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
