Patrick: My first entry here put me off writing for a while. I was overwhelmed with how much of my day it took to chronicle my day, and so I went sour on it. But today, Sarah told me, “I’d like to write another entry, but people will start thinking it’s my blog, and not ours. You should really write something.” My reputation thus threatened, now I write. This will not be a comprehensive log of our recent travels. I’m just going to describe the creatures we’ve seen, beginning with the mudskipper.

We saw more wildlife than we were expecting to see in Melaka, on the southwest coast of peninsular Malaysia. We went there for history and architecture. It’s a six hundred year old port town that, under its first two sultans, grew to be an extremely important trading center and the seed of Islam in this region. Following its first century, it was successively colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British, none of whom were ever able to match the trading success of the original sultanate with their imported government models. It’s now kind of a small, picturesque town with a lot of good food, but it’s certainly not a pillar of Southeast Asian trade. We knew most of this from the guidebook. But it didn’t mention the mudskippers.

These suckers were swarming the banks of the tidal river that runs into the ocean through Melaka. Sarah, who is the better wildlife spotter between us, noticed the first one. It was jarring. The expressive face of a withered human was peering out of the water, propped up on a rock, its tail end disappearing into the depths. Was it an amphibian? It had no front legs. It had, we convinced ourselves, only fins. It skipped off, swimming across the top of the water. Another one came up and started trotting around on land. This one was confirmation that there were no legs, only fins and a tail. We sighted another, then more. We decided for a few minutes that these were creatures at some life-cycle stage between a tadpole and a frog. A Malay family came by, obviously on vacation too, and we pointed these things out to them. The man gave them a glance, totally blasé, and said, “Fish.” He consulted his wife, then said something like “Gembing.” We tried to express our enthusiasm, but they just smirked and moved on. They did pay some attention to the gembings; the man stamped to scare them and make them stir up the water, entertaining the little boy. Like a dad in Philly might do with squirrels or pigeons. Basically, the message was, these are no big deal.

The first sighting was all at high tide. There wasn’t much room for the mudskippers to run around. But when we came back the next morning, the tide was low, and they were all over the place. They’re really fast, and they come in all sizes. They bounce across the top of the water and then scoot across the land, leaving tracks like plant stems with leaves shooting off the sides - the stems from their tails, the leaves from their fins. Also, like the prairie dogs of the riverbank, they were popping in and out of little holes in the mud, looking around, and generally darting every which way.

They were pretty cute in some ways, and absolutely revolting in others. This is not a clean river, by any stretch. It’s filled with trash, gutter runoff, and, I’m sure, worse stuff that I don’t know about. The mud these fish are rooting around in is basically the decayed effluvia of the surrounding area. It’s gotten me to worry about whether I’m eating mudskipper when I sample the fish curries in restaurants here.

Other sightings in Melaka: a tree strung up with so many lights that at night, it was a virtual Manhattan of screeching birds. I mean, noise pollution and a serious need for a modernized sewer system. Also, a couple of pretty large monitor lizards hunting on the banks of the river as we biked by on our rickety rented mountain bikes our last day there.

After four days in Melaka, we took a bus up to Taman Negara (which translates to simply, “National Park”), where we were supposed to see wildlife. We did, after a while. On our first rainforest hike, we saw a crew of monkeys chilling in the canopy. They were fun to watch until they started peeing at us, then we got out of the way quick. There were peafowl brazenly walking within a couple meters of us, more monitor lizards, and giant ants crawling along the path with us. We came across an enormous centipede, at least 20 cm long, and took a video of its amazing leg action.

We probably spent the longest time watching a family of wild pigs rooting through underbrush and eating leaves. Their occasional grunts seemed so homey and contented, it was comforting. At some point, the mother went off to feed her seven piglets, and we couldn’t go to watch because we would have been in the way of the other four adults charging across the path to join them. We knew what was happening only because of the loud squealing we heard coming from that direction.

Now we’re in the Cameron Highlands, a cool-weathered hill station on the way to Penang, and I imagine we’ll be here for a while. Sarah and I are both recovering from various maladies, and the weather here is just so pleasant, aside from the fact that it rains every afternoon. There is plenty of canopied jungle to hike through, and we aren’t even sweating through our clothes when we’re done. In general, the abundance of plant and fungal life here is just incredible, unrivaled by anything I’ve seen in the US. Everything is green. Every tree has bromeliads and moss growing off of it and vines hanging from it. I guess that’s what you get with lots of sun and lots of water, even at a moderate temperature. Actually, we decided that the plants growing on the forest floors here would be perfect choices for house plants back at home, because they live in low light, at a constant temperature that’s ideal for humans.

We haven’t had as many animal sightings here, but there have been some. There was some weird asian squirrel that ran up a tree in front of us on our first hike, and a few shy lizards. On another hike, some monkeys seemed to be following us around and hooting, but they wouldn’t show themselves; they just hooted and chittered from the branches. We’ve seen a number of cool birds here, including one very small one, maybe a finch, that hopped and looked around so jerkily that I thought it must be some kind of clockwork machine.

It’s raining today, not just in the afternoon, but since the morning. Sarah and I are catching up on our reading and writing. No nature sightings except what we can see out the window.

September 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: The thing about travelling for a long time is that the phrase "once in a lifetime" can begin to lose its meaning. Each day is a new adventure, and every city we visit is a place we are likely never to see again after we bid it goodbye.

So "once in a lifetime" could describe half of every day's activities, technically, and I think that starts to change how I look at the world around me. Each moment of beauty, each surprise, must be fully appreciated as it happens, because there may never be a second chance. Learning to love things without trying to hold onto them is a new challenge, a skill I'm trying to build.

But within all these small once-in-a-lifetimes, there have been some experiences that have stood out, that I have felt truly lucky to have chanced into.

Like last week, high in a volcanic mountain range in East Java, on the lip of what was once the crater of a massive volcano that is now an otherworldly desert landscape called the Sea of Sand, we watched the sun set -- watched it slip flaming red into the western peaks and color the clouds of sulphur smoke billowing up from the craters of nearby volcanoes salmon and lavendar. And then, moments later, we watched the full moon rise up out of the mountains in the east -- a bright orb in a surreal misty purple landscape.

The next morning, we woke before dawn and watched the same full moon set into the peaks of the volcanos to the west, pausing to balance like a glowing marble atop the flat mouth of a mountain before being swallowed whole, and then turned to the east and watched as the morning star ascended through the rainbowed band of pre-dawn light and the constellations faded into the brightening sky and then as the sun come up. And the wild combination of being on top of a mountain, on the equator, on the night of a full moon, all translated into one of the most breath-stopping, awe-striking sights I've ever seen.

So that's what I think I'm trying to get at when I say once in a lifetime. Moments that force me to be aware of the fact that time is passing, that each day is a gift and a chance to witness something incredible.

And, incidentally, I've never been much of a hiker or an outdoorsy type, but this trip to Gunung Bromo -- the national park where we experienced these volcanic sun/moon/rises/sets -- may have turned me into a fledgling mountain junkie. We had been planning to climb Mt. Kinabalu, in Sabah, the easternmost Malaysian province on the north coast of Borneo, anyway, just because I had read that it was not to be missed -- but now more than ever I"m really excited about it.

Meanwhile, the past four days have been spent here in Kuala Lumpur, a city that I knew next to nothing about before stepping off the Air Asia flight on Saturday. There was no set agenda for Malaysia, other than a vague plan to travel around the peninsula and then head off to Borneo, and we didn't know how long we'd be in KL, but figured just a day or two, especially if it was anything like most of the Indonesian cities we experienced -- crowded, polluted, unwalkable, and generally not very approachable. But instead it has come to feel, in a matter of days, like a second home.

We got here Saturday and made our way to one of the guidebook's recommended guesthouses in Chinatown, and were pleasantly surprised to find a place with tons of art on the walls, a shared kitchen, music playing on a stereo in the communal living area, and small but decently lit bedrooms for under $10. We dropped off our backpacks and headed out to nearby Little India, where we'd read there was a Saturday night market, and stumbled onto this astounding array of street food, each stall more mouth-watering than the next. After three weeks of Indonesian food, which was almost entirely delicious (especially the tempeh, the avocado milkshakes, the fried whole fish, and the sambal asli that I got addicted to) but which, honestly, had just started to get a little mundane, I was oh-so-excited to be eating Indian curries and drinking new frozen concoctions and especially to find yummy 12-grain bread that we've been toasting for breakfast every morning and eating with Nutella or black currant jam.

And KL is truly walkable, with wide sidewalks and crosswalks and unpolluted air and some beautiful architecture and very few people interested in staring at you or trying to sell you things just because you happen to be a westerner walking down the street -- so we've been having what feels like a little break from the exciting but often exhausting process of travel. We've seen a few sights here, eaten a lot of good food, met some really great fellow travellers at the guesthouse, spent a lot of time on the internet, and done a little shopping -- including checking out the mall in the Petronas towers, which is probably the biggest, swankiest mall I've ever witnessed.

Ah, shopping... yes, it only took about a month for me to get sick of my four outfits, so I found a couple of cute tops and a salmon-orange knitted shrug at a local boutique, spending less than $20 for all three. We also happened upon a little record store the other night whose selection of US indie rock was so impressive that we decided to ask the guy working there for some recommendations of Malaysian bands, and came away with an album by a band from Sarawak called OAG which so far I'm really digging. They sound a bit Death Cab for Cutie-ish, but sing in Malay.

All this time in KL has been comfortable and relaxing, but it's getting to be time to head out on the next adventure. We'll keep you posted on whatever that might be.

September 12, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: In the internet cafe here in Yogya/Jogja, I took a moment to skim the NY Times Magazine online and came across this personally relevant article, which I thought I'd pass on...

Like the author, I've been thinking about what it means to be an American travelling in a majority muslim country -- in the case of Indonesia, the largest muslim country in the world, to be precise. One of the phrases I picked up from my phrasebook in Indonesian was "...but I didn't vote for Bush." People have generally been very interested and welcoming when they learn that we're Americans -- largely, I think, because we are such rare visitors to this country. But they've also been interested in our take on Bush, terrorism -- particularly in Bali -- and religion. I thought I'd pass on this article partly as a way to bookmark it for myself, and as a way to start thinking about what it means to be a responsible ambassador of the complicated country I call home.

September 04, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: When the homesickness finally hit this past week, it was a gut-punch, a breath-stopping tear in my lungs that curled me like a leaf on the bed, wracked me. It was pain I’d only known before in mourning -- it felt like the awful loss that comes from having your heart broken; it was that same yearning for something that so recently was familiar and taken for granted.

I lay on the bed, closed my eyes, spun out into orbit above the earth. I could see its size, its incredible scale, see the shroud of dark night moving slowly across the hemisphere I call home while outside my window it was broad daylight. I could picture so clearly the dark streets and houses of my family and friends -- the way the light from passing cars will shimmer through lace curtains across the wooden floors and paintings in the dark living room of my parents’ house in DeKalb -- the sound of a police car’s tapped “blatt-blatt” as it pulls through a red light out of the station near our old house in South Philadelphia -- the stillness of dark ocean under bright stars in Maine. I walked familiar streets and familiar rooms in my mind’s eye, longing for them.

It was all I could do to drag myself out of bed again and onto the streets of Bandung, which were not at all where I needed to be in that state. After the cool ocean breezes and small-town friendliness of Kalianda, the hot, traffic-filled streets of this smoggy city choked me, and I had no patience for haggling fares with taxi drivers or navigating a chain of public transit to negotiate day trips out of the city.

After a day in Bandung, the plan we arrived at was to head straight to Jogja on Thursday, but we arrived at the Bandung train station around 9 a.m. only to learn that the train to Jogja had left at 7:30 that morning, and there wouldn’t be another until 8:00 p.m. A representative from the tourist office in the train station came over, intent on selling us a package tour to a nearby mountain followed by a visit to the hot springs in Cipanas. We turned him down -- hiring a private car and guide is way beyond our budget -- but decided to take his suggestion and headed to Cipanas via public bus.

Cipanas means “hot water,” and there are multiple towns across Java named this for their hot springs. In the Cipanas we visited, near Garut, the main tourist attraction is that every hotel room has a huge, deep, tiled bath tub with a pipe from the hot springs constantly flowing into it. We checked out a few different options before settling on a room that we bargained down to about $11 for the night. Not the cheapest option we’d looked at, but it had a bit more light and a bit more space. After the first of several baths, we wandered around a bit, enjoying the quiet and walkability, and practicing a bit more of our Bahasa Indonesia (indonesian language). We were the only non-Indonesians in town that day, as far as I could tell.

Lunch and dinner were both delicious -- we have been eating very, very well in Indonesia -- and after some more time in our private hot spring, we went to bed early. But the calls to prayer that we have become accustomed to hearing throughout the country were especially loud and especially frequent that night in Cipanas, and between them and people chatting outside our room and a few loud cars in the parking lot nearby, I slept fitfully, still pulsing with occasional pangs of homesickness.

In the morning, our trek to Jogja began again, this time at 6:00 a.m. with an angkot (public minibus) ride down the hills from Cipanas to the nearby town of Garut, where we were supposed to catch our bus to Tasikmalaya, where we were going to catch the train to Jogja. But the angkot only took us part of the way there, dropping us off on a street corner in Garut. Asking around, we learned that we were still a few kilometers away from the bus station, and every angkot that came past was crammed full already, people hanging out the sides. Eventually, we flagged down a passing horse-drawn cart that seemed to have space for two more passengers, if we squeezed. I hefted my backpack onto the back running board and squished onto the small wooden bench seat next to two girls, probably heading to school, and an old woman who smiled at me and helped me hold my backpack to keep it from falling off.

“Hatur tuhun, ibu,” I said -- “hatur tuhun” is “thank you” in Sundanese, the local dialect that most people speak in that area. It is the one thing I know how to say in Sundanese, having learned it from our very friendly waiter at Rumah Makan Sari Sunda, the Sundanese restaurant where we’d eaten in Bandung a couple nights before. “Ibu” literally means mother, but is the general term of respect for adult women -- similar to “ma’am,” I suppose. She was charmed, and asked in Bahasa Indonesia if I spoke Sundanese. In indonesian, I told her no, but that I spoke a little indonesian. She asked a few other things that I was able to make out well enough to answer -- where we were going, how long we had been in Indonesia, where we came from, whether we were married. These are the things that almost everyone I’ve met in Indonesia -- at least in smaller towns -- is interested in, so it is the vocabulary I’ve picked up. Ke mana -- to where? Dari mana -- from where? Berapa -- how much or how many?

We parted ways from the horsecart and caught our bus to Tasikmalaya, grabbing a quick breakfast to go at the bus station -- steaming-hot spiced, fragrant rice, curried hard-boiled eggs, and fried vegetable fritters wrapped up in brown paper and fastened with a rubber band. The bus ride was slow going but incredibly gorgeous -- a rollercoaster ride puffing slowly uphill and then roaring downhill on twisting mountain roads overlooking brilliant green terraced rice paddies above a winding river, while dangdut music blasted from the speakers behind us as the bus chugged along. We had to catch a 10 a.m. train out of Tasik, and had been told this bus would get there around 9 -- plenty of time to get from the bus terminal to the train station across town. But 9 came and went, and we were still plodding along. Around 9:45 we finally pulled into the station, where we raced over to the number 8 angkot -- which some fellow riders on the bus had told us was the one to take to the train station -- only to have the driver sit there, waiting for more passengers. There were no taxis around, so we offered him the equivalent of five regular fares (10,000 rupiah, or a little over a dollar) to leave right away, and started our languid progress to the train. In pidgin indonesian, we said that our train was at 10, and could we please drive faster? The driver sped up a bit, getting us to the station around 5 minutes to 10. We had realized in the interim that, between the unplanned trip to Cipanas and the bus delay, we hadn’t had time to go to an ATM in the past few days, and were down to our last 130,000 or so rupiah -- not quite enough for train fare, but the train was pulling into the station. Thankfully, the agent let us make up the difference with $6 US dollars, and we ran over to board the train.

And now it’s hard to believe that was only yesterday. Jogja so far has been a complete change of pace from anyplace else we’d been in Indonesia. We arrived yesterday in the early afternoon, found ourselves a nice hotel (very clean, air conditioning, private bathroom, but no hot water -- but under $10) and settled in. It was immediately apparent that we were in tourist central -- after almost a week of seeing no westerners other than each other and Anita, and of communicating, by necessity, almost wholly in indonesian, we were in a place where menus and room rates were explained in English and where backpackers from sundry nations wandered down every street. It was a weird sort of culture shock.

But I have been enjoying Jogja, mostly because it is walkable, and I value walking in cities so much. Last night, we walked down to a museum that puts on a nightly wayang kulit -- shadow puppet -- performance. We watched episode one of the Ramayana, which was part of what we’d seen performed during the kecak in Bali, as well. And today, we spent most of the morning walking the city -- first over to the Batik Museum, where we looked at a range of examples of antique batiks from the early 20th century onward, and later through the southern part of the city. We have seen some evidence of the earthquake, and talked to a few people about its continuing effects on the area, but the neighborhood where we’re staying seems not to have been too badly damaged.

The other thing that has happened since yesterday is that the homesickness, at least this first bout of it, has passed. I think it helps to be staying in a city where I can walk around, and go to used book stores, and drink avocado milkshakes, and generally have some semblance of a moment-to-moment existence that is familiar and comfortable. It helps to be close to an internet cafe, and to have talked to my parents on the phone yesterday, and to be staying in a clean, well-lighted place.

It will probably be jarring to leave Indonesia next Saturday, a country that has become more and more familiar over the past couple of weeks, with a language that I pick up more of every day. I have no idea what to expect of Malaysia, but I think I’m starting to get my sea legs, to get the routine down -- getting from town to town, finding places to stay, washing laundry in the sink or in a bucket and hanging it to dry on a line rigged in the bathroom or, even better, on laundry lines outside the hotel where we’re staying. I am excited about all that’s to come.

But of course I still miss Philadelphia and family and friends terribly -- so please stay in touch.

Love, Sarah

September 03, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)