A weekend in ... Bali. yay!

I just spent the best weekend in Bali - nothing like escaping one beautiful, little under-developed tropical island for another beautiful, bigger, overdeveloped one.

My mate Rob, from Adelaide, told me a month or two ago that he was attending a wedding in Bali for his friend Greg, who was marrying an Indonesian girl. So I invited myself along as his hot date and was the official gatecrasher for the day.

I arrived Fri night and went to a gorgeous little resort in the rice paddies around Legian, where we had some nice food and drinks with the group of Aussie friends and family. Spent half of the night in the pool, which was wicked :)

Saturday morning Rob and I headed for a lovely spa resort and got ourselves a Balinese special spa and scrub treatment, to relax ourselves for the celebrations of the afternoon ... while the massage and scrub were relaxing, we arrived late back at the hotel and had a mad rush to get ready (in about 15 mins) to leave for the wedding. But made it in time, and from the hotel we caught a bus up the hill to the wedding venue.

The venue was somewhere north of Kuta, on a hill top overlooking the sea. You could see down to the beach over the top of beautiful pink and orange beauganvilleas. It was an amazing traditional West Javan wedding, and the wedding costumes were beautiful. Greg works in the oil industry in Kuala Lumpur, and his bride Vita is from an Indonesian oil industry family, so there were plenty of important people there, not to mention that the wedding was totally lavish]. At the entrance to the venue were about ten large, gaudy signs from a range of oil companies, wishing the couple a happy wedding. Crazy!

Being traditional, Greg had to convert to Islam and go through quite a lengthy preparation process. The ceremony went for quite some time - about 3 hours - and involved a number of important religious and family figures. There was even explicit statements of the wedding 'contract' that Greg had to agree to before signing along the dotted line. It was really interesting to witness.

The reception celebrations were great. What I liked about them were the traditions that symbolise different things in a marriage, that are missed out of a typical western wedding. There were also lots of fun things, like the couple and their parents throwing lollies and gifts over their heads to the crowd, which ensured a mad scramble!

The logistics of the wedding were perfect, with the arrival of the bride and groom (in a new costume, #349302) time perfectly with the beautiful sunset. Once they were seated on stage (it really felt like watching royalty, and the wedding seemed like it was mostly for show and status - but I think this is normal in Indonesian culture!), there was a traditional dancing and drumming show which was great as well.

...and the wedding was alcohol free... which for us Aussies was a bit difficult to handle given that the wedding was at 2pm and didn't finish til 6:30. So by the time the food came out we were starving and really in need of a beer... I was just happy with the food - so many things I can't get here in Simeulue: mushrooms (4 types), capsicum (all colours), lasagne, red meat, not to mention ICECREAM (4 flavours, fudge sauce and SPRINKLES!). The only alcohol we had was the rum in the rum 'n' raisin icecream!

Afterwards we headed out on the town in Legian, we were a group of about 10 people. Hit up a couple of bars before the remaining crew (which was only 6 of us by the time we left the bar at 1am) cruised to one of the biggest clubs in Bali - the Karma Sutra. Classic name. There was a quite dodgy cover band on stage, and drinks were expensive but it was good fun getting out on the dance floor and we were a bit of a novelty for the locals! After getting home around 3:30 we jumped in the pool and had a few more beers before turning in around 5.

Unfortunately the fun had to end Sunday afternoon, and the day disappeared due to sleep and a late breakfast!

Bali was ok, but just as I expected. If I ever go back there I'm getting right out of Kuta and Legian and all that crappy touristy stuff. The reason I haven't been to Bali is because there are so many Aussies there, and I can drink in a pub with Aussies back at home. The other side of it is that many of them are old (50+) and gross and picking up hot 20 year old Indonesian girls. Yuck! What surprised me though was how empty the place seemed - I guess it's still a hangover from the bombings, plus it's not quite peak season yet - that's in December. The club we went to was probably only about 1/4 full. Still, I was happy with that - the less drunk Australians the better.

So anyway Rob, if you're reading this, thanks a bunch for a great weekend and letting me gatecrash Greg's wedding. Next time you'll have to make it to Simeulue.

f*@$#(g indonesian airlines, again!

If you thought I'd had enough stuffing around in airports, here's another tale.

I spent another 5 hours on Sunday coming back from Bali... first I had to fly from Denpasar to Jakarta, then Jakarta to Medan before a short flight on Monday morning back to Simeulue (a lot of travelling considering it's not actually that far. About 4 1/2 hours flying).

Surprisingly I made it to Jakarta without incident. But then...

My flight from Jakarta to Medan was delayed by 2 hours, so I paid $40 to change my ticket to another airline and earlier flight. Then when I went to the boarding gate, they told me THAT flight was delayed by 2 hours due to mechanical problems, and wouldn't leave til 10pm - an hour after my original flight. Talk about pissed off! I was ready to swing a punch...

Then, to top it off, considering I had so much time on my hands and didn't want to sit in the boring, dark lounge for another two hours (well, had already been waiting for ages), I went for a wander for a while - and almost missed my plane! In the meantime they had rectified the mechanical problem early, called the flight (in the lounge only) and the plane left an hour early... I had to sprint to the plane, and was the last to board... bloody hell!

I'm sure there will be plenty more tales like this to come!

Good weather for ducks.

Ahhh it's just started PISSING down again, welcome to my life!

It's always raining here, and it doesn't just rain, it buckets down. Good thing is they are intermittent showers most of the time... although it's the rainy season now, so it can set in and rain heavily for a good hour or even a whole morning.

There is so much water lying around, the island has a really high water table and not very good drainage, so it's sodden all the time. Amazing. Some of the houses that have been built for people are constantly surrounded by water.

Not surprisingly, malaria and dengue are a problem in this place.

My usual ramblings

Well thank god it's not raining today. It has been pouring down in this place almost all of last week and the entire weekend, making it very difficult to get outside and do things.

I spent last week in Salang doing a monitoring and evaluation of our WatSan program. Marty (our Monitoring and Evaluation delegate) came over from Banda Aceh and we had a week-long program of beneficiary surveys, GPS-ing of the location of our latrines, meetings with field staff and compiling information. It was good fun, especially going around to the households and interviewing people in the pouring rain, and teaching the field officers how to use the GPS. And playing frisbee with the local kids on the road. In a few weeks we'll compile all our info and make a pretty report for the big wigs.

This week we've properly kickstarted a revamp of how we procure, warehouse and deliver all our WatSan materials, in conjunction with our Logistics and Finance people. The reason behind it is to be more efficient, in order to meet our December 08 finishing deadline. Currently we're only building about 15 latrines a month; to finish on time we have to build close to 60. So lots of work to do.

So in logistics terms, instead of sending over septic tanks and cement and other goodies by the very unreliable Sinabang ferry, and getting a lot of other materials locally (either through suppliers here in Sinabang, or supplied by the community which is cheap but really slow), we're going to get everything from Medan in much larger quantities and stick it on a landing barge that can deliver it directly to our field site, where we'll build a big new warehouse. Then we don't have to truck everything from Sinabang on crappy roads, which takes forever. We only have to truck it from the port to the warehouse and to each household. Should be much faster and more cost efficient. I'm pretty excited at the prospect of it actually, hoping to have it up and running by January.

But what I'm more excited about is going to Bali on Friday - yay! I am gatecrashing the wedding of my friend Rob, well it's not his wedding but he's going, so I'm gonna be his hot date. Should be great fun. I've had lots of fun and games getting tickets back though, because my original return flights were cancelled, bastards... so it's ended up costing me a lot more! Still, it will be worth it for all the good fun we're gonna have, plus getting off this island is always a good idea, and I'm also looking forward to wearing shorts, and just bathers to swim in. Hoorah!

Not much else to add really. Bye.

2nd Nov ramblings :)

I came back from a day trip to Salang last night. Japanese Red Cross organised a big handing over ceremony for their housing and health centre projects, which are now finished there. They invited all the big wigs from JRC, the Federation (or IFRC, which coordinates all of the RC societies), the local construction authority BRR and even the governor of Aceh. The NGOs on Sim were also invited, as well as the locals.

They set up stalls with activities for kids, food to sell, beautiful crafts from Salang to buy and even a stage for local dancing and a singing contest at the end of the afternoon! It was a good day and it went really well. Chigusa, the Japanese delegate who organised all the festivities, has been stressed for the last month, and was looking pretty tired yesterday by the end! But I think she was generally happy with the result.

Unforutnately the govt also organised the official opening of the new Lasikin airport terminal (a very fancy building for such a little island with hardly any visitors!), which meant that all the important people didn't arrive until 4pm (was supposed to start at 2), so a late start meant a late finish.

We are not supposed to travel at night here, becaues the roads are so dodgy, but I just wanted to get home - and I'm glad I did because we have a teleconference with Melbourne office this morning that was organised yesterday! - and by the time we left, which was 6:45 - it had already started to get dark. Luckily we made it back in under 2 hours - which is a record, our driver Misbah went a bit faster than normal!

The head of IFRC is a New Zealand bloke based in Banda Aceh, and he and his daughter (who was visiting on holiday) came to dinner with us Wed night at my boss' place. So it was good to meet them and have some nice Indonesian food and a few bevvies.

We have a week-long Monitoring and Evaluation of our WatSan program next week, which will really help us to know exactly where we're at and how things are going. We have an M&E delegate, Marty, coming here specifically for this purpose. He's a champ too, he's from Adelaide and I did my Red Cross training with him back in 2005. There will be G&T!

In terms of my health and well-being (as you're all very concerned), I'm feeling fine. Not overly tired or anything, just back to normal I think. I've been out and about in the field, active on the weekends, and so far it's all good. Everyone is BA is getting sick though - when I was there this week people were sounding terrble and half of them were working from home (or just trying to sleep it off!). I really hope I haven't picked up something from them, as I've gotta be here next week for this visit to Salang.

Rah! that's all.