We're back

            Lost a little blog momentum in the three week hiatus through a big chunk of eastern Indonesia, a bus, boat, car, plane, train extravaganza that was marked by moving. We started on a 24 hour bus ride from Salatiga to Lombok, which required a 12 hour drive on an express bus from Solo to the tip of east Java, a 45 minute ferry ride to Bali, a five hour bus ride across Bali, a five hour ferry ride, and then we had an hour taxi to our hotel in Lombok, where we arrived on Christmas Eve exhausted and overwhelmed. The most extraordinary part of this leg was the bus ride in Java, on a bus which a woman I met later compared to the busses in Harry Potter, that suddenly get skinny and survive the passing. We were in the front seats of a bus ride that started at 8 PM; I thought the front seat would be the best seat, with the best view, but it was really the best view of our impending death. Everything comes back to an island 1/3 the size of Montana with 130 million people – on mostly two lane highways, with bus drivers who are in a hurry.  Motorcycles were seemingly invisible to the drivers, forced off the road (they seem quite resigned to this) on multiple occasions. I could not sleep for most of the night for multiple reasons:

1. I could not close my eyes to the driving, which caused enormous amounts of adrenaline to course through my body. I was almost killed that night by several trucks, cars, busses and various other hazards of the road, headlights flashing frantically at our driver just before the bus got skinny again and suddenly appeared back on the right side (the left side here) of the road.
2. “No smoking” in Indonesia can be interpreted in multiple ways. Most typically, it means, “no smoking unless you really want a cigarette in which case nobody is going to stop you.” On the bus, “No smoking” meant “No smoking unless you are one of the two drivers or the guy on board to help them,” all of them sitting in the front, puffing furiously. Of course I believed that their nicotine could be the difference between survival and death, so we said nothing.
3. Graham.
4. Graham.
5. Graham, who after about three hours in any moving vehicle suddenly turns into a kind of gremlin. He becomes frantic, panicked about not being able to sleep, uncomfortable, and resentful of any forces that have conspired to put him in this situation (obviously only in order to torment him), those forces being me, Laura, and Seamus, depending on who is in closer proximity. At about two in the morning, speeding somewhere through East Java, I very nearly just told the bus driver to let Graham and me out, and that we would figure things out from there.
6. The seats, which were somewhat spacious, sort of, but also broken.
7. Gnawing hunger. About 10 o’clock in the night, and about 10 o’clock the next morning, we stopped for the most god-awful food I have eaten since we landed in Indonesia. Perhaps like the busses the food was sort of magic, food that stops your hunger without your even having to eat it. We had plates full of stuff that we couldn’t identify, and we sort of just stared at them, a little depressed, already exhausted.

We arrived safely, however, and spent a marvelous Christmas on a beach in Lombok, rifling through stockings that Santa somehow got to us, eating fresh seafood, snorkeling, sleeping, on a nearly unvisited part of the island. It was so quiet, and so relaxing, and so perfect, after the semester we had, that it wiped out the memory of the bus trip (which we avoided for the way home by booking a flight).

            I just wanted to announce our safe return, and wish a Happy New Year to any readers who are still with the blog. And if my Grote friends read this, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I can’t believe you picked the first Grote ski trip for the year I will not see snow.