible. I’m still amazed that we’re actually allowed to touch them and go inside! But both experiences were let down by the maze of trinket sellers that we were forced to walk through on the way out. They all sell the exact same merchandise. The kids were despairing at the endless “exit” signs only to turn a corner and see another stretch of stalls. It was hard to keep a friendly but no thanks smile on for the sellers when I was unreasonably furious about being channelled through these tiny alleys - I would happily pay an extra fee to go directly to an exit. These were also our hottest days of the trip so far, which didn’t help. The weather app said "31 degrees, feels like 36 degrees” and we felt every bit of it. It’s the first time we’ve all been in the pool at once!

    We matched the temple trips with fun things for the kids: on Borobudur day we also did a open-air Jeep ride around the side of the still-erupting Mt Merapi. For us it was a sobering reminder of the reality of living on the side of a volcano as it killed several hundred people in the last major eruption (2010). The jeep tour included a stop at an emergency bunker that was designed for use against gas clouds and ash, but unfortunately failed to protect against lava, killing two who were taking shelter inside. It is now a slightly creepy tourist destination with flags, food stalls and a giant Kaliarem bunker sign where people take selfies. There is also a little museum containing memorabilia and household items found after the eruption, displayed inside the remains of a house that was destroyed. All of the family members from that house survived, so traipsing through the ruins is less macabre, but their cattle are immortalised in reconstructed skeletons in the front courtyard. The kids thought the jeep ride was just the best thing ever. As a final highlight the driver took us down to a gravel river and spun us around a few times in the shallows, well, deep enough to flood the footwell and leave the adults feeling that perhaps the speed was a little unnecessary.

    On Prambanan day they spent ages riding around the park on their own little ATVs. M0ses is a menace! Hurtling around the park like a little old man on an overpowered lawnmower. We then discovered where the beautiful people of Jogja hang out: Wanawatu is a terraced restaurant on a hill overlooking the city with Prambanan in the background. We watched the lovely ladies of Jogja, wearing clothing co-ordinated with the restaurant decor (it’s a thing), lined up at a specific spot under the vines while their well-trained boyfriends took multiple photos from slightly different angles. I posed the kids in the same shot and it turned out great, so there’s something to it.

    Another highlight was a batik workshop at our Airbnb run by the owner of the house, who turns out to be a lecturer in interior design with a batik practice on the side. He also brought his assistant, a recent fine arts graduate specialising in batik technique, as well as his cosmopolitan daughter, who interpreted for us. Although it didn’t originate in Indonesia, batik has been practised by the Javanese for centuries with a recent resurgence in popularity. He showed us examples of his own incredible work and we really only appreciated it in hindsight, once we tried to make our own. Like most art forms the basic premise is pretty simple but getting to expert level would require a lot of skill and practice. We drew our designs in pencil on the cloth, then dribbled hot wax on the pencil markings using a “canting” tool which performs similar to a quill. The assistant dyed the cloth, creating the pattern as the wax prevents the dye from reaching the fabric underneath. The last step is washing the fabric in boiling water, which melts and releases the wax. Hey presto! Such beautiful cloth designs. It was great to be able to learn from locals who really knew their stuff, and it was a blessing to have them come to the house.

    We chose red and blue dye and the fabric is bandanna sized so the batiks are packed away in case people think we’re about to start some kind of gang war.

    The owner of the house couldn’t help himself after the workshop and started sweeping up all the leaves that had fallen to the ground during our stay. His daughter told me that Indonesians of his generation care a lot about fallen leaves and consider it dirty to leave them unswept, but don’t mind plastic rubbish being left on the ground, whereas in her generation (20s) it’s the opposite. I assured her we didn’t think fallen leaves were in any way dirty! She passed this on to her father who shook his head and kept sweeping. Then after they left we picked up the plastic rubbish they had dropped.

    Heading back to the train station for our next trip we found a number of roads closed for no apparent reason. Ah said our Grab driver, turning around, carless day. Turns out most big Indonesian cities have carless days, or at least carless periods
    of time, where roads are closed and people are encouraged to get out and walk. None of these were shown on google maps so it was an interesting trip to the train station, but obviously there was no traffic so we weren’t late. You might think carless days would be signalled in any one of the travel websites we’ve looked at so far, but no.

    Less than a week left in Indonesia before our visa runs out! Bandung is next.

    Second set of Yogyakarta pics coming in a separate post!    Read more

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