Bangkok - Buddhas and Beers

Our next stop was Bangkok. John and I were looking forward to it because we had such a great time when we went there last year. We took my parents in the river taxis up the Chao Phraya river to see the temples and palaces along the way. One of the standouts is Wat Pho, (Temple of the Reclining Buddha). The largest Buddha image in Thailand, it is 46 meters long and 15 meters high. It's covered in gold plating and its eyes and soles of its feet are all inlaid mother-of-pearl, which is gorgeous. This temple was also the birthplace of Thai massage. Thai massage is different in that they put your body through a lot of stretching motions in addition to massage, plus you wear pyjama type clothing during it. Afterwards you are not only relaxed, but you feel much more limber and have more energy. It's great!

Here's a couple pictures from our stroll down Soi Cowboy. I won't go into details on why this street is so well-known, but you can read about it here if you wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soi_Cowboy And yes, we did check out a few of the "bars".

This is pretty sad, but maybe sharing it would prevent some future tourists from making this mistake. There was a sweet elephant that a couple Thai men were parading up and down the street. For a small price you could buy some snacks and feed them to the elephant. We did not choose to do this, but an American told us that the men periodically take the elephant around the corner, force it to throw up all its food, and then bring him back out and continue to let tourists feed him over and over again! Made me so sad....


You might remember John and I ate at a really cool rooftop restaurant on our last trip to Bangkok on the 61st floor of a hotel. Not to be outdone, my parents suggested we eat at Sirocco, which is the highest rooftop restaurant in Bangkok at 63 floors up! The food was delicious, the jazz band great, and of course, you can't beat the view!

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

We stopped in Kuala Lumpur for one day and night on our way to Bangkok, since it would have been a long layover. So even though we didn't get to see all that much of the city, it was pretty cool. To us, it was basically a "really nice Jakarta". It is similar in a lot of ways, but they just have their stuff together there. People use the lanes on the road, it's much cleaner and organized, and there are decent sidewalks! Plus there are rolling green hills surrounding the city. To go up in the Petronas towers, you had to get there at about 7:00 in the morning, so we said forget it. Instead we went up to the top of a communications tower nearby. It ended up being better, because you can only go about halfway up the Petronas towers to where there is a bridge connecting both of them. The tower we went up in was much higher than where the connecting bridge was, plus we had a great view of the towers. It was the tallest building(s) in the world at 1,483 feet until 2004 when the Taipei Tower took over at 1,667 feet. What's crazy is a building in Dubai which should be finished in the next year or so will be 2,313 feet tall! That is too tall in my opinion...

For dinner we ate at an Indian restaurant in a sort of Little India area of the city (although not the actual touristy Little India). We were the only white people around for blocks, and they didn't quite know what to make of us wanting to eat there. You choose what you want and they slop it all onto your banana leaf on the table. It was GREAT food! Plus we ate a ton and it came to about $12 for all four of us - not a bad deal!

Here's my mom and I covering up to visit the oldest mosque in KL.

Next stop...Lisbon!

After several weeks of stress, we found out last Friday night when one of our friends called at 2 a.m. to wake us up and tell us that assignments had been announced. I checked my crackberry and lo and behold, there was the email saying that we were going to Lisbon in March 2010 for me to work in the Political/Economic section of the embassy. I'll get to brush up on my Portuguese and Hill will start to learn it from scratch when we leave here next summer.

But it wasn't easy to get there. Our previous blog entry talked about how I was able to schedule a last minute Portuguese test, but that wasn't the end of the drama. On the day that I was told that I'd receive my test score, I didn't hear anything so I contacted our HR department. I then found out that something had gone wrong and the tapes were garbled, so they couldn't score them. And they were totally unwilling to do anything another way so that we could get a test score in time. Bureaucracy at its best.

Luckily, there was a guy at the State Department's language school who knew what he was doing. Apparently the only problem was that the tapes were recorded at the wrong speed. He was able to slow them down and my test was scored just in time for it to count.

Hillary doesn't know what she'll be doing there yet. They say they guarantee anyone who wants to work at least 16 hours per week, but hopefully she can find more regular work, either inside or outside the embassy. Regardless, we know we'll be going to a beautiful country with great food and nice people, so we couldn't be happier.

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...