Indo Limbo
Too many things were too much up in the air for me to have a real itinerary this trip. I knew I'd start in Jogjakarta and head east from there, roughly, but that was about it. So now my trip is a bit more than half over, and I've just arrived in Kuta, Bali, which is sort of delightfully tacky and an easy place to serve as a temporary home base for some of the more absurd activities I still want to tick off my list (Surfing lessons! Ride a bike down a volcano!) but I don't imagine it'll hold my interest for more than a few days, which is a new experience for me, travel-wise. I know I have to be back in Jakarta next Saturday to catch my flight home, and that's all. I'm getting crazy ideas now, including leaving Indonesia altogether, or playing random throw-a-dart-at-a-route-map games at a travel shop. I could go see orangutans! I could go see elaborate cremation ceremonies! I could take a berth on a Pelni cargo ship to wherever-the-fuck!
The last few days were spent in the company of some friends who are just getting into the meaty part of a 3-month trip through Southeast Asia. I'm jealous of their leisure time (and they, I imagine, are in turn maybe a teeny bit envious of the fact that I don't have to limit myself to a budget as strict as theirs owing to the brevity of my trip and, you know, having a job). But if I ever did a truly lengthy stint of traveling, I might find myself a bit paralyzed trying to decide where to go and what to see. I could go anywhere, and that's actually kind of scary because I pretty much want to go almost everywhere. This mode of thinking makes the hunker-down habits of some backpacker types very very understandable. You have no sense of urgency, and probably a great deal of comfort to take in not moving, in deferring decisions about where to go next, because each choice requires exclusion, and there's nothing more seductive than possibility.
Meantime I'm toying, for this five minutes anyway, with the idea of a coffee plantation at a high elevation somewhere in Sumatra. With a hammock. There definitely needs to be a hammock.
The last few days were spent in the company of some friends who are just getting into the meaty part of a 3-month trip through Southeast Asia. I'm jealous of their leisure time (and they, I imagine, are in turn maybe a teeny bit envious of the fact that I don't have to limit myself to a budget as strict as theirs owing to the brevity of my trip and, you know, having a job). But if I ever did a truly lengthy stint of traveling, I might find myself a bit paralyzed trying to decide where to go and what to see. I could go anywhere, and that's actually kind of scary because I pretty much want to go almost everywhere. This mode of thinking makes the hunker-down habits of some backpacker types very very understandable. You have no sense of urgency, and probably a great deal of comfort to take in not moving, in deferring decisions about where to go next, because each choice requires exclusion, and there's nothing more seductive than possibility.
Meantime I'm toying, for this five minutes anyway, with the idea of a coffee plantation at a high elevation somewhere in Sumatra. With a hammock. There definitely needs to be a hammock.