Blogs from Timor, Indonesia, Asia

Woke up and spent most of the day here at the Anna's house in Kupang since I do not have transportation. Invited the neighbors out to lunch and we went over to the mall and ate at an Indonesian restaurant. I had some chicken with rice that was grilled inside of a banana leaf with some peanuts and a small amount of fish and some chilis with an avocado juice which was fantastic. We shared a plate of some noodle with chicken, mushrooms, veggies, and pork that was also really good. The total price of food and drinks for everyone came out to 207,000 rupiah of which I paid 200,000. We then did some shopping and i bought some snacks, bottled water, fruit, and a small mirror for around 120,000 rupiah. After lunch we headed back ... read more

Met up with Nick Turner at the KFC here in Kupang which is the only American fast food restaurant for hundreds of miles and the only one on the island of Timor. Since we were there decided to grab something to eat which was not very satisfying compared to all the delicious Indonesian you food you can get for a third of the price. We headed out on Nick's bike to find the museum of East Nusa Tengarra using some great open street maps Nick had downloaded to his Garmin GPS. We arrived at the museum and asked some of the guards if it was open and were led to another building by one of the security staff. The museum was not in the best of care with damage to the roof and rusted metal on ... read more

Nusa tenggara atau Pulau Sunda Kecil ? Awalnya kebosanan untuk travelling yang begitu-begitu saja, dalam artian travelling yang hanya 3-4 hari dan cuma mengunjungi satu tempat tujuan. Akhirnya saya berpikir untuk mencari tempat yang Indonesia banget selain kota besar yang sudah berubah menjadi TPSR (tempat pembungan sampah raksasa)… Sebenernya sudah terbayang kalau akan travelling ke Indonesia timur, maksudnya tempat-tempat yang ada di wilayah timur Indonesia. Teringgat janji pada teman saat kuliah kerja nyata (KKN) yang juga kebetulan berasal dari kota di timur Indonesia. Ken Djami mahasiswa hubungan internasional di universitas yang sama dengan saya (Airlangga), seorang putra daerah dari Kupang (ibu kota propinsi nusa tenggara timur, kota di Pulau Timor satu daratan dengan negara Timor Leste), yang bikin saya kagum pada dia adalah bagaimana kebanggaan dia sebagai seora... read more

After a long but pretty comfortable 20 hour ferry ride I was in Kupang, Timor, just north West Austrailia. Another 5 hours on a ferry and bemo and I was on the east side of Rote, just off the coast of Timor. Nembrala, Rote is the home of T-Land another one of Indonesia's epic surf breaks. T-Land is billed as the easier G-Land (*surfer knowledge*). It is a long long left point with a few other breaks nearby. I have finally found paradise. Ive been told that Nembrala is like Hawaii in the 60's. A single paved road runs through town lined with stacked coral fences. The town sits beneath the swaying shadows of coconut trees. The 4 hotels in town are scattered throughout thatched huts and concrete block houses. Goats, pigs and dogs roam the ... read more

I arranged my flight onwards to Ruteng in Flores (home of the giant rat....hopefully) for Thursday, at the unusual hour for Indonesia of 6am. With three days to utilise I chose to go to Bipolo on the first and third days and back to Camplong on the second, to attempt to try and find the remaining endemic birds of the island. Bipolo was remarkably easy to get to, simply bus to the whistle-stop town of Oelmasi and then take a motorbike to the forest at Bipolo about 15km further on up a sideroad. I was going to just bird along the road, which runs right through the middle, but I found a dirt trail heading into the trees so I took that instead and in a couple of minutes came across a fruiting fig tree. These ... read more

Gunung Mutis is FANTASTIC!!! Getting there was a bit of a laugh though. First was a three hour bus trip from Kupang to Soe which wasn't bad because the bus was only half-full (the buses aren't really buses either, they're like bigger versions of mini-vans). Then a quick motorbike ride to where the bemos to Kapan leave from. I had been given to understand that I had to take a bemo half-an-hour to Kapan and then another bemo another half-an-hour to Fatumenasi where I would be trying to track down what was described on the internet as a "basic losmen" owned by Mateos Anin (yes the same internet source that called the delightful Mamariwu House a basic losmen too, so I wasn't worried). A bemo is a small mini-van in which instead of having rows of ... read more

The first paragraph is for computer people only. Non-nerds can safely skip to the next paragraph. OK. There seems to be only one public Internet connection in this whole city, and that’s at what passes for the tourist hang-out place. The only way to get on is to use their one computer, or unplug their one Ethernet cable and hardcode your IP address to his 10. address and set your DNS servers. He doesn’t seem to have a switch or a router or anything, just an Ethernet cable which as far as he knows magically comes from his ISP. It gives very intermittent connectivity to the Internet, slowing right down often, so that lots of webpages don’t even load for me. So I haven’t been doing much in Kupang, but I thought I should write a ... read more