this is not a gap yah.

20 million indonesians can't be wrong... plus yogurt kart

iona — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:14:00 GMT

Determined to get a glimpse of all the aspects of Indonesia, Tami and I found ourselves mid-January in the over-populated (20 million people living in a city smaller than the ACT), over-polluted and under-public-transport-serviced capital of Indonesia, Jakarta. Having been warned off by numerous people who apparently hold their lung health as a higher priority than we do, we nonetheless decided to spend a couple of days in the city.

Upon discovering that the 'historic old town' was in fact a concrete square surrounded by traffic-choked streets, we realised that the reason Jakarta has so many shopping malls is because they are the only places in the city in which you can simultaneously breathe clean air and walk around (the street footpaths caused us a few problems- they often have bits missing, which means if you're not paying attention you could quite easily fall two metres into a stormwater drain). And so we did as the Romans do and spent a large part of our 48 hours in Jakarta inside Plaza Indonesia, Indonesia Grand Plaza and various other malls with very similar names.

As you may guess, even the national monument required us to embarrass ourselves in order to make the photo of it semi-interesting.

We also went to Glodok, Jakarta's Chinatown, which I can only say was a bit of an experience (standard produce at the market included something that looked like horse penis but was apparently sea cucumber, and live frogs which unfortunately couldn't be mistaken for anything).

In short, Jakarta is pretty disgusting but it's also kind of awesome, and it's safe to say we were glad we went, although we weren't sad to be getting out of there. I realise that's a very ambiguous conclusion to draw about a city, but Jakarta is just that kind of place. This is one of the only nice photos of the old city:

Next stop was Yogyakarta (also known to us as Yogurt Kart), where Tami and I very studiously enrolled ourselves in Indonesian lessons, for the comical price of $8 an hour for a private tutor each, and set about enjoying the much more pleasant city. With a main road that was apparently meant to be named after the Duke of Malborough and ended up sharing the name of a famous cigarette brand, we decided Yogyakarta was a pretty cool place to be. We met up with some Frenchies that we'd first made friends with in Bukit Lawang, went to a really weird but funny Bird Market, visited the historic but boring Sultan's Palace (seriously, the only cool things there were the Indonesian military hats in the gift shop), and best of all saw Borobudur, the most ancient and impressive Hindu temple in all of Indonesia.

Borobudur is located in a valley near Yogya (just near the famous Merapi Volcano, which has recently spewed ash everywhere), and it was all misty and mysterious when we got there early in the morning. It was really very beautiful, and arguably worth the 4.30am wake-up (please appreciate how rare it is for me to find something worth an early wake-up!).

Our last night in Yogya was a really fun one, drinking with the people who ran our hostel (including Tami's new best friend, a really cool Indonesian guy who spoke barely any English but perfect French, obviously) and some friendly people from Melbourne, Meg and Larry. We went out to a bar with a band playing Bob Marley covers (I am of the informed opinion that most Indonesian bands exist solely to play Bob Marley covers), where we had a really good time. The next morning, Tami and I went for our last lesson at 'school' and in the afternoon, we hired scooters with Meg and Larry to visit Prambanan, another impressive temple outside Yogya. After the usual photo shoots with Indonesian tourists and providing of fake names for them to add us on Facebook (it sounds mean, but do you really want a 12-year-old Indonesian kid from Bandung with whom you have nothing in common knowing everything about you?), we set off back to Yogya for Tami and I to then head to the airport to fly back to Bali that night.

I was on the back of Larry's scooter and Tam was on the back of Meg's, and trouble unfortunately struck us when a man came out of a side-street and Larry slammed on the brakes to avoid him, losing control of the scooter and sending us flying off down the road. Tami and Meg arrived moments later, and we were whisked off to a nearby hospital, me in the back of a ute that had handily arrived at the scene, and Larry on the back of a local's motorbike. We were both pretty scraped up and apparently in shock, but luckily had both been wearing helmets and proper shoes (which probably saved my now-broken foot!). Tami saved the day by speaking Indonesian to all the nurses (who were really sweet and helpful but not much chop in English) and then managing to organise a hasty escape for us onto our flight to Bali. Although it wasn't ideal for us to race off onto a plane, we had Tami's lovely villa waiting for us at the far end and the thought of spending a night in some local Indonesian hospital really didn't do it for me. Tami did, however, manage to procure me a wheelchair and a guy to push me around (some kind of poetic justice for mucking around on wheelchairs in the airport in Sulawesi, I thought) and was basically an all-round hero, while I sat about eating jam biscuits that had somehow avoided being crushed in the excitement.

My genius father managed to get my flight home moved forward so that I could come home with Tami, meaning I was lucky enough to spend my last two days in Indonesia sleeping, eating and reading Stieg Larsson, so life could have been a lot worse! On top of that, Miss Tamasin Young (my nurse/assistant/personal shopper) bravely took a list of presents to buy and hit the shops of Seminyak and Kuta, coming back $100 poorer but a lot richer in terms of Bintang products. We eventually made it home to Sydney in one piece, to the great relief of my concerned parents as well as that of Jetstar who no longer needed to look after me. It became very clear to me that travelling with a friend like Tami (ie. smart, funny and generally good-looking) is not only great fun but also near-essential in the case of injury! She managed on one occasion to both carry ALL our luggage (two 18kg backpacks, two smaller backpacks and a handbag) AND get cross at an unhelpful taxi driver in Indonesian, at which point I realised I would now be bringing Tami on all my future travels.

So this brings me to the end of my blog, which I am now writing on my couch at home with my broken foot in the air, wondering what the moral of the story is. Indonesia is a crazy, frustrating place where I was asked whether I had a boyfriend more times than I was asked my name, and where it's impossible to go unnoticed (less fun than it sounds after 8 weeks!) no matter how hard we tried. It is also a place where being tall, blonde and pointy-nosed means I somewhat amusingly fit the generally accepted definition of 'so beautiful', and although most people could do without the locals calling after them down the street, being asked to hold people's babies for good luck is something I would happily do again and again. Above all, it became clear to me that Indonesia is so much more than Bali. Although there are many intelligent and interested travellers who visit Bali, it saddens me that so few make it any further.

I don't know who the several hundred people who have read this blog are, they surely can't all have been relatives, so I hope it was vaguely interesting. So until next Summer (India? New York? Africa?), thank you for reading it!

XXX Iona

a very long way from anywhere (banda aceh)

iona — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:26:00 GMT

Our last two days in Medan, the honorary recipient of Lonely Planet's prestigious 'Worst City in the World' award (2009), were spent somewhat productively (if depressingly) by visiting two different orphanages, both largely home to children who lost family in the 2004 tsunami (which struck only a couple of hours' drive from Medan). The first was a very basic place, where most of the small kids had bad skin rashes and/or wounds, and the older kids were sharing horrendous dormitories of stained mattresses on the floor or broken bunk beds. The staff were somewhat embarrassed to show us around, and explained that sadly things like fans and clean clothing are much further down their list of priorities than food or medicine. The second orphanage was a much more organised and welcoming place run by an energetic Indonesian-Chinese guy called Wang Sugi, who was a very keen Methodist and firm believer that all his orphanage's luck and success can be attributed to the will of God- we of course nodded and agreed, but it was pretty clear he had put his heart and soul into the place and deserved a fair share of the credit.

There wasn't a great deal we felt we could contribute besides teaching the kids the Hokey Pokey (they got really into it), so we spent the next day buying books, toys and medicine for the far more basic orphanage and then going back there to deliver them. While eczema cream was obviously much needed, the soccer balls were far more popular and we left very resolute in the belief that a couple of hundred Australian dollars will make a world of difference to the kids living there, in a country where $5 will buy a school uniform and $20 will get a new mattress or two.

So, good deeds done, Tami and I farewelled Sinead who is off to Thailand and set off ourselves for the very un-touristy, unfrequented and apparently unpopular province of Banda Aceh (if the fact that it has previously been flattened by a tsunami isn't enough to turn people off, the recent implementation of Islamic law is apparently sure to). It was mostly curiosity and a strong desire to escape the 'banana pancake trail' that prompted us to make the extra hop north to the most North-western point of Indonesia, and to see if the warnings from Bali taxi drivers that we would be kidnapped and forced to marry elderly locals had any weight at all.

As it turned out, Banda Aceh (the capital city of the Aceh province, which is now a kind of autonomous region of Indonesia with their own laws) is in fact a very modern, friendly and religiously-moderate city where for once we weren't called out to by every Indonesian man we passed, and where the memory of the tsunami has far greater bearing on people's lives than any Islamic law, extreme or otherwise. Although they don't exactly make for great happy snaps, seeing some of the relics of the tsunami such as the 'boat on the house' helped us a lot in understanding the phenomenal scale of the wave that essentially flattened the entire city. Of around 250 000 people killed by the tsunami worldwide, 61 000 were in the Aceh province alone.

Nowhere until Aceh had we been thanked for visiting, and it seems that helping people out by overpaying for a taxi ride (and overpay we did) or buying far more bananas than we really needed from a roadside stall was greatly appreciated. Far from being criticised or threatened for being wealthy non-Muslims, people were so friendly and welcoming to us that we wondered why we hadn't spent more time in cities where people want you to hold their baby for good luck, ask you endless questions about yourself and marvel at blonde hair ('You look just like Barbie', an old lady told me- my 6-year-old self was immensely flattered).

The highlight of Banda Aceh, however, was visiting the Main Mosque- an incredibly beautiful building in the centre of town, apparently quite unused to foreign visitors wanting to come inside. After buying headscarves in the market and having a local lady tie them up for us (much to the amusement of everyone in the vicinity), we just kind of wandered in. Although it turns out that non-Muslims aren't allowed in the actual building (getting kicked out of a mosque has now been checked off my lifetime to-do list), we had a wander around the grounds and both came away with a very nice impression of the peaceful gardens and lovely building, as well as the friendly if slightly incredulous locals. The second highlight was watching Tami tackle eating a durian.

The next day, we got a ferry over to Pulau Weh, apparently one of the most beautiful islands in Indonesia just off the coast of Aceh. I am yet to visit 16 992 of Indonesia's 17 000 islands, but Pulau Weh is undoubtedly a pretty amazing place, with green jungly mountains sitting on a bright blue sea. I went scuba diving in the afternoon, which was incredible (a close encounter with a moray eel, one of the very ugliest of the world's creatures, is quite an unforgettable experience), and then Tami and I swam and chilled out at the gorgeous beach at Gapang.

Although we had only 24 hours there before we had to whisk back to Banda Aceh's airport for our flight to Jakarta, Pulau Weh undoubtedly deserved longer. However, we are yet to conquer Asia's most polluted city and it really seemed like the time had come.

Sampai jumpa, Aceh, and selamat pagi Jakarta.

north sumatraaaaaaaaaaaaaa

iona — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:57:00 GMT

Two weeks in Bali behind us and it was definitely time to get out of there and see a bit more of the rest of Indonesia... and to be honest, we were starting to miss people stopping us in the street to take photos.

From Denpasar, we flew to Jakarta and then Medan, in North Sumatra. Having a large American man drop his carry-on baggage onto my head as we left the plane did not get things off to a good start, but when we were met at the airport by the first of many of Sinead's extended family things quickly picked up. We were whisked off to an Auntie's house nearby, to learn that it's completely normal for a middle-class family in Indonesia to have 3 or 4 live-in housekeepers and to have between 2 and 22 guests over for coffee at any given time. After spending one night with the three of us sharing a bed (this is also pretty standard practice in Indonesia) we travelled down to Lake Toba, a few hours south. The smell of the bus station was not to our liking.

The lake is absolutely amazing, and we were also pretty happy to be staying for free in Sinead's great-aunt's enormous hotel, although it's a shame there aren't more people who visit Lake Toba as it's a really nice place.

Incidentally, the great-aunt was exactly as you would imagine an Indonesian, female version of the Godfather. Quite literally. We pretty much had the island to ourselves, and other than a day when we hired scooters to zoom around, we really just swam in the lake and hung out.

After a reasonably entertaining experience where a bunch of locals pretended to be taking photos of a dog nearby while in fact surreptitiously taking photos of me, we got a car back to Medan with a driver who literally did a huge, open-mouthed burp once a minute for 4 hours, and slept again at the Auntie's house (and this time we managed an extra bed). The next day, we headed up to Bukit Lawang, to the north of Medan (although the Auntie's house is nice, Medan is a bit of a hole so we are attempting to keep our time here to a minimum). Bukit Lawang is famous for its proximity to jungle inhabited by lots of orang-utans, so is popular for jungle trekking etc (what is known in Australia as 'bushwalking'). We stayed in a great place called Garden Inn where we ate way too much for three days straight and still had a grand total bill of $90 for the three of us, such being one of the great joys of Indonesia.

Other than a hilarious afternoon spent 'white-water rafting' on a bunch of truck tyre inner-tubes tied together (pretty sure my insurance doesn't cover that one), and a weird kind of Alanis Morisette singalong (you really had to be there), the highlight of our time in BL was our 'jungle trek'. Although there's an orang-utan feeding platform heavily populated by elderly Americans, there was a bit of a lack of orang-utan action so we were really excited when a bit further into the jungle we came across two adult orang-utans and two babies! It was so cool, they were literally three or four metres away from us, and there was only us three girls, a spanish couple and two guides there to see them. Looking an orang-utan square in the eye has definitely been a highlight of Indonesia.

We were pretty sad to leave Bukit Lawang as it's just such a nice place, but with more adventures on the cards our time was unfortunately up. The car ride back to Medan was also fairly entertaining as the middle-aged Muslim driver was apparently a bit of a Justin Bieber fan. Globalisation has a lot to answer for.

xx Iona

back in the yak (and a very balinese christmas)

iona — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:52:00 GMT

It was with great excitement that we checked into our hotel in Seminyak, not because it was particularly fabulous but because it had air con and hot water, two old friends we were very happy to re-discover. The day we arrived was the same day we reunited with Sinead, who had been swishing around Lombok while we were in Ubud.

For most tourists in the south end of Bali (the Kuta/Legian/Seminyak area), the main goals of an Indonesian holiday seem to be:

a) Get your hair braided (mullets are not exempt)

b) Get (more) tattoos (the uglier and more patriotic the better)

c) Get really really really sunburnt

d) Go out at night and get drunk, dance the night away to Rihanna with half of Perth's total bogan population and eventually crash home at 6am having apparently made it there on the back of a scooter... followed by waking up the next morning to discover a cigarette burn on your face (it later turns into a nice scab).

e) All of the above

(While most Australians apparently treat these as a checklist, we actually only did one of the above. Don't worry, parents, it was the hair braiding.)

As Lucy's part of the trip was drawing to a close, we spent her last few days shopping, eating out, lying by the hotel pool and generally ignoring the fact that Indonesia is an exciting and culturally diverse country for a few days. I'm trying to remember interesting things we did for our first few days in Seminyak but other than discovering that the small (and comically inexpensive) Indonesian restaurant over the road did 'home delivery', we really just drank a lot of gin and tonic and generally chilled out. We did have a delicious dinner in a restaurant called Ultimo, where a waitress laid out Hindu offerings around a Christmas tree in a touchingly odd display of religious open-mindedness.

For Christmas, we four girls all went our separate ways- Lucy went home to Sydney to hang with the Burgesses, Sinead flew to Singapore to hang out with her Indonesian Auntie and cousins, Tami lurked around the gorgeous villas her family co-own (more on that later), with various of her friends and relatives, and I marched back to Ubud to take up a generous offer from close friends of my parents for me to stay with them over Christmas.

A generous offer made much better by virtue of it involving staying in one of the nicest houses EVER (see photo), where even the Christmas Eve celebrations involved a suprise troupe of traditional Balinese dancers and fireworks (in the garden, you know, whatever). Having been staying in an OK but not very exciting hotel in Seminyak, Villa Sebali reminded me why I am struggling through a Commerce degree (apparently being friendly and being able to name all the major islands in Indonesia aren't enough to pay for a holiday villa there).

Leaving the villa in Ubud was amongst the hardest things I've ever done, but thw blow was softened somewhat by me being able to now sleep in a spare bed in Tami's family's villas, back down in Seminyak. Their beautiful Saba Villas as a follow-up to the house in Ubud caused me to briefly forget I had told my family I was 'backpacking through Indonesia', which I doubt they will now believe. The photo below is the Ubud villa, the one below that is the lovely Tami sunbaking at her villas in Seminyak. A very hard life.

The only dramatic thing that really happened this week was Tami and I going on a ridiculously long chase to extend our visas from one month to two, which involved four trips to the immigration office (the first was a false start as Christmas Eve is a public holiday in a Muslim/Hindu country, obviously), which was equipped with only one pen in the wrong colour for the forms, and finally required us to drag an Indonesian man along with us in order to add a bit of weight to our pleas for them to give us our passports back! So, after a few days of being illegally in Indonesia we were pretty excited to get that minor detail sorted.

Hanging out in amazing Balinese villas doesn't exactly make for exciting blog material but I can assure you it's pretty damn nice, and things are about to get a whole lot more intrepid as we are heading off to North Sumatra on New Year's Day!

Lots of love xx

'i like your pointy nose' and other adventures in lombok and ubud

iona — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 23:12:00 GMT

The grey weather starting to get us down, we decided it was time to bail out of the Gili Islands. Undoubtedly a really nice place, we nonetheless agreed that we could hang out with drunk Irish people anywhere in the world and would probably be better off without the many crystal-meth addicted locals offering everything from snorkel rental to magic mushrooms to marriage (we quickly learnt that the best answer to 'Do you have a boyfriend' is not 'sort of' or 'yes' but 'No, but I have a husband and three children so don't even think about it').

Before we ventured back to Bali, however, we received an offer we couldn't refuse: a visit to Lombok with a great local guy called Ikram, who was heading back to stay with his family. No travel agent or taxi driver or huge amount of money could have given us the incredible day we had- we drank from coconuts with Ram's grandma and little cousins, walked through the jungle trailed by dozens of local kids who treated us as a game of red light/green light, ate lunch that Ram's auntie had cooked us (we sat on the floor of his house and ate with our hands, as is the done thing, but listened to Indonesian dance music pumping out of a state-of-the-art sound system, such is the anomaly of local life) and rode on the back of his friends' motorbikes through kilometers of incredibly green rice paddies.

The day ended with us all swimming in our clothes in a waterfall with all the village's kids, and chatting with children who wanted to know why I was so white and why my parents were so old (when I mentioned to a girl whose mum is 28 that my dad is 57, she was like 'wait... so he's still alive?'). We all slightly wondered why we'd bothered for so long with the grey and touristy Gili Islands. (this is them below, at sunset. not really so bad!)

Boat tickets to Bali already booked, we reluctantly endured a killer journey (they handed out seasickness pills and plastic bags before we'd even set off) followed by a car trip to take us to Ubud, in the hills of Bali. Highlights of Ubud would have to include the monkey forest (our bargained-for bananas were snatched from Tami's hands by the king monkey within three seconds of our arrival, to the great hilarity of the women we had bought them from), the shisha lounge (there is nothing to do in Ubud at night but smoke shisha, although to be fair it was really nice), but most of all the day we rented scooters.

We'd all been on the back of one before, but for the first 10 minutes of lurching up and down our hotel's driveway we really wondered if we'd made a mistake. However, half an hour later we were all happily cruising up to Bali's central mountains safe in the knowledge that our travel insurance covers all types of foolish activities. We made it, 2.5 hours later, to a beautiful Hindu temple that had barely anyone in it but for a few people who were actually praying. We had a delightful time wandering around in our borrowed sarongs and posing for photos as we imagined Hindus would.

Following up our temple visit we went to a place marked as 'Astounding View' on the map (it was pretty astounding, actually) and took lots of photos of us being mad coolies babes on motor scooters. Or taking arty photos in mirrors, if your name is Lucy Burgess.

One way or another, we agreed that the day we spent with Ikram in Lombok and the day we spent scootering around the roads-less-travelled of Bali were the two best days of the trip so far. And, to top it all off, none of us were swiped by a truck or anything so everyone still has all their limbs. A successful excursion!

Next stop... Seminyak. Bali is about to get a bit unreal.

gili gili gili gili gili islands

iona — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:09:00 GMT

the very lovely togean islands behind us, we spent a day in the chaos of kuta (downtown bali, for those not in the know) 'running errands', which involved getting massages, eating food that wasn't fish or rice (as great as they were, the togeans were not a culinary wonderland), spending my christmas money and appreciating the joys of running water.

the next day, which was last wednesday, we endured a horrendous boat ride from east-coast bali to lombok (think small boat on a big ocean, lots of seasick passengers, and windows that couldn't or wouldn't be opened so it was about 50C on board), and then on to Gili Trawangan, the largest of the three gili islands located to the north of Lombok.

it quickly became apparent that, as ever, the destination made the journey worth it as we took in the great beach, friendly locals and good-looking scandanavians that tend to be the icing on the cake of any great holiday place. until yesterday, we were staying in a homestay run by a couple of young local guys, who are always around with their friends and are we thought were pretty funny. only one or two of them are actually employed there, the rest just 'help out', which mostly seems to involve selling magic mushrooms. they also give themselves hilarious names like blink (after blink 182) and bacardi, the latter of whom has smoked so much weed he can barely string two words together but he makes really good banana pancakes and plays the guitar pretty well so he's good value. anyway, after 5 days there we felt they were getting a bit too friendly so bailed out to a different homestay closer to the beach.

(this is the girls at a seafood BBQ thing, so yum)

gili trawangan is a really nice change from bali- less bogan aussies on a cheap-beer-and-tattoos holiday (to each his own but not really our style) and more local restaurants and cafes, chilled out people and really fun nights out. on friday we went to a bar with a large population of solo indonesian men, who would dance around us really enthusiastically without apparently ever getting bored of dancing by themselves for hours on end.

we came across this really cute little girl eating her dinner when we were on a bike ride and really couldn't not take a photo of her.

lucy and i also went for a dive here, which was not as amazing as the togeans in terms of coral and stuff BUT we saw two turtles which made it very much worth it.

after a few exciting/dangerous experiences with the local rice wine (one bottle exploded in sinead's ear, apparently a regular occurrence) we are playing it safe with more familiar liquors (if you would count indonesian vodka as familiar)... however for its petrol-like taste and milky texture, lombok rice one is one not to be missed. it is still probably less dangerous than the pony carts that stampede around the streets here, transporting everything from overweight japanese tourists to mattresses and chests of drawers. only in indonesia, it seems, do people move house on a horse.

x iona

Photos: indonesia

iona — Tue, 7 Dec 2010 14:38:00 GMT

selamat pagi, sulawesi

iona — Tue, 9 Nov 2010 13:30:00 GMT

with two semesters of first-year indonesian and my selamat pagi's seriously down pat, the next chapter in the secret diary of iona main is 8 weeks in indonesia. with flights to bali so cheap you almost save money, it seemed a golden opportunity to get better at the 'world's easiest language' (thanks, lonely planet) while i am still young and cool enough to be adventurous, hectik and legitimately poor all at once.

the cast:

tami and sinead: fellow followers of our delightful indonesian tutor, deby deborah, and general cool beans

lucy: we no longer wear matching outfits but lucy has known me since she was 10 and has stuck around thus far, making her the perfect final member of the starting line-up. she too won't be attempting the 8-week marathon but will at least be around long enough to get a few freckles

iona: me. i once read another blog that was like 'yeah so neil and sharon just kept going off the whole time leaving me with joe who was studying for his exams when we get back and yeah overall i had a really crap holiday in thailand' and i was like WOAH i hope i don't write like that... or go on holidays with people who go to thailand and study... but in the end i don't really mind because i know my grandma will always read what i write.

SO. INDONESIA.

we decided to take the hard road first and the easy road later, so started our trip with a 72-hour marathon of flights, car rides and boats to get us to the most beautiful place i've ever been: the togean islands, in sulawesi. we obviously weren't desperate to fly on B-grade indonesian airlines more than was required, but getting to airports such as Luwuk (look it up) where the baggage carousel is a ramp that some guy rolls everyone's bags down to a pile at the bottom requires some compromise. my fears about flying with blacklisted airlines was put slightly to shame, however, when the closest i came to injury was almost falling out of the bus that drove passengers across the tarmac (the doors opened really suddenly, i swear)... when the next leg of our journey involved being driven for 6 hours, in the dark, around hairpin bends, on the wrong side of the road. one way or another we made it to Kadidiri Island in the Togeans, AKA heaven, due to it being amazingly beautiful and a very long way from anywhere.

a week of learning to dive for lucy and i, snorkelling and beaching for sinead and tami and drinking arak (local palm wine) for all of us, we were sad to be getting out of there. diving wasn't ever something i had ever really considered (being an embarrassingly poor swimmer and someone who would really battle carrying oxygen tanks around), but the Togeans turned out to be a good place to learn as lucy and i basically had the lovely instructor to ourselves and managed to both enjoy diving and not kill ourselves. there was a pretty eclectic mix of people on the togeans, and we ended up making friends with elderly french couples and a cool swiss guy travelling with his dad, in the way that you really only can when travelling in obscure places.

heading back to bali and then on to the gili islands in lombok was/is our next plan, but we weren't so keen for the awful car journey we'd endured on the way up so decided to head back a different way. we took an overnight ferry up to Gorontalo in the north of Sulawesi, which was in itself a pretty funny experience (for all of us but the donkey on board) and then found ourselves in the Gorontalo airport with 5 hours until a flight out of there and a completely deserted airport (they actually turned off the lights and locked the doors while we slept inside!). discovering a stash of wheelchairs offered some light entertainment until we managed our escape down to Ujung Pandang, and then finally Denpasar.

it was actually tami's birthday yesterday (when we were doing all this travelling), which can't have been fun although she was very stoic, so we celebrated when we arrived in bali by drinking some outrageously expensive cocktails at an amazing beachside bar and finally crashing into bed.

we're off to lombok tomorrow which should be good, my only aims of this holiday have been to avoid sunburn and malaria and i may well have failed on both counts so it can only get better from here! (i'm joking... hopefully. we are actually having a ridiculously good time).

love xx