Ibu Kasum, our wonderful pembantu, sobbed early Monday as we loaded up the van with out giant load of suitcases for the drive to the Semarang airport. I'd been feeling like crying for about a week by then, every motorcycle ride around Salatiga through the cloudy lens of my tearing-up eyes. And now we're not there anymore - I'm writing this from Hanoi.
We lost internet at home in the final week, or I would have certainly posted more. But then we had to scramble around town looking for places to do our emailing, and I never got the last week's musings up. It was a flurry of departure and last-minute purchases (like the machete I bought, which later caused an hour's worth of drama in the Singapore airport, though I am now a licensed machete carrier in Singapore.) Every morning Mount Merbabu looked glorious last week, shining and green and huge. The department had a farewell lunch. We packed and packed and distributed stuff. We ate our favorite sate and fried noodles. And then we left, suddenly gone from a place that had started to feel like home. Now, in Vietnam, again linguistically helpless, I speak to everyone in Indonesian, accidentally.
It's a good thing we didn't come straight home, though. The transition would have been too abrupt. We would suddenly be in our house, still grieving about leaving, looking at our life there with outsider eyes. Plus we're in Vietnam now - so far we've just wandered around and bought food, which is miraculously delicious.We're on the road for three weeks, a last Asian hurrah (until the next one), in Vietnam and Cambodia, only tourists now, wide-eyed and lost. It will be wonderful.
I will write more as I can, but probably not too much until we are home. But we have left a place I never expected to love as much as I do, and I know only that we will certainly return.
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