With the house finally sold, I need a vacation! For the next three weeks, I am heading to Indonesia and Singapore with a couple of friends and my 15-year-old niece. Yup, my niece is going with us. She is very excited about the trip. This will be her first big trip and first international trip.
I am really excited about the trip too. I’ve wanted to go to Indonesia for some time, so when my friend said he was going back to visit family I wanted to go too. We have 19 days of travel starting Tuesday night. One entire day is spent on a plane to get to Jakarta. It will take literally 24 hours from the time the plane lifts off from Seattle to the time it arrives in Jakarta (with a few hours in Taiwan). This is the least fun part of the trip, though we do get to fly on the upper deck of a 747—something I’ve never done before—on Eva Air (Asian airlines are soooo much nicer than their American counterparts; perhaps it won’t be too bad to spend 20 hours stuck in a metal tube at 38,000 feet in the air).
We will be spending a short amount of time in Jakarta, then heading to Borobudur in Central Java for a couple of days. Then we head to Bali where we spend the next six days relaxing on the beaches, touring various temples and exploring some of the surrounding area. After Bali we are heading to Komodo to see the dragons and explore the surrounding islands and Pink Beach. We will be sleeping on a boat for at least one night. Finally, we head over to Singapore for a few days. Originally we were going to Borneo (Sarawak and Brunei), but the flights just didn’t work out well. In Singapore I plan on having a Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel where it was invented and, if I am lucky, I might get caned!
Aside from getting some needed rest and relaxation, I plan on using this trip as a practice run for my upcoming travels in the fall. I will be bringing pretty much the same things I will in the fall and seeing how it works out. Ideally everything will go smoothly and I will get an idea for the best way to handle any snafus that might arise.
I am going to try to continue to blog here and on my other sites (try being the operative word since I have no doubt I will be doing a lot of relaxing) and keep up with my normal activities all from the other side of the world. That means finding internet cafes and all the other fun stuff that is required to keep up a “connected” life.
So, over the next three weeks you will see some posts and pictures about Jakarta, Borobudur, Bali, Komodo, and Singapore. That is, unless I am eaten by a Komodo Dragon!