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What have we been up to? There can hardly be a short answer, since we haven't posted anything is more than a month. On August 7 we were in Lake Toba, Sumatra and now we are in Kuala Lumpur, about to observe the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Our main reason for not posting anything in these five weeks is that we've been too busy. Was that a guffaw? Yes, too busy. Because we have to be in one place long enough to first see the sights and then, in our last day or two report on them. In our month on the beaches of Thailand there weren't a lot of sights and there was a lot of time. And voila: lots of web postings. After our last posting at Lake Toba we stayed on another four days, enjoying more of the cool air and view of the lake and mountains. Then it was off by an overnight bus ride to Bukittingi, another mountain town. (The overnighter was our first one since the Berlin-Paris trip in late March, 2005. We also took an almost-overnight ferry from Santorini to Crete. We got on at 4:00 a.m.) In Bukittingi we enjoyed a few museums, a walk to the previously Dutch village of Koto Gadang where we enjoyed the architecture, there being many examples of Dutch Colonial homes and some very nice, though limited in number, Maningkabau traditional longhouses. From Bukittingi we went 40 km west over the sides of an ancient volcano, to spend four days on the shores of Lake Maninjau, situated in the ancient crater. We got in a second day of bicycling, another exercise of ancient muscles not so long after having gone around Tuk Tuk at Lake Toba. We just hit Indonesia's celebrating of its independence and were treated to a parade composed primarily of school kids marching along, sometimes in traditional costumes and sometimes in costumes borrowed from American high school marching bands. By this time our 30-day Indonesian visa had but a week left. We planned to spend four of these days in the Harau Valley and made reservations there at the Eco Lodge. Unfortunately the place was having its problems: smoke from seasonal fires to prepare for the next crop filled the valley with an annoying haze. A water shortage meant the showers in the Lodge didn't work. So after one day we left (see photo of our departure). We went to Pekanbaru, a city of a million that could be nice but we experienced it in an even worse haze. By this time, the accumulation of air pollution was having its effect on our health, both of us had developed coughs. For that reason, we stayed just long enough, three nights, to catch a ferry to Malacca. The trip to Malacca took four hours down a "jungle river", or that is what it would have been a hundred years ago or if we let our imaginations ride freely. On our trip we saw plenty of oil installations and barges of wood scraps being towed to paperboard factories. In the next (and last) 90 minutes we actually crossed the Malacca Straits. Our trip ended with a transfer to a smaller boat since the tide was low and our main ferry couldn't go up the mud-filled mouth of the Malacca River. |
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