Bali Bound

Day 4 Today we've said goodbye to the jungle to visit the village again.  We braved our crazy bridge one last time.  I must say it was getting easier to navigate each time but I do enjoy going places without crazy bridges. us at school We walked along the canals again and had a visit at an elementary school.  The company I traveled with seems to have a feel good aspect about trying to improve the places we visit.  So we left them with a gift of writing books.  Which they were incredibly grateful for.  But then later we found out it was a private school to a degree so maybe they were the only place okay with disrupting class to let the white people sit at a desk for 10 minutes. They kept telling us that the kids were excited to see us but it was the teachers that were far more excited to see us.  They kept chatting with us all after our visit peppering us with questions about where we were from, and what have we seen and where are we going. ...

Day 3 Today was a switch up for breakfast.  Instead of our usual "American" breakfast of eggs and toast with fruit we could choose pancakes.  They were fairly good but not the pancakes of home.  We did get some chocolate sauce with them as well.  Most amusingly is that everything in this restaurant is served on banana leaves.  Every meal we eat here has a banana leaf liner.  Which amuses me.  I suppose it's far less dishes with doing it this way. Since the primary reason of visiting Indonesia was for the orangutans and komodo dragons we did get the chance for a  second hike today.  It was longer and deeper into the jungle.  It was a 6 hour trek with a bit of a loop and starting and finishing on the same trail as yesterday. The rain from the previous afternoon made things a bit more slick.  The longer trail is just an offshoot of the main trail we took yesterday.  The main trail goes to the old feeding platform which we d...

Day 2 So it's really day 4 of vacation for me if you include all my travel days. Ha ha.  It's our first day of the trip without any travel so we have the entire day ahead of us for excitement! The ecolodge we are staying at is right on the edge of Gunung Leuser national park, home of the Sumatran Orangutan.  It was originally a conservation site with a rehab facility where after they were released they were still regularily fed.  They have closed this in the recent years and have a new location south of us where I don't think the tourists visit.  Due to the history of the area about 30% of the orangutans are semi wild.  Where they can survive on their own but can smell our food and will approach humans easily. It was an earlier start for our group.  We had 3 guides altogether.  Lili was our main guide for our stay at Bukit Lawang.  The one thing I never did figure out is who exactly these guys worked for.  As you'll learn in the coming...

Travel Journey Well I'm almost 2 flights out of 12 down!  I never really realized how far away Indonesia actually is from me.  Many of the connections from Canada go through Hong Kong which means a long layover in Vancouver before I even leave the country.  I thought that a break during the travel would be a nice treat. And it truly was.  As well I was a bit concerned with making sure I made all my connections to meet up with the group in time. When we land in Indonesia we land in Medan, in Sumatra, and then depart directly from the airport to Bukit Lawang for our 3 night stay.  It's a 4 hour drive and if I miss the group at the airport I have to find my own way to the hotel. I'm not sure if anyone has heard but I've been getting a lot of random Indonesia stories in the news.  Last week there was a man in Indonesia who was killed and eaten by a python.  I would like to say that this was on a distant island but before this incident the last victi...

Well I've arrived back in london for my break before continuing along home.  We had a good few days in ubud.  There wasn't so much a lot to do there to justify the amount of time we were there but it was nice to take it easy. I head home tomorrow and am hoping to start the full blogs in the next couple days.  Depends on how the jetlag is hitting me when I get home.  14 hours is a bit of an adjustment.

I'm getting a bit tired on the trip these days.  We have one of the group who complains every morning about how poor they slept.  I drop like the dead every night. Today we went to a volcano caldera hike.  At first we were excited for the fact we only had to go down and the bus would meet us at the end.  But it was a brutal and steep winding trail down the cliff side.  But we made it down,  and the lava field was a sight to see. We also toured 2 other temples one which you could do the water cleansing ceremony but it was filled with hundreds of people so nobody was that interested.  And the second involved 150 steps down and then back up.  I miss flat Alberta a bit today. Tomorrow we are doing a private tour and heading to the hard Rock Cafe so Terry can get his pin and see a bit more of the island.  And then just a part day and the journey home starts.

We have survived the boat!  It went quite well and we saw a lot of dragons  and did a lot of snorkeling too.  Terry has become a pro after never having snorkeled before. I'm a bit red which doesn't surprise me even a little bit.  But overall we had a great experience on the boat and it was a great time.