Tongariro National Park, NZ with Tibor, Mount Doom in the background which we hiked (Lord of the Rings Movies).
Uncle Dave in a park in Wellington.
What pretty ladies!
Uncle Dave on the patio with Hanna. Beautiful old cyprus tree in the background.
What a pleasure to finally meet little Hanna. She's gorgeous and charming!!
Wellington, NZ Botanic Gardens with the whole family. A perfect sunny day!
Sunrise view from Borobodur Buddhist Temple near Yogyakarta, Java Island
Dave with Buddha statues at Borobodur Temple, Java.
Ildi at Temple, Java (We always got robes and scarves to wear at each temple.)
Waiting for our coconut smoothies on tiny Gili Meno island...aaah.
Tiny crab underwater. We got our scuba certifications on Gili Air and even went on some fun dives. Amazing underwater world there, and in Indonesia everywhere we went. Lots of diversity of corals and tons of colorful fish. It was a real pleasure. This picture was from a guy we dove with, but I think for future trips, we'll have to get our own underwater camera.
Sunken pier and scuba diver, Gili Islands
Macaque in Tanjung Puting National Park, S. Borneo (Kalimantan)
Beachfront seats at a cafe on Gili Air.
Banana trees in the jungles of Flores. I loved our 3 a day banana smoothies!
Port town of Sape on Sumbawa from the ferry to Labuanbajo, Flores.
The view into Rinjani's crater from the top of the mountain, Lombok island.
Top of Rinjani Volcano and very much above the clouds.
There were lots of mother orangutans in Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo.
We were amazed at how close we were able to get to some of the orangutans.
This was the second male at Camp Leakey that held my hand...I was smitten!
Komodo dragon at Komodo National Park. The largest lizard in the world. They are 3 meters long and eat each other and their young, water buffaloes, deer and sometimes people.
Stunning view from our hotel room in Labuanbajo, Flores. Milk and journal...am I getting old?
Terraced rice paddies, coconut palms and banana trees in Ubud, Bali.
Buddhist/Hindu temple on lake Danau Bratan, Bali.
Baby macaque, Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Bali.
Lovely jungle flower in Borneo.
Dave and I posing with Ben after hiking with him for a half hour, AWESOME!Below: With a dominant male elephant at the Elephant Safari Park in Bali
What lucky, blessed people we are! We began our journey with a few day trip to Kaikoura, New Zealand with our Antarctic friends to swim with the 300 or so wild dusky dolphins. It was totally worth it and amazing as the dolphins were very curious and even swam circles around us at times. We saw lots of terns there and even a killer whale named Koru very close to our boat. Next we visited Tibor, Dora and Tia and met Hanna for the first time in Wellington. We had a blast! We stayed at their new house overlooking a large park and gardens, had lots of delicious meals (thank you Dori!) and took tons of scenic walks in marshes, along beaches and in forests. We even hiked the Tongariro Crossing in the National Park and went to the top of Mount Doom (Lord of the Rings) with Tibor. It was a wonderful way to gently break into the real world from Antarctic life, thanks very much guys and can't wait to see you in June!!
Our Indonesian trip started in Jakarta for a few days after a free business class trip from our frequent flyer miles. Although it was an amazing looking city, it seemed to be the typical Asian big city with lots of skyscrapers and traffic and people buzzing by on mopeds (a bit too busy for us small town folk). We took the train to Yogyakarta, the cultural center of Java and saw lots of lush green scenery along the way. Verdant, terraced rice fields were the norm, with banana and coconut trees here and there, rivers every once in a while and plenty of volcanoes in the background. We visited ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples there (Borobodur and Prambanan) and got a taste of family stays, Javanese cooking and phenomenal coffee. We flew from Yogya to Lombok island and after a night at a resort on the beach in Sengiggi, took the local boat (read here: boat carrying people, eggs, noodles, fruit and everything else you can imagine) to the tiny island Gili Air. That is where we spent a whole luscious week learning how to scuba dive at Manta Dive and then taking fun dives afterward. It was an island so small it takes an hour to walk around, made for diving and eating. The restaurants were actually thatched huts with pillows and small tables facing the ocean. We would start by staring at the ocean at breakfast, then go diving, look at the ocean some more at coffee and lunch, dive again and watch sunset at dinner. Idyllic for certain! We never got into sunbathing, and I don't think we ever really will...and it was too perfect to sip on coconut juice in the shade, read a book or just watch the ocean. We even went to Gili Meno the small island to see what it's all about, but it was a bit too Robinson Crusoe for our taste. Although I did love the turtle hatchery!
Another local boat back to Lombok and a drive into the mountains to get to the start of our volcano trek. What a view from our hotel into a ravine with wild jungle plants and at some terraced rice fields. Phenomenal! We hiked with a guide to two massive and powerful waterfalls and even bathed beneath them while our guide chopped pineapples for us for a snack. The trek up Rinjani was three days long and should have been five or seven. It was mind numbingly beautiful but equally painful, and admittedly the hardest and most treacherous hike we've ever done. Mostly because it was a torrential downpour for three days, but also because it was straight up and down clinging to roots and it was a great distance to cover (so 14 hour days). Rinjani Volcano did have it's own magic! Unbelievably far views, a crystalline blue lake in the center, macaques by the hundreds with lots of babies, hot springs by a river and an active, steaming volcano in the center. Awesome!
We cleaned ourselves up in Lombok's capital, Mataram, and even enjoyed some local shopping, pizza and donuts and of course tons of Lombok coffee and booked a flight to Sumbawa island, from where we took a scenic drive and a long ferry ride to Labuanbajo, Flores, my second favorite island. That was absolutely a dream and positively my favorite place in Indonesia up until the male orangutans in Borneo decided to hold my hand and look sweetly into my eyes. Labuanbajo was definitely shady just as the American girls described it. It had a rough edge and it was of course poor and run down, but it was also right on the water and very colorful. It was hilly and our eco-hotel, the Bayview, was up somewhere near the top of the hill with absolutely the best view I've ever seen from any hotel! It was a view through lush trees and flowers at the bay, green islands, the town itself, hundreds of boats and water that glowed like pearls as far as the eye could see. It never got old and it never let go! Our first day there we took a naturalist plant tour of the island and our driver would stop and point out different kinds of trees and flowers and spices, like coffee and cacao trees, vanilla and ginger, pagoda flowers and a bunch of plants I've already forgotten. We chartered a boat to Komodo and Rinca islands to see the Komodo dragons, the worlds biggest and strangest lizards. They eat water buffalo and are a full meter longer than me and they do attack people. They're also veiny and gorgeous! Our small boat had a crew of 3 guys and us. As we put-putted along to the islands staring at other islands with gorgeous trees and mountains and pink sand beaches I thought that there is nothing better in the world. The guys would serve us coffee and bananas and of course three home cooked meals, and boy was that young little cook a good one! We slept outside on the deck on a mattress and it was deep sleeping. We hiked on Rinca the first day and Komodo the second. We snorkeled at several places on both days, including off a pink sand beach and with giant mantas and those experiences were perfection too. We did end up seeing wild Komodo dragons, especially a few really young ones which are rare to see as they're usually up on trees, a water buffalo, a wild boar and lots of beautiful birds.
After our dragon watching trip we decided to see some more of the underwater world and went on a full day, two dive trip near Komodo Island. The diving was spectacular! The first dive was to see the giant mantas and we did! Watching them elegantly flutter their wings and open their mouths, look at us eye to eye and being as indescribably massive as they were, I cried into my scuba air regulator, how funny. It was too beautiful a sight! We saw five of them! Some people spend their lives diving and never get to see one. The second dive was off a steep and very rich wall. The amount of soft corals there, ever square centimeter absolutely covered by life was amazing. And tons of green coral, which I hadn't seen before. So many beautiful, colorful fish and soft sea stars, angel fish even nemo fish. And another scenic boat trip home after a marvelous home cooked meal.
It was very hard for me to leave Flores, but we did and flew straight to Bali. Upon arrival we discovered that getting to Borneo was not as impossible as we first thought and we booked tickets for two flights that very day to get all the way to Banjarmarsin in Borneo. The next day we found a flight to Pangkalan Bun and booked a 4 day jungle boat tour through Tanjung Puting National Park to see the orangutans. The boat tour again was just us on a small boat with a 4 person crew, and it was again the most amazing experience I've ever had. Just living on a tiny boat that literally put putters because it has such a small engine, cruising up liquid black crystal river all day, watching the proboscis monkeys, wild orangutans and macaques, exotic birds and even a crocodile! Hiking to conservation/rehabilitation camps everyday, returning to the boat for freshly fried bananas and coffee and besides that three amazing home cooked meals (Dave ate freshly caught lobster and crab and shrimp everyday) and sleeping on the deck, under the stars and a mosquito net while listening to frogs, cicadas and gibbons howling. Very cool, indescribably great and perfect even if the male orangutans hadn't come over randomly to hold my hand. That was very cool indeed! We even hiked with one of the orangutans, Ben, for a half hour. That was just awesome!
We went from Borneo back to Bali and spent the rest of our holiday just relaxing in the "easiest" place on Indonesia. We spent most of our time in the mountains in Ubud, the cultural and artistic center. We did, however, rent a car and drive for 4 days around the island. That was scary but the places we saw were beautiful! Firstly a Hindu temple on a volcanic lake, a botanic garden and the small town of Munduk with Dave's favorite hotel view in Indonesia of a massive field of coconut trees and 4 large mountains with their sides covered in coffee trees. We drove out to Pemuteran where we stayed on the beach and went for 2 more scuba dives (we're now up to 10 scuba dives and almost 9 hours underwater!). The coral was fantastic, especially the soft corals like the fan and flower corals. Very pretty! Both dives had a great variety of fish too and the second dive was Dave's favorite so far. I loved it too! And it was great being back in the diving/beach lifestyle of diving in the morning, catching coffee and lunch and then going back out again. How absolutely decadent! We drove to Lovina on the beach that night so as not to gain elevation until 18 hours had passed after our drive, and the next day took some tiny roads that aren't on any map up into the mountains to a small village on yet another volcanic lake. We did a lot of staring at the scenery there and reading our books on the front porch. The last day of our road trip we drove down on a scenic coffee plantation road to Ubud, but first stopped at the Elephant Safari Park, which was fantastic! It's a park established to protect abandoned logging elephants from Sumatra. Other than riding elephants and seeing them do some tricks, there isn't too much to do other than feed them, pet them and admire them. Our lunch spot in the park was the best lunch view spot ever, facing the pool of water where the elephants liked to cool off. They splashed each other for hours while we ate. It was so wonderful to get that close and look into their eyes. Perfection!!! Our last three days in Ubud were relaxed. We shopped for art, took walks in the morning in the outskirts past rice fields and small villages, ate way too much good food and I got a massage almost everyday at the price of three dollars. Our last day was memorable as it was the most beautiful walk we took on Bali, up Jl. Kajeng past our hotel (Gusti's) onto a small trail between rice paddies lined with palm trees for hours. We eventually circled around to a small organic garden (Sari Organic) that had views of the paddies and surroundings and served some amazing salads and smoothies and coffee. We had a great dinner and foot massages together before jumping into the hotel pool in the darkness to cool off and getting into the car to head to the airport. A wonderful way to say goodbye. Definitely a phenomenal trip and lots of incredible memories!
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