In October, we received the final set of visitors from Canada. Bjoern, Britta, Tabea and Andrew were keen to meet our orange cousins in Borneo, so off we, plus our Bogor friends Karen and Michael, went for a 4 day 3 night boat trip to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan.
We can’t recommend Timur and Rote enough as a holiday destination. Off the well worn tourist trail, but easy and full of great people. Our trip included Kupang (with its night market), climbing Fatu Timau and Mutis, and relaxing on Rote Island – world class surfing at the southernmost point of Indonesia.
Dempo is a hulk of a mountain, and one of the few peaks in Sumatra over 3,000 metres. It dominates the landscape at the southern end of the Bukit Barisan mountains in South Sumatra, an area that’s important for Sumatran tigers. It’s not an easy mountain to get to, requiring a 6 hour drive from Bengkulu or Palembang.
We joined the four-day Java Lava trip organised to to coincide with Ascension Day (national holiday) – the Friday also happened to be my birthday and we thought that camping in the meadow below Dempo’s crater at 3,000 m would be a good place to spend it. We were also going to test out our new, fabulous Hilleberg tent.
Using a pinch day before Waisak day, we took a four day break to the volcanic islands of Ternate and Tidore islands in eastern Indonesia’s North Maluku province. It’s a four hour direct flight from Jakarta to Ternate, which we chose to do on the rather brutal red eye that leaves Jakarta at 1 am and arrives in Ternate at 6am. If this was not much fun for us, it was even less fun for our friend Olivier who had just arrived in Jakarta from Vancouver on Friday lunchtime. Still, we all got a bit of sleep on the plane and arrived safely in Ternate, a landing that involves circling clockwise around the volcano and dropping to land on the runway (at the second attempt in our case).
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