As I mentioned in the last blog, this one is a bit behind reality - I visited these temples on March 15 I'm having troubles uploading the pics, I think Travelblog is playing up, and my connection here is slow, after about three hours I'm giving up. Sorry if some of the photos are missing, or are in here twice, or are upside down, or don't have a comment. Blame Travelblog, which seems to be down more often than it's up The most famous attractions of Yogya are the two ninth-century temples, Borobodur and Prambanan. To see both temples I took [View Full Entry]

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So at the end of the last blog I was in Yogyakarta, universally called “Yogya” (pronounced “Jogja”). This found me in the middle of Java, which is the most populous island on earth by a country mile. In other words, it has a population (over 120 million) about that of Japan in an island not much more than half the size of Victoria. Yogya is often called the “soul” of Indonesia, which I don’t think is meant to mean that it exists only as an epiphenomenon of the brain but rather that it’s Indonesia’s cultural, historical, religious and ed [View Full Entry]

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OK, I’ve been holding off on writing this blog because it’s about Bali. I feel like I didn’t do Bali justice, and like most of you guys, being Australians, know more about Bali than I do. I guess the simple thing to say would be that I didn’t like Bali, but that’s probably not fair. There’s an awful lot of interesting stuff to see and do, and a fascinating culture, and diverse scenery. There’s also the drunk aussie holiday-makers and fat middle-aged men who think it’s cool to walk around topless even when they’re nowhere near the beach [View Full Entry]

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In October 2004, the journal Nature broke the news to the world that an Australian Archaeologist, Michael Morwood, then from UNE, Australia, had the year previously discovered “a new small-bodied hominim” that had lived from 74000 to 13000 years ago, on the Indonesian island of Flores. This was astounding news. Someone, I believe the editor of Nature later in an interview said something like “If someone had told me that a fully manned spacecraft from outer space had just been discovered, I would not have been any more surprised”. An almost complete skel [View Full Entry]

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I’m writing this offline sitting off the back of a ferry, which might not be a great idea as a small crowd has gathered behind me, I guess by how they react to this I’ll see if they can read English or not. My ferry ticket said that the ferry leaves at 04:00, and the office told me to be there at 02:00. So I dutifully arranged a car to pick me up at 01:30 for the half-hour drive. When I got there we were met by a young guy in jeans and a T-shirt who told us that the ferry [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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As I woke up this morning, having eaten very little for over 24 hours, with no more drinking water, no local currency, and a vague idea of where I was, my life had become concerned with the lower of Maslow’s needs hierarchy. Just like the original cavemen, my primary concerns were then finding water, finding food, nursing my injured leg, and finding a place to get on the Internet. I’m in Kupang, in a hotel room with a nice firm bed with a clean sheet, a fan, and an “asianised” Western-style toilet - no seat, no toilet paper and no flush. [View Full Entry]

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I wrote this blog a day ago, on Friday 20/02/2009, mostly relating to events of the previous day. My leg is healing up nicely, so don't worry. I have to admit, back home I sometimes check SMSes while driving. This is of course illegal; back home. What I do not do, however, is check my SMSes while driving a minibus jam packed with 25 people around hair-pin bends with an almost-vertical 200 m drop and only an intermittent one-foot high guardrail, on a heavily trafficked road barely wide enough for two cars. As a general rule, I would be opposed to [View Full Entry]

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Most of this was written yesterday, 16 Feb 2009, or the day before All backpackers express a desire to get “off the beaten track”, which isn’t always as great an idea as it sounds, because the reason a track is beaten in the first place is because it leads to a nice or interesting place. But still, it’s an alluring dream. In my opinion, there’s two ways to get off the beaten track. One is to use your travel skills, and negotiate with locals, probably do some research on a place, maybe learn the language, etc. The other way is to [View Full Entry]

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Just a quick note that I arrived in Dili yesterday. As far as I can work out, Internet is a bit unreliable, and I can't find a wireless access point. I mainly spent yesterday walking around Dili, which is quite spread out, fairly poor, and full of UN vehicles everywhere. I got bitten by lots of mosquitos already, despite taking all the precautions, but don't worry Mum I'm taking my doxy tablets :-) East Timor's very expensive compared to other SE Asian countries. They use the US Dollar as their official currency which doesn't help, and like everywhere else that uses [View Full Entry]

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