for those who didn't read this blog earlier - Travelblog (the provider that hosts my blog) deleted all the photos that were uploaded over a twelve-day period in April, including these ones. Their only comment is that one has to uplaod them all again. Given that it takes me a long time to wokr out which photos I want to upload, and that Travelblog makes the actual uploading very difficult, it's not an easy thing to do. So for the time being you just have to imagine that they're really great photos. Actually, the first one was quite nice, a speedboat riding through a mangrove swamp almost at sunset, taken from above.... Anyone thinking about setting up a travel blog, do NOT use Travelblog. If any bloggers out there have any suggestions about better blogs ... read more

This blog was written on March 20 and Mach 24. So I’m sitting in the ferry from Jakarta to Batam. It’s a Pelni ferry, which is the large company which runs fast ferries all over Indonesia and have a virtual monopoly on many of the longer routes. The ferry is spic and span in much the same way that Malcolm Turnbull has a good handle on the Australian economy - that is to say, not really. It’s also full of cockroaches, which, I hasten to add, is where the Liberal Party metaphor begins to break down. Actually I’m not even sure if these things are cockroaches, I haven’t been able to catch one. They look like cockroaches but they have wings. I understand that cockroaches can have wings, but none of the cockroaches I’ve seen ... read more

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 educational capital. It’s also apparently the place where the Javanese language is still spoken the most and in its purest form. It’s supposed to have a population of only around half a million, although I don’t know how ... read more

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 skeleton of one adult female had been found, and various parts of nine others, along with associated stone tools. The media fuelled the popular imagination that there might still be some of these little creatures out there, digging up legends from locals about how ... 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