Two Trips

Because of a few more classes being added to my workload, in part caused by one of the other teachers resigning, my teaching schedule has filled up quite a bit since the start of the year. Because my teaching schedule has filled up, and I’m actually having to work for the majority of my working hours here (what a pity), I haven’t taken much time to write like I did before. There have been some great changes to my routine in the last few months. I’m settled into a pleasant little townhouse in the Karawaci area, about thirty minutes from my school. I’m back teaching two days a week at the other school in PIK that I was at when I first came to this country. I’m able to regularly attend two different Bible studies that are both wonderful sources of community and encouragement in my relationship with God. Playing the board game Risk with some good friends of mine here has become a regular thing on Saturday nights, and often other days of the week as well. And I’ve got an incredible girlfriend, who in spite of the 10,000 miles of distance between us for the season, has been a major blessing to continue getting to know. Those are some of the highlights and developments in my normal routine over the last few months. Aside from the routine stuff though, I’ve also been blessed with the chance to leave Indonesia on a couple short, but very different trips recently.

Here’s the thing with living and working in developing countries like Indonesia: sometimes the government is a complete mess. The bureaucracy here fits every definition of insanity and as a result, sometimes things like working visas are difficult to obtain. Tourist visas are easy to get on arrival at the airport, but are only good for thirty days. Because my work visa is still in process, I’m now on my ninth consecutive tourist visa. The downside of that is that it’s a hassle, you can’t do a lot of basic things like apply for a driver’s license or open a bank account, and it’s technically ille… never mind. The upside, as I choose to look at it, is that you have to leave the country every thirty days, meaning I’m getting to do a lot of extra exploration of this part of the world, at least partially funded by my employer. Singapore is the usual place they like to book their employees a quick overnight ticket, because it’s the closest, cheapest, and most familiar option around here. I, however, have been getting a bit bored with Singapore after having been there three times already. It’s a nice place, but it’s almost too nice, too clean, too perfect. I decided I would start booking my own visa runs and just get reimbursed by the school for the cost up to what the budget allows for a trip to Singapore.

In the early part of December, I was hoping to be able to use the extended break around Christmas to leave the country and do more than I would have been able to during the school term. Between complications with the calendar and the price of flying around the holidays, I wasn’t able to buy a plane ticket anywhere. I still made a pretty good adventure of it, traipsing all over South Sumatra for a little over a week, but prior to that excursion, I decided I would go somewhere further when I had the chance over the Chinese New Year in February. Darwin, Australia became that somewhere further. Why there? Well, I had been to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia previously, but never Australia. And I found a really cheap round trip ticket out of Bali that lined up perfectly with my time off.

The week leading up to departure saw a number of curveballs thrown my way, like learning two days before that Australia requires a visa to be arranged ahead of time in order to enter, seeing the first leg of my flight and every single other Lion Air flight that night delayed roughly six hours in leaving Jakarta, and finally, getting to Bali around 4:30 am and not being able to find the hostel. All that had surprisingly little effect on my attitude. Maybe it’s not that surprising. It’s kind of hard to complain when you’re sitting on the beach drinking coffee without a responsibility in the world. After a leisurely walk to the airport and a couple hours mostly spent pondering how Bali’s palatial new airport and the abomination that is Jakarta’s airport can belong to the same country, I was on my way to checking the last continent off my list.

My first impression of Australia was how abnormally down to earth and nice the people working in customs and immigration were. Typically, that part of the airport is for the scary people who don’t smile and seem to enjoy the fact that they have the power to prevent you from making good on all the hotel reservations and tours you’ve booked in advance. It was nearly midnight by the time I stepped out of the airport, and there was still a thirty minute shuttle ride to my hostel. Throughout both the ride from the airport and the entire weekend, I kept trying to figure out what I could compare Australia to. It was tropical where I was, yet no tropical place I had been to came to mind. In some aspects, it was a bit like America and even more like Canada, but Canada’s not tropical. I guess I could say it was vaguely like Canada but dropped into a Floridian environment.

The next morning when I woke up, it was raining heavily. It continued to do so for most of the day. Between the six hour delay in Jakarta and the several hours spent waiting out the rain, I managed to finish a 300 page Ted Dekker novel in just over a day. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything planned for my first day in Darwin beyond a little shopping that I was still able to get in, so not being able to do much didn’t really hinder my long weekend. It was just nice to be able to go for a long walk between rain showers in the afternoon and make a few purchases of items that I’ve had little luck finding in Indonesia, like shoes that fit me and Old Spice deoderant. Getting to experience a new country, even in a limited capacity, is still really enjoyable.

Now the highlight of the trip for me, and what I had been looking forward to most since I booked it a few weeks prior, was a tour of Litchfield National Park. Litchfield was about two hours south of Darwin and the journey there included a number of stops as a part of the package. The coolest thing I did on that whole trip, maybe in my whole life, was the early morning “Crocodile Cruise” we embarked upon. Our guide was exactly like what you would picture for an Australian crocodile cruise guide: big barefoot dude with a beard, straw hat, jean shorts and a thick accent, who grew up in the bush with Aborigines. He had a lot of great stories and tons of knowledge of that environment and the dinosaur-like creatures we were there to see. Some of the highlights were: crocodiles only have brains the size of their eyes, they recognize individual boats by the vibrations from the motor, and if they knew that there were people on board (apparently, they just identify the boat as one homogenous unit without realizing that it contains crocodile food), they would quickly be on board as well to feast on us like a big buffet.

After watching our guide feed raw chicken to the crocs with a bamboo pole for an hour or so, we left that portion of the Adelaide River and continued on towards the perimeters of Litchfield N.P. That park is very big, and the landscape is some of the best that the Australian Outback has to offer. We saw some termite mounds that were nearly two stories tall and others that were built in a perfect north-south alignment so as to keep the temperature inside from getting too hot. We saw beautiful waterfalls in multiple places, red stone ridges expanding over many miles, and many of the iconic Aussie wildlife you think of when you think of the country: dingos, wallabies, wallaroos, and a long, poisonous snake to name a few. Getting to channel my inner Steve Irwin for a day was one of the cooler travel experiences I’ve had.

The following day, which was my last in that country, it rained again until the afternoon. When it ceased, I checked out of the Dingo Moon Lodge and walked again towards the downtown area. Though it was the offseason for tourism, I still couldn’t help but feel like the city and the surrounding area should be a much more popular destination than it was. Darwin had a lot going for it: tropical weather, a beautiful landscape, a nice coastline with plenty of fish, and numerous national parks nearby. Everything seemed to be closed by the mid-afternoon that Sunday and by six on Friday. A few bars gathered a crowd, but no more than you would expect in a city of roughly 100,000.

With Sunday being so quiet around town, it was a challenge to figure out what to do with my day. I ended up buying a coffee mug from a souvenir shop and a few more things from the grocery store before it closed. The one main thing I had on my agenda for the day was to attend a church service. I always like doing that when traveling for a couple of reasons: one being that it’s an interesting window into the culture of the place, and two, I love the experience of worshiping alongside people who are completely different than me but serve the same God. It reminds me that God is way bigger than just the few parts of the world and cultures I’ve been around. After my shopping, I walked over to a pentecostal church with a Sunday night service that I had found online two days prior.

One thing I noticed that weekend, was that there really wasn’t much of a Christian influence in Australia. There were a few churches, but not nearly as many as you would expect for a city that size. Bookstores typically didn’t have any Christian books, except maybe the Bible, though there were plenty of New Age and Occult type of books to be found. And when you would hear people talk about Christianity, it was typically in a way that implied it was something from the past that their ancestors forced on the native people of the land, but meant nothing to them today. Because of that, I was very much interested in meeting some genuine, practicing Australian Christians. One of the people I met that night was a middle aged lady who definitely fit that description. A few minutes after she started talking to me, I remember having a thought/ prayer of “I could really use a ride to the airport tonight.” That same moment really, she asked me if I needed a ride to the airport. Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe it wasn’t. Regardless, it led to a couple hours of conversation while I accompanied her grocery shopping and then on to the airport. I heard a lot about the missions work she and others from her church are involved with, and shared a meal and prayed with her and her family during my last night in Australia. It ended a pretty good trip on a high note, before I returned to Indonesia.

One month after my Australian adventure, I chose to renew my visa with a two night trip to Bangkok, Thailand. For a lot of people that visit Thailand, it’s a far away, exotic location that supplies plenty of culture shock. For me, after spending more than half a year in Indonesia and visiting a few other countries in the region during that span, it really wasn’t all that different from what I had grown used to. There were a lot more white people there than I had seen in a while (other than Australia and maybe Singapore), and a lot of the city highlights were geared towards foreign tourists. I even had some bacon before I left that was just as good as any bacon I’ve had in the U.S. I arrived on a Saturday night and after checking in at my hostel, I went for a walk through Bangkok’s Chinatown. It was a neat first taste of the city, and after a long day of flying, walking, and sweating, I was ready for a shower and some sleep.

The one most noticeable difference in Thailand from any other country I had been to previously was that Thailand is an almost entirely Buddhist country. I was unable to locate a church nearby to attend that morning, so I instead spent it walking across the center part of the city and popping in at sites that looked interesting as I went. Most of those sites were temples and giant, golden Buddhas that tourists flock too and locals worship.

Spiritually, it was a heavy atmosphere, and besides that, there are only so many golden Buddhas you can see in a morning before they all start to look the same. So I switched gears. My new M.O. was to simply eat as many different varieties of street food as I could fit down my throat before the day ended. It was cheap. It was delicious. It was a great way to spend most of the day. I got away from the touristy areas and into the traditional markets and sampled fried chicken, Thai sate, juices, desserts, and one of my new favorite fruits: the dragonfruit. Dragonfruit looks like something from Super Mario Bros. and is juicy and sweet with either a white or almost impossibly bright fuschia colored flesh that my phone camera couldn’t even do justice in capturing. The one in the picture below is one of the white ones that I bought in the flower market.

My shoes underwent a lot of walking that day, and by around 4 in the afternoon I had blisters on my feet and wasn’t sure I could walk much further. Still more than a mile from my hostel, I stopped to watch some locals playing soccer on a concrete field under a highway overpass. A minute later, they noticed me and invited me to play. So I put my aching feet out of my mind and joined their game for the next couple hours. It was a blast! Playing soccer (or basketball or any sport really) is another one of my favorite things to do when traveling in a new place. It provides a nice opportunity to quickly connect with normal people from the area, and is also just a lot of fun. I didn’t play the greatest, but managed to make a few nice saves while I was in goal, and just before sunset the game ended and one of the guys gave me a ride back to my hostel on his motorcycle.

The next morning, I ate breakfast, walked back to the transit station, bought another dragonfruit on the way, and was headed out of Thailand after a weekend that went by in a flash. I was back to Jakarta by the evening, and as it seems now that I’m a few months removed, finished with that first season of taking trips every month or two around this part of the world. I really procrastinated in writing this blog entry, and things seem still a little different now than they did then in a lot of ways. My classes have finished until the end of July and I’m preparing to go back to the states to spend a few weeks with my girlfriend. I’ve only taken a short trip to the nearby city of Bandung and an overnight visa run to Singapore since March, and am now more focused on saving money than traveling for the time being. I’m nearing the midpoint of my contract here. That fact on its own astounds me, but I’m very grateful that I made the decision I did to move across the world like this, though it seemed drastic at the time. If anything, it makes me feel like making big, gutsy decisions in the future and following the Lord wherever he leads won’t seem as scary now that I’ve already done something like this. Time will tell if that actually is the case.