Everything changed!!

Apologies - we've been neglecting the blog this week! We spent a week in Penang (Malaysia), but we'll have to do a post-dated post on that. Penang really is king when it comes to food.

Anyways, our trip has radically changed. Janet is back in Hong Kong working on grad school applications. I'm in Sumatra going solo with just a day pack. This pack is so small that I had trouble packing it for a weekend trip back home. Janet kindly took all of my unnecessary stuff back to HK.

If you've heard of Sumatra before, it's probably because of natural disasters. This island is very disaster prone. Devastating earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are frequent. Perhaps you've heard of Sumatra because of the very strict sect of Islam practiced in the province of Aceh. Sumatra is also known for its diversity of wildlife. Here, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans still live in the wild.

My general itinerary had me flying out of Padang in a few weeks, but apparently an earthquate/tsunami combo just hit the region. Current plans are very fluid..

I'm currently in the city of Medan. According to the guidebook, it's "featureless transit point" with not much to do. This might be true, but its a lot of fun being completely immersed. I'm actually at the point where I can [painfully] converse in Indonesian. People are so surprised to see a white guy speaking Indonesian (in addition to their initial surprise of seeing a white guy, full stop), I have to admit, it's fun.

On another note, Obama arrived in Indonesia on the same day as I did. Its much nicer to have strangers excitedly talk about Obama (who spent his childhood here) than talk about American priests burning Qu'rans. Most of the little food stalls had their TVs tuned in to his speech today. It was subtitled in Indonesian. I was thinking back to any time a foreign leader speaks for an American audience, and realized that it's always dubbed [poorly]. Are we too lazy to read?

Oh, yeah. No more pictures. I don't have a camera. I do have my flip though.. expect plenty of videos and low quality screenshots of the videos in place of pictures.

our fifteen minutes...or seconds

http://www.p-wec.com/news/en/2010/p-wecs_school_visits_with_american_volunteers.html

but what i really think they meant is "p-wecs school visits with north american volunteers"

Kawah Ijen Sulfur Miners

This post is long overdue. What amazed me more than the natural beauty of the crater lake was the daily struggle of the local sulfur miners. Twice each day, they walk several kilometers up the mountain, climb down into the volcano, dig out 60-80 kg of sulfur, climb back out of the volcano, and walk back down the hill. According to Lonely Planet, they make about 600 rupiah per kilo (roughly USD $10 per day).

A miner mentally prepares to descend into the crater

There weren't many tourists, but most of the ones that do come here stop at the lip of the crater and don't climb down the steep path to the lake. Our guidebook mentioned that a French tourist fell and died some years back. Perhaps it happened again, because by the time we got there it was "forbidden" to go down.

Kurang selamat

So naturally I went down. At first I was hesitant, but I really wanted to do it. After all, I thought, if these guys can do this every day with 80 kgs on their back, why wouldn't I be able to? And it helped that one of the miners was urging me to come with him. I pointed at the sign and said to him in Indonesian "less safe," but he shrugged his shoulders, and so off we went. Janet decided to wait at the top, as she's prone to trip on your average sidewalk.

Following my guide down into the abyss.

As we got closer to the bottom, gusts of smoke would hit us. My guide gestured that I use my shirt to breath through. At one point the smoke was so thick that he pulled me to the ground. We squatted there, blinded by smoke, coughing. At the bottom, it was almost constantly that thick.

Just another day at the office.

When we got to the bottom, two guys with gas masks told me not to go further. When they weren't looking, my guide pulled me further. After more than five minutes, I handed my guide 7000 rupiah and headed back up the cliff.

The bottom of the volcano during a very brief moment with less sulfur smoke.

Sulfur smoke is not pleasant. You duck down and hold your breath. You can't see. You can't breath. Your eyes burn. Tears pour out. Your lungs burn a different type of burn than you've ever felt. A sharp, crisp, poisonous burn. And if you're my guide or the hundreds of other laborers, you suck it up and dig out some rocks.

As you can see, there is no high-tech pack to distribute the weight to his hips. All of the weight is resting on one small part of his shoulder.

If you ever hear me complaining about my job at any point in my life, please punch me. Much respect for these guys.

natural instincts

let's say you were walking in the forest with a friend and you saw a 16 foot python would you

a. run away
b. run away
c. decide that your best option is to kick the python and catch it in a bag, bring it home, skin it and eat it

if you chose c, you are correct! particularly if you are a 13 year old boy. DING DING DING DING DING (sound of excited bells going off)

well - that's what our Deepavali (happy deepavali by the way!) open house host family's son did. And he had the dried skin to prove it.

if i was in the jungle i would want him there. just saying.

sleep tight

ari has some suspicious looking bites...a nice red ring on his back.

i guess we'll see in the morning.
but for now we'll just sleep tight and don't let the bed bugs bite (more).

Random videos

Below you can see a guy having a casual cell phone conversation while driving.. his motorcycle! The video quality isn't very good.. I was filming from inside of an angkot (public transportation van).


And here's Bromo (our most recent volcano):

gunung bromo

you're probably as tired of reading as i am of writing...so basically we went to mt. bromo with three other volunteers from PWEC. The views are supposed to be spectacular but we were plagued by rainclouds and sulfur clouds. All volcanoes on Java are being closely monitored for increased seismic activity - hence the additional sulfur smoke. However, we optimistically got up for sunrise and then hiked up to the volcano itself.

And for your enjoyment, here are the highlights in photo form.

the extent of the sunrise

gunung bromo and gunung semeru smoking away

hopefully you can see this if you zoom in, but this is a photo of ari and toby hiking around the crater

the group!

sleeepover!

we're sleeping over at the KL airport tonight but unfortunately they are shutting down at 12:30am and "fogging" for pests. So while we wait for them to close down and relocate us, we paid the equivalent in Indonesia of three meals with drinks or a four/five hour bus ride or twelve pounds of mangoes (you get the idea) for ONE starbucks orange juice in Malaysia. All so we can enjoy the "free" wifi.

So as we're probably not going to find a nice little quiet corner with a mattress to sleep on at the airport - nothing better to do then to blog

Ari did a mini post about kawah ijen, which was beautiful, but the most exciting part was actually the getting there. We hired two motorcycles (with drivers) to take us from our hotel to the base of the volcano - a two hour ride. The first hour went by pretty quickly. Smooth and deserted streets and watching the sunrise over the rice paddy fields was pretty surreal.

By the second hour, the road was very bumpy, you would have thought they planned the road to be covered in potholes. actually, all the potholes had merged and become one giant pothole leading to kawah ijen. So as the motorcycles struggled to climb the steep hill, my motorcycle suddenly died. Turns out, the chain needs to be attached to the motorcycle for it to run. (The chain had broken off and was left lying on the road/pothole)

So the obvious indonesian solution was to get me, ari and ari's driver on one motorcycle. For those of you who know a thing or two about motorcycles the bike was less than 200cc. I think those children Barbie and Hummer vehicles (that run on batteries) have about the same amount of power.

And for Indonesians it's pretty common to have three people on a motorcycle, in fact, it's pretty common to have three people, two chickens in cages and a huge stack of hay, some random building material (most likely a steel pole) and groceries. So one american, one canadian and one indonesian should be no problem!

Aside from dangerous (Ari's feet got caught on the lip of some of the potholes and almost tipped us all over) I can't explain how incredibly funny we must have looked and sounded (my best onomatopoeia of a bike struggling up a mountain in first gear would probably be "nggggggeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh").


But I guess a photo is worth a thousand words. Kids this is only a simulation and please don't try this at home.

(If you zoom in - yes, our driver is wearing flip flops with socks.)

Eventually we discovered that if Ari put his feet on the passenger pedals and I rested my shins on his feet we were able to go more than 30 ft. at a time.

Lastly, imagine ari, me, our driver and the motorcycle flying down the mountain that we had just struggled to climb - avoiding the laughing villagers, the potholes and most importantly the oncoming trucks.

and that my friends is what you call an adrenaline rush.

Pedas

Quick story from the other week.. One the way back from Kawa Ijen, we stopped for food. My eyes were sensitive from excessive sulfur smoke exposure, and the very spicy food we were eating didn't help. Janet, who isn't a huge fan of spicy food, left me the hottest part of her dish to eat. With my eyes already on the brink of tears, all it took was the guy next to me to light up a cigarette to put me over the edge. Tears from hot food and smoke. By the time I wiped them away, I noticed that the entire kitchen staff of 3 had come out to watch me cry. All I could think to say was pedas (spicy). They were undoubtedly thinking that the rumors are true.. white people can't take spicy food.

have you ever

craved a philly cheese steak and taco/burrito with extra guacamole, extra cheese, with chicken pesto linguine (preferably from giacomo's) with a veal parm cutlet on top, maybe some "gravy" to top that off, with some nachos and french fries crammed in there somewhere, a kielbasa with cheese in it, some clam strips and new england clam chowder, a 20 lb turkey, maybe a turducken for good measure, stuffing, turkey based gravy, mashed potatoes, some potato salad and possibly extra mayonnaise for good measure??

...followed by a three tiered cake of gregg's lemon drop, death by chocolate and heath bar crunch with extra whip cream, a few cannolis and erickson's mint yoghurt with caramel sauce...some pumpkin pie and maybe a cherry or two?

these are my notes from almost 30 days of vegetarianism in addition to minimal refined sugar.

i think it's going quite well.