Rwandan roads are at least as good as those in the US, so I’m starting this post from the third row of seats in our 10-passenger van as we drive the two final hours to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. We crossed the border with Uganda a few minutes ago. Writing on the Ugandan byways, which range from good (occasionally) to abysmal (far too common), is pretty much impossible, given the jouncing. Off the road, our three and a half days in Uganda were so packed I couldn’t find a spare minute to get on my iPad when the sun was up. By the time it set, I’d run out of gas.
But I can summarize what we did.
We slogged out of Kampala through mind-bending traffic…
…then moved westward across the country to finally struggle up the broken dirt roads that lead to the village of Nyakagyesi. The trip ate up ten and a half hours — pretty much all of Monday.
Wednesday we devoted to meeting with the grandmother groups and their members who are receiving micro loans funded by Women’s Empowerment, the San Diego organization for which Steve and I serve as liaisons.
Thursday we toured the first primary school built by the Nyaka Foundation, its beautiful secondary school, and its health center, then we met with yet another set of grandmothers, these specializing in making jewelry, baskets, and other handicrafts.
After that we drove a couple of hours to Buhoma, where you can catch glimpses of the mountains on the other side of the border in Congo. Buhoma is a base for gorilla trekking, but everyone in our group had already done that (Jose and Mari two weeks ago; Steve and I in 2013.) Instead we paid a quick but fun visit to the office of a non-profit organization founded and run (by a woman I know in San Diego) to help the desperately poor local Batwa community.
The setting for all these activities has been a landscape that’s among the most beautiful on earth. A dozen shades of vibrant green, the land is all rugged mountains intermixed with verdant valleys and reddish soil so rich it produces almost every crop you can think of.
This morning an unexpected treat was when our drive to the Rwandan border took us over an 8000-foot pass in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (today in fact penetrated by a fairly smooth dirt road.) This forest, home not just to mountain gorillas but also forest elephants, is 100 million years old. Because it didn’t freeze during the last Ice Age, it harbors fantastic biological diversity. We didn’t see any forest elephants on our passage but Deus, our driver, pointed out fresh deposits of their droppings on the road.
This was our fourth visit to Uganda, and another landscape, an invisible one, has also been coming into focus over the past ten years. It’s the network of relationships we’ve acquired. Some are with people we’ve come to love, like Jennifer Nantale, head of the whole Nyaka organization in Uganda and one of the smartest, toughest women I’ve ever met.
Or Sam Mugisha, the remarkable guy who in his youth jumped at a chance to travel to Japan, became fluent in Japanese, and returned home to start a travel business catering to visitors speaking that language. (He’s also been the outfitter for all our WE trips.)
Dozens upon dozens of encounters with various individuals have been more fleeting but still vivid. Some fade quickly, but they’re still part of the tapestry composed of all the warm, kind, hard-working people we’ve gotten to know here. The impression made by others remains sharp for longer, like Norah, whom we met her early Thursday afternoon.
Norah is a 72 widow who’s currently raising four grandchildren ranging in age from 12 to 4. She greeted us with a warm smile and explained that she joined the Kyepatiko granny group four years ago. Now she’s the chairperson. Over the years she’s gotten two loans from the group, the most recent one for 500,000 shillings (about $133). She combined that money with the 3 million shillings she had saved from her coffee crop and used the money to buy a cow and calf. When the calf was a baby, Norah was getting 5 liters of milk a day that she could sell for about 37 cents a liter. But now that the calf has grown, it consumes all its mother’s milk. Still, she had bred the cow about a month before our visit, and she was hoping to have a birth in about 8 months. She would then sell one of the calves.
Norah has a warm and confident presence, and she led us to the back of her substantial house to the clean and well-organized enclosure she has built for her cow and calf.
Besides her fledgling dairy business, Norah has also built up an apiary; today it houses 50 beehives. We couldn’t visit it because the bees would sting us during the day. (Norah and her family collect their honey at night when the insects are sleeping.) It’s a good business. The grandmother can charge about $68 for 5 liters of honey. It adds up to more than $500 over the course of a year. Still Norah said she wants to develop the market further.
The path to the apiary passed through healthy coffee trees laden with berries. And Norah also seemed proud of her field of emerald spears of elephant grass. She harvests it to feed to the dairy animals (which can’t just wander around, munching other people’s crops.)
Later, we watched Norah direct the grandmother group meeting. She commands attention with ease. Reflecting on our meeting with her at dinner a few nights later, Jose and Mari and Steve and I agreed she was hard to forget. “If she were in the US, she’s be the CEO at some big corporation,” someone said.
But I have to confess: my attention is drifting away from all that. It’s now Saturday morning and in a few minutes Steve and I will board our flight to Harare. Compared to the cozy familiarity of Uganda, Zimbabwe is terra incognito.
That’s what Steve and I will be doing Friday morning (9/15): buckling up as we take off on perhaps our most ambitious adventure.
It looked like the race would take place at some course near the sea.
The town hall was built in 1627.
That building with the red tile roof now houses the Cafe Batavia, where we ate dinner.
In a different latitude we might have hiked the 2-3 miles from there to central Jakarta, but the heat and humidity made that unthinkable.
Instead we enjoyed a tuk-tuk ride that gave us insight into Jakarta’s infamous traffic.
We abandoned our plans to climb to top when we learned it would probably take three hours to get up there, the line of locals already was that long.
The nearby national museum was less crowded. We could have spent hours, had we more time and energy but instead mostly marveled at the galleries focusing on Indonesia’s paleoanthropology. Somehow homonids who walked upright made their way from Africa to these islands a million and a half years ago. How did that happen?
It was a bit before 7 pm, and people were wandering into the square and plopping down on the stones. You could feel all the energy pulsing through the place, Steve insisted. And it emanated from some of the sweetest people we’ve met anywhere.
Still it all looked extraordinarily convivial. Little kids tossed lighted twirling things into the air or blew bubbles. Their parents snacked on chips and drank soda. I saw a few folks getting their pictures taken with the living statues.
I also saw a bunch of the wannabe photo props bored by the lack of business.
PS: I shot this from my window seat on the plane going into Jakarta as we were flying somewhere over Borneo. But it’s the closest we got to any big geological events. We didn’t feel so much as a small jolt. That was fine with me too.
The news was discouraging when we landed on Rinca Island Tuesday afternoon. No one had spotted any Komodo dragons that entire day — nor the day before. I tried to resign myself to the same fate. When you seek rare animals in the wild, it’s not like buying a movie ticket. You’re not guaranteed a show. But we lucked out.
Another score! The ranger asked for Steve’s phone and recorded the temporary occupant: a male whose big belly testified to recent consumption of a meaty feast. Now he was digesting in the cool comfort of the man-made shelter.
This was breakfast the second morning.
The view from near the top, taking in three different-colored beaches (black, white, and pink) is so famous it’s on Indonesia’s 50,000-rupiah bank note. Indonesian tour groups pressed for time will often choose to visit it and skip the Komodo dragons, according to Robert.
This time our park ranger, Dula, took my iPhone and shot the wonderful video footage I will try to incorporate here. I hope it’s viewable on the blog; part terrifying, part comic, it’s documentary evidence of one of the most unforgettable strolls of my life.
We didn’t succeed at seeing all of it. The wind blew hard for a few hours on our final morning, whipping up white caps that drove the local manta rays and sea turtles to deeper water. But we did manage to snorkel three times in calm water, and each outing delighted me. The sea was clear and warm, and I felt as close as I will ever get to flight, gliding effortlessly over the landscape of coral and anemones and rocks, in the company of neon-colored fish, many dressed up in astonishing patterns. At times we sailed by rivers of fish; into clouds of them. Once I started to laugh out loud at the concentrated beauty but was quickly reminded that’s not a great idea when you’re breathing through a snorkel.
We watched the molten tangerine sliver of sun shrink to a dot and disappear and the color begins to drain from the sky. Several long moments passed, but enough of a glow still remained that I could make out the strange thing that began to occur — a stream of tiny black objects rising out of the mangroves like cinders flowing up from a campfire and dispersing.
The stream thickened and grew; that’s when I cried out. These were fruit bats, a vast horde of them, ranging out by the millions to hunt insects in the night.
For our week in Bali, I used Guest Points we’ve acquired on 
The bathroom attached to our bedroom also was open to the elements. That’s the shower next to the plants against the wall, with the sink inside the little gate. The toilet was behind me to my right.
Here’s the view from the living area of the building containing Steven and Christina’s bedroom.
This was one of the free photo opp sites.
To get in, we had to don proper Balinese garb, i.e sarongs (which we borrowed for free from the temple.)
So it cracked us up to see that for the equivalent of about $3.50, you could pay to have a park employee entice one of the monkeys onto your lap and photograph you.
We resisted, but managed to capture a few images of the adorable baby macaques without making their moms mad (as the signs claimed could happen.)
Despite being tethered to the villa, we packed in a lot throughout the rest of our stay. Most fun was the morning we spent with Chef Mudana, who offers popular classes in Indonesian and Balinese cooking. We met him and our only fellow student (a network security expert named Sanjay from Sydney) last Saturday morning at the Jimbaran fish market, a wonderfully chaotic, stinky warren of fishermen unloading their wares and vendors selling the staggering variety of protein from the sea.
No doubt about the freshness of this stuff. We watched it coming off the boats.
Some of it looked too beautiful to eat. 
Mudana purchased a beautiful piece of mahi-mahi, and we made a quick run through the adjoining produce market to pick up what we needed for the class.
Then we drove to his base in the community of Sanur, a combination of family home, restaurant, and the classroom in which Mudana teaches foreigners how to cook like a Balinese. Here’s the street front:
And the room where we had our class.
…into a delicious seven-course meal. I plan to try to do this at home in San Diego.
One small patch of rice field still meets up with their property, but in just the last two years a stunning amount of development has gobbled up the rest of their bucolic surroundings. This has occurred despite the lack of such basic infrastructure as sidewalks and water services.
Sometimes I’m thrilled to find the footprint of American culture far from home. Sometimes I love when it isn’t where I’d expect it. We’ve already experienced both in Bali.
and a driver in a clean, air-conditioned vehicle materializes, usually within five minutes. We never have to worry about finding a taxi, a constant source of stress in the bad old days. The rides typically cost $2-$3 for a 15-minute trip; maybe $10 for one that lasts an hour or more.
We paid about $8.50 each for all-day tickets, then spent the next four hours exploring what turned out to be more weirdly, wackily different from the Anaheim and Orlando institutions than even Walt could have imagined. What we figured out by the end of our stay is that you go to GWK for two main reasons.
…and ate a basic lunch on a pleasant terrace overlooking the city. We were very excited about catching a 35-minute film that screened every hour in a little movie theater; surely it would fill in some of the blanks in our understanding of Bali and its history, I thought. But the film instead was an animated drama that depicted how Arjuna came to be Vishnu’s airborne chauffeur. 
The drama centered around young Garuda’s having to free his mom who was tricked into being enslaved by the evil witch, Kadru. It was cute and fun but about as educational as a Saturday morning cartoon.
Why were THEY here? What were they? Our 2021 edition of Lonely Planet Indonesia, incredibly, didn’t even mention the GWK cultural park. In the first-floor lobby that underlies the gigantic statue of Vishnu riding on Arjuna, we found some historical photos that hinted at why. The center apparently was only inaugurated in the fall of 2018, and we imagine the guidebook went to press before that. After our visit, we found a bit more information on Wikipedia, which explained that the park began as a government project, then construction shut down when the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 90s. A Balinese real-estate developer finally stepped in to take over the project and finish it. But nowhere in the park or online could we find an explanation for those monoliths. (Our theory is that the land originally was a rock quarry, and the monoliths were remnants of the original stone. But we don’t know if that’s right.)
by reporting on train travel in the UK and Europe — time tables for the major routes, how the system worked in each country, how to buy tickets, and so on. Pretty soon you had expanded to cover the whole world (as far as I can tell). Thanks to you, I’ve been able to plan train trips that took Steve and me from Singapore up the Malay peninsula (2016); from 
Its comfortable reclining seats, clean toilets, and functioning power made that ride a pleasure. I knew that to continue on from Surabaya to Ketapang on Java’s eastern tip our only option was an “Ekonomi-class” line but those trains were “perfectly safe and comfortable,” you assured us readers.
The bench seats on the one we took were plain, and it was all but impossible to avoid playing kneesies with the plump young woman who faced me for the first four and a half hours of the ride. But any train that posts a photo of its conductor has to make you feel you’re in competent hands.
We left Surabaya just three seconds after 5:30 a.m. and pulled into Ketapang six hours and 59 minutes later — a minute ahead of schedule.
In 1945 it also was the setting for a key event in the birth of Indonesia as an independent country. So when you declared, “Even if you’re on a budget, splurge here,” I complied. What a bargain splurge it turned out to be: $89 a day for a lovely suite in a setting that enticed us to abandon our normal hyper-driven sightseeing and spend a whole day chilling out.
I feel bad about shortchanging the magnificent temples we visited Friday; I mentioned them so briefly in my last post. Steve says the one at Borobudur was the most impressive religious structure he has seen anywhere. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’d put it at least in the top five. To make up, here are a few postcards from the day.
At home and abroad 