Kecak fire dance

We had heard that seeing the kecak fire dance was one of Bali's traditions not to be missed. The venue they hold this performance at is spectacular - high on the cliffs above the ocean, with a temple in the background. It was beautiful at sunset, and that's when they begin the show each night.

The dance showcases the story of the Ramayana, which, among other things, involves the kidnapping of a beautiful woman, changing oneself into a deer, tortured singing, and a white monkey who sets everything on fire. A typical Saturday night back then, I assume. The performance doesn't include any music. Instead, the rhythm is provided by about 50 men who are seated in a circle around the torch and small performing area in the middle. They are dressed in the traditional Balinese black and white checked sarong, and continuously chant "chak-chak-chak-chak" over and over which sounds pretty impressive with that many voices at once. With a lot of arm movements and swaying, they provide both the music and the backdrop for the dancers.

One of the things that makes Bali so different than the rest of Indonesia is their religion. Bali is a Hindu majority (93%) while the rest of Indonesia is a muslim majority (86%). This makes everything, from their way of life to their culture and art forms very unique. To see a map which shows Bali (shown in green) in comparison to the rest of Indonesia, click here

Uluwatu reprise

We tried to take my parents to the hidden beach we went to with my sister. When we finally got all the way to the bottom where you duck inside and under caves to reach the beach, to our surprise the ocean was surging all the way up into the caves. We couldn't get to beach because it was high tide. So we decided to go all the way back up to the very top and kill some time watching the surfers. It's a gorgeous view and those surfers were really good!

After a couple beers the tide had receded enough so we were able to make it to the beach for swimming!

Bali...again!

My parents came to visit last month, and they wanted to see a lot! Wouldn't you say 5 cities in 2 weeks is a lot?

We did some things with them in Bali that we hadn't done before. We went to a gorgeous temple on the west coast of Bali, called Tanah Lot. The temple itself sits on a huge offshore outcrop of rocks. During high tide you can't get across to the temple. At the base of the rocky island, poisonous sea snakes are believed to guard the temple from evil spirits and intruders. There is said to be one giant snake which also protects the temple, but to see it you had to pay money and enter a cave. Indonesians are very creative when it comes to making money. The funny part is it was mainly Indonesian tourists paying to see the snake!

When we travel outside Jakarta, Indonesian tourists always want to get a photo with the white people. Many come from small villages and may never see people other than Indonesians. You'd think we were famous or something. It's cute the first or second time, but at some point you just want to say "no more photos, please!" But when children want a photo, we usually cave.

The Joys of Bureaucracy

One of the funny things about the Foreign Service is that as soon as you start to get settled in a place, you have to start getting ready to move to the next place. We've been in Indonesia for more than a year now and have about 10 more months here, but right now, we've been busy trying to choose our assignment for when we leave.

The way it works is we get a giant list of all the jobs in the world for which we're eligible and they tell us to rank our preferences. There are hundreds of jobs on the list, but only a very limited number work with all the rules that are involved. For example, because they taught me to speak Indonesian, they won't teach me another language from scratch for our second tour. If I speak a language at a medium level of proficiency, they'll give me what's called a top-off course to get me to the minimum job proficiency.

Last month when the list of jobs was sent out to us, we saw that there were tons of jobs in Brazil and one in Portugal. I fought through the bureaucracy and was able to get a last minute language test scheduled, so I crammed for a few weeks, hired a tutor for a couple hours and then took the Portuguese test since I studied it in college. They had to mail the tapes back to Washington to get the results, so hopefully I'll get a score that will allow me to put jobs where I'll need to speak Portuguese on our list. We're up against a ticking clock though since the bids are due in just a couple weeks.

The other bureaucratic rule we have to deal with relates to timing. They don't want to leave embassies with staffing gaps if they don't have to, so they only let us bid on jobs where the person working there now will be leaving right before we're scheduled to arrive. So right now, we're ranking our favorite 20 out of 35 or so options. We'll post something as soon as we know how things turn out...

Save the Orangutans

In case you couldn't tell by the inordinate number of posts, John and I really loved this trip. The orangutans are such amazing creatures, but they really won't be around for much longer. They're really threatened by loss of habitat from palm oil plantations, the illegal pet trade, and climate change in general (just to name a few).

Speaking of the illegal pet trade, we learned of a hotel in Bali that keeps an orangutan caged as a tourist attraction. In Indonesia, orangutans are considered national treasures and the laws make it illegal for anyone to keep them in captivity. The Melka Hotel blatantly violates this law by bribing anyone who could put a stop to it. I encourage you to send them an email to let them know how reprehensible it is to keep these beautiful animals trapped in small cages. The email address is melka@telkom.net.

But in an attempt to end this post on a happy note, we've added some video clips from our trip that we hope you'll enjoy.

Looking after the little ones

Once we made it all the way back down the river to the port town of Pangkalan Bun, we spent the night in a hotel and got up the next morning to go to the Orangutan Care Center and Facility. This was a really unique opportunity. The center is closed to tourists, but a friend who works for USAID was able to arrange us a visit.

There are currently 340 orangutans being rehabilitated at the center, many of which were held captive as exotic pets. The center's main goal is to teach the orangutans the survival skills they will need once they are finally released back into the wild. (They are then released back into one of the camps we previously visited, where they can still be monitored while they adjust.) The women who work at the center act as surrogate mothers for the young orangutans. You can tell that most of them are very comfortable with humans and were very curious to meet us.

We got to see the entire facility, including where the juveniles played in the forest. The one in the photo was very strong as he tried to climb between me and the tree! All of it was so neat to see, but the best part was when we hiked to the area where the baby orangutans were playing. We sat down in the brush, and the babies immediately came over, wanting to play with us. Having one climb into your lap, stare into your eyes and give you a hug was just heartbreaking! Another one played a balancing game on my leg, and a rambunctious one jumped straight into my lap, landing on his back. They are more used to women, so John didn't attract too many babies. But at least he got some good shots of me!

Just like you and me...almost

Camp Leakey was built in the 1970s as a research post and has been staffed ever since by Indonesians and the Jane Goodall of orangutans, Dr. Birute Galdikas. Dr. Galdikas spends most of her time fund raising and lecturing these days, but she lived in the jungle for more than 30 years studying orangutans.

When we arrived at Camp Leakey, we were the first tourists and we immediately met a couple of friendly gibbons named Bob and Boy. These two gibbons have lived around Camp Leakey for their entire lives and are pretty comfortable with humans. They also apparently love coffee because when one of the staff set their coffee mug down, Boy grabbed it and climbed back to the tree to finish drinking it and eating the leftover coffee grounds.

Our guide took us around the camp, and up in the trees we saw our first baby orangutan with his mom. Orangutans only have one child at a time, and the babies stay with their moms until they're about 7 years old. As a result, orangutans take the longest time between babies of any species. They share 97 percent of our DNA and the similarities are just amazing.

The orangutans that live around the three camps we visited are either former captives or the children of former captives. Many of them have completely gone back to the wild, but some still show up for feedings to supplement their diets. The camps offer feedings once a day, and they give the orangutans milk and bananas. They never mix up the diet because they want them to be bored with the food options on offer so that they'll prefer to find their own food in the wild.

It was amazing to see them up close and watch how they act and interact with eachother. At the last camp we visited, we were walking into the forest to the feeding site and our guide saw a huge orangutan coming behind us. He told us to walk faster because it was completely wild and rarely came around. We knew we'd better move quickly if our guide was concerned. The big guy showed up at the feeding site a couple minutes after us. He was huge. Probably about 5'8" and he must have weighed 250 pounds. He then proceeded to eat all of the bananas by himself for the next 20 minutes while the mothers and their babies stared longingly at the diminishing supply.

One thing we didn't really realize before we saw them was how orangutans slept. They make a new nest way up at the very top of really tall trees every night. It almost seems impossible that their nest could support something the size of a human. Imagine trying to build a nest 50 feet up and then sleep there!

So after three days on the boat, we finally headed back to to town for a much overdue hot shower. But we had one more stop to make before heading back to Jakarta...

Into the Jungle

When we came to Indonesia, there was one place we felt we had to visit...other than Bali of course. We recently made a trip to the southern part of the island of Borneo to visit Tanjung Puting National Park. The park is the largest wildlife preserve in Southeast Asia and home to some of the great biodiversity found only in Indonesia. The main reason we wanted to visit this place is because Borneo is one of two islands in the world that still has orangutans living in the wild. In Sumatra, the other island where orangutans live, there are only around 7,000 left and they are critically endangered.

The orangutan population in Borneo (the third largest island in the world) has faired better due to their relative remoteness. However, the estimated 50,000 left in the wild are endangered and represent only 14 percent of the historical population. Their homes have always been subject to destruction from forest fires and logging, but they are under an exponentially growing threat due to the growth in the palm oil business. Some estimates say they may be extinct in the wild by 2012.

The best way to see Tanjung Puting is to fly to Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan. From there, you drive 20 minutes to get on a small chartered boat. We took the boat along the Kumai river to a smaller river that headed north. It took about 4-5 hours to travel all the way up into the area where there is a large population of orangutans. As you travel into the reserve, you begin to see long-tailed macaques sitting along the trees lining the river. We also saw proboscis monkeys, which only live in Borneo and are extremely endangered. Fewer than 7,000 still live in the wild. They're famous for their long protruding noses and in Indonesian are often called "Dutch Monkeys" because they think white people have big noses.

On the first night, we moored our boat along the river and the boat crew cooked dinner and made beds for us and our two friends on the upper deck of our boat. We slept under nets, afraid of every mosquito since malaria and dengue fever are prevalent in this area. The next morning, we woke up early and continued up the river to Camp Leakey, a remote orangutan observation camp built in the 1970s. More to come...

Can you find it on a map?

Timor-Leste is one of the newest countries in the world, having only achieved nationhood in 2002. I recently had the opportunity to go there on a last minute trip for work. Because our embassy there does very limited consular work, they asked someone from Jakarta to speak at a townhall they were having for Americans and I got the nod.

Dili was like no foreign capital I'd ever been to. It felt like I was in a movie set in sub-Saharan Africa. Because Timor-Leste doesn't have the infrastructure to police the country, the United Nations is there. As a result, there are UN vehicles everywhere you turn. The country's infrastructure is non-existent in so many areas. It's a beautiful country with great natural resources, but they're still struggling to get on their feet.

I was shocked to see a refugee camp immediately outside the entrance to the tiny airport. They call these camps "Internally Displaced Persons" camps because they are filled with people who had to leave their homes outside Dili due to recent violence in their areas. These camps are all over the city and at one point a few months ago the population of Dili doubled when the number of people living in the camps reached 100,000. It definitely makes you think about how badly some people in the world need our help.

Earth Day

Indonesia has the most biodiversity of any country in the world. We see it as critically important that we encourage Indonesians to take care of this amazing natural environment. The embassy is always working on environment protection issues, but for Earth Day we invited a group of about 80 kids from around Jakarta to come to the embassy.

Each group of kids painted a mural about the environment and then presented them to the embassy to be displayed on our outer wall. It was also a day of fun and games that included Hillary teaching the kids Simon Says and me organizing a soccer game with coaches from Arsenal's training academy(!) The kids were even treated to a live performance by their neighbors from Jalan Sesame (Sesame Street) that featured an orangutan talking about his home in Kalimantan.