20.7.08

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Well..

I feel like I've been neglecting this blog big time. Thus it's felt like a higher and higher step to actually sit down and do something about it. So much has happened since my last entry.. Talk about real time blogging!
For starters when I came back to Finland it was quite a cultural shock. Somehow it was even easier to see after I had already somewhat recovered over a half year later. Interesting enough I even studied about this at school and it was quite similar to what the books said about it lasting from 4 to 6 months and having a feeling of not connecting. Being back, but not really getting a grip on anything. Trying to study and being quite broke at the same time didn't really help to soothe my absent mind. Living in a nice house relatively close to the central of Helsinki didn't exactly boost up my budget either. Not that I was complaining -it felt really great to meet friends and family and to actually just be back.
I've always had the bad habit of being a little bit of a money stresser. Being unable to use ANY money is a total bummer. It's ok if you have a little bit, maybe even just enough to get a cup of coffee somewhere if you really feel like it, but just the sheer inability to do anything requiring a bit of money makes me feel like I'm in a cage and I need to escape. I need freedom and I'd rather have the financial one as well.

I guess my natural reaction was to skip the studying bit for a while again and to do some work. I got on a course to do nurturing for the elderly and handicapped. Basically it involved
cleaning, helping them move, going shopping for them and such.
Didn't really get to do the job but just a few times before the real change came. At least I now have a certificate to do the job and a little bit of experience.
The news was, that my mom being a kindergarten manager heard about an assistant in a nearby kindergarten being fired -she called me to call them and apply for the vacancy.

Whoa! I'd never really considered doing that kind of work probably because it was 1. for girls and 2. because my mom did it.
But then again I like kids, and I'd been used to the kid-hustle in the boy scouts and then again it was kind of the same thing in the army -you have to get people to do something they don't necessarily want to, but you still have to get them to do it. If they don't know how, you help them and if they just don't want to do something you simply bribe, threaten or blackmail them to do it. And then again I'm confident enough about my manhood for it not to feel as threatening as probably the average Joes running after their dicks might.

So I did apply, got a job until the end of May and moved just a three minutes walk away from work into a trailer located on my moms front yard. So here's some white trash blogging for you!

Oh. And another thing. My laptop crashed and with it went the remaining pictures and videos from my trip. Luckily, in the end I managed to fix the laptop by replacing the hard disk. I might even be able to recover the data from the hard disk as it's probably only the hard disks control unit that failed and not the disk itself. And I had already uploaded the next patch of pictures before the breakdown, so I can still tell you a story about the journey that took me to the furthest point of my travels so far:

Flores, Indonesia.



After spending time out of the Kuta area it just didn't feel the same anymore. There was just so much more out there and I could feel a craving for it. Kuta was a tourist juggernaut -fun and games, but tiersome. And besides, everybody I'd hanged out with was leaving, the swedes were off to the Filippines, everybody I knew was leaving. And I had the itch for something else all together. To get away from the beaten path and maybe take a peek back onto it to see me a dragon in Komodo National Park! I would've never imagined what was in store for me 'just a bike ride away'.

Hitting the road early after breakfast I headed east Towards Padang-Bai to roll onto a ferry to Lombok island. An island you can see from FAR away, because it's basically one huge 4000m volcano "Mt Rinjani" -actually Indonesia's third highest point. Again it turned out to be a long drive there and because of the six and a half hours ferry trip I decided to just hide my backpack in the jungle and sleep at a nice spot. So I hid my pack and decided to come back and set up my hammock just before it got dark.
I'm quite used to hiding my stuff away somewhere and this far no one has ever found my stashes.. Well.. When I went back after dark to the same location where I'd hid my pack to -I just couldn't find it!
The horror of it all was just so abstract, that I was handling it quite well -scratching myself in the cacti-bush going back and fourth in the dark just not believing how I'd just somehow missed it and would for sure find it if I just searched the place over again.. In the end I started looking around places I knew it couldn't even have been in, just because I just had to check them out too. Them cacti-scratches were healing for a long time. Finally, after three hours of looking, swearing and getting stung by cacti and swearing again I decided it was time to sleep somehow.
I'd planned on a comfortable sleep and an early morning stroll, but I ended up wandering around just looking for some comfortable hole to curl in.
I had only shorts on me, so after trying out some of them too desperate places to actually fall asleep in I set up some kind of shelter from two wooden panels I found and set up to lean against each other. But the draft kept me awake until I just had to go to town and just try to find a blanket to buy or something. No luck on that one. Then I decided to just sleep at a guest house, but they were closed at this point too, so I ended up going back outside of town and wandering into a temple yard. In a corner of the yard I found a patio with a roof. There were some tables and planks piled up -and a heavy roll of cotton cloth which I partly managed to unroll and crawled under.. Couldn't help to think that maybe sleeping at a temple like this would anger the spirits or more probably the people that believed in them.. Nah! I thought that I needed a place to sleep and surely it would be ok -for the spirits at least. It wouldn't be that comfortable with a stone floor to sleep long enough for people to come around anyway.. Zzz..

The next morning I Woke up early in the chilly morning mist and decided to try to find my pack again. I searched, swore and searched some more. No luck.
I decided it was time to go to the cops to make a report, so I just might get something back from insurance -it was locked onto a tree after all. Well.. Did that.
And after everything I just couldn't let it go, so went back to take one last look just to be sure. I still just couldn't believe it was gone.

I just glared around bitterly, when I took the path again and didn't really think anything would change at some point. Thinking: "It must've been that man I saw yesterday on his way to the temple -He must've followed me.. Or maybe it was just someone happening to be close by and just saw me sneaking around.. I'll never catch him.. I'll never see my stuff again.." From the path I was walking on I took a look down the deep slope towards the sea -I saw my pack in the bushes below! Now I just couldn't believe this! I went down to look at the pack and realized what had gone wrong:
I hadn't noticed a small path swinging down to the right just some meters before the spot I thought I'd hid my pack at. In reality I'd been looking for my pack on an identical-looking spot where the cacti was growing in a similar manner and even an identical looking tree stump just in the right place. Hugging my pack I swore I'd learn something from that one! For sure!

So things were just as before, only time and my efforts of trying to cope with it all were wasted. After returning the report to the cops, buying a 110 000rs(bit less than 10€) ticket and boarding the ferry I felt embarrassed and my mind wandered off speculating how nice the night over at the spot might have felt with the views and shelter of my hammock and sleeping bag. But I was definitely glad I was on my way again.
On the ferry over to Lombok I met this really nice local surfer dude, who worked on Bali, but who's family lived in The capital of the island, Mataram.

He offered a place for me to sleep as it would already be dark when we'd arrive to Lombok. I gladly accepted and shared a meal with him later in a restaurant . He told me about his family and about the culture on Lombok and how long it would take for me to drive to the other side of the island. I was happy to have someone to talk to and he asked me about my country and culture and I did my best to describe the odd phenomenon called western life. It was late, when I got to bed, but I felt everything was perfect again. As it always is -sometimes its just hard to see it.

The next morning I said my goodbyes and hit the road. I got a good road rage going and just drove straight through the island as I was planning to come back later to have a better look. Lombok felt quite different from Bali foremost because of its landscape: Bali was very varied because of several volcanoes, but Lombok was just one gently sloping huge volcano. It felt a bit boring at first sight, but later, when I came back and explored the south coast it showed a different, more varied face. And there was another change: the west side was hindu and the east side muslim.
Mosks began to appear in every town and the architecture wasn't as decorative anymore, but more like traditional Indonesian housing. I arrived to the docks just on time when a ferry was leaving and got a good head start to begin my butt-breaking ride through Sumbawa on the 'so called' trans-Sumbawan highway.

Sumbawa was something different. Its astonishingly beautiful with traditional Indonesian fishing villages dotting the coastline. No tourist anywhere. It felt pristine -But the whole island is very poor. Here you could really see what its like, when your community just isn't connected to the global economy. There just isn't any money to be made, because nobody has any. The only way to make money is to get a government job and there ain't many around. Close to nobody has cars or mopeds. Horses are the real means of transport here. Every family seems to own one. And you don't need to refuel one. It just needs food and thats what there is plenty of around these parts of the world. It was the first place where I encountered horse carriage traffic jams. Towns were just filled with them like busy towns usually are filled with cars in our parts of the world. Everywhere I'd stop I got an interested group of people around me and my bike. And it wasn't like it so often feels like in places where they do see a tourist now and then: you can see that the people see an opportunity to get something from you. These were genuinely interested people with the most beautiful smiles. Nobody spoke English here and I was only beginning to speak a bit of Indonesian, so communication was minimal, but very, very friendly.
I reached Sumbawa Besar, the biggest town on the island and found a cheapish room(30000rs) just a bit before sunset, went on to buy some meat on a stick and to watch the sunset in a park.
Sumbawa. The trans-sumbawan Highway:On the second day of my journey through Sumbawa I stopped in a town as I saw a man selling ice-cream from his 'business on a bicycle'-kind of shop. I decided to give me and my engine a bit of rest as I was still hoping to 'make it somewhere tonight' whatever that meant. There was a woman, who bought an ice-cream for her kid and as I happened to be just in front of her house she asked me to come over to her porch. Turned out she knew a little bit of English too. She was my age and wife to the local cop. Her whole family lived just around there in the houses next to hers. She was a mother of four lovely kids and you could see she enjoyed the lovely life they had been able to set up for their selves. She wanted to learn a bit more English from me and I wanted to learn more Indonesian, so we sat there on her porch for a good while trying to make each other understood and rejoiced when we did. Her mother came from the house next to hers and barbecued some earns of corn -the traditional stuff to eat around there, they said. I had a lovely time sitting there and watching people on their carriages stare at me when they drove by, most of them taking kids to school. They even asked me to stay for the night, but I decided to continue my trip promising to stop over on my way back.
With a warm feeling in my heart I started my bike and pushed onwards untill sunset. I hung my hammock on a platform on a slope with a nice view. I guess they build these around for chilling out during the midday sun. Having a siesta between working the fields or herding whatever they might be herding.
The next morning I arrived to Sape after only two hours of riding just to hear that there would be no ferry that day. Actually there wouldn't probably be one in a few days. Well.. Whatever -I thought and sat down to have a meal of ginger rice, chili and chicken I'd picked up in a banana leaf from somewhere along the way. Turned out there were other foreigners around too. Six of them to be exact. Coincidentally one of the people was a Swedish guy named Robert. They'd ridden the bus through the island damning the buss ride to hell and were eager to take the ferry to Flores as well.
As I was still eating my meal and having a chat with the guy it turned out that there was going to be a ferry today after all! What a pleasant surprise!

I got my ticket(140000rs) and after some waiting I got to board the boat. The foreigners all naturally gathered in the same corner of the ship. An older French couple, who didn't really speak much English, an elderly Aussie couple, the Swede and a Brit girl.
It was nice to sit with some folks with a common language exchanging stories and just wondering if the ferry would ever leave..
One of the people: the Brit girl was so broken down from the bus ride, that she was constantly on the verge of jumping out of the boat and just turning around. We made jokes, that the boat would for sure leave immediately if she got off and that she'd be just plain lame to quit at this point when she was already on the boat. She said that she didn't care and that she was so tired of this that she just wanted to quit. In the end, after waiting maybe three and a half hours for the ferry to embark she finally did quit. She jumped off the boat and the boat left immediately afterwards. I guess she just wasn't meant to be on that one..
After a nice long chat with the crowd I got my fill of communication and wondered off to set up my hammock to watch Komodo island drift by and trying to spot an occasional dolphin jumping flips out of the water.

A view of Komodo island from my hammock:
Sunset on the ferry:
We decided to share expenses with Robert and found a nice place to stay in Labuanbajo for (50000rs, 4€) for a room with breakfast(turned out to be coffee and a doughnut).
This is a view of Labuanbajo bay from the hotel veranda:
The town of Labuanbajo itself:
In the hotel we met this Dutch guy named Jamie, who invited us to go for some snorkeling he'd already arranged for beforehand. So the next day we took a local fishing boat and headed to a nearby desert island. On this trip the beauty of Indonesia really started to hit me. It was the first time I saw a flying fish. I don't know why, but I'd always imagined fly fish to just jump out of the water and kind of hang-glide for a while and just make a kind of long jump. I'd never really imagined that some of the fish can really fly for long periods of time. There was this fish and it jumped out of the water and instead of obeying gravity it just flew past the boat and some tens of meters on leaving me with my mouth open!
Nothing had really prepared me for what I'd see in the sea itself.
After really nice snorkeling in Thailand I could say that Spain was nothing. But After this I could just as easily say that Thailand was nothing! There was an abundance of life just immediately when you got into the water. SO many kinds of coral it made the memory of the neon-colored corals at Koh Lipe shrink into something you'd thought of as big as a child and came back to see as an adult.
In just a while I saw barracudas, parrot fish, sea snakes, napoleon fish, stingray, a turtle and big tunafish on the hunt and many others I have no idea what they're called.
The tuna was especially thrilling as they were very interested in me and in a blink of an eye a mass of these big fish made a pulsating swirling silvery wall around me leaving nothing to see except for the fish themselves checking me out moving around me so quickly I could barely make out individual fish, just flashes of eyes on silver -all of them just staring right at me. I'm sure I'll never forget it.
Me and Robert wanted to see the dragons, so we were trying to arrange a cheap ride to Komodo National Park. Not as easily said and done as the place is the only real tourist attraction around. They get quite many of tourist flying to the nearby airport just to fly away after they'd seen the legendary beasts. Luckily it was off season, the town was almost empty of tourist and we got quite a cheap offer for our ride. We got a fisherman to take us to Rincha island in the Komodo national park on his boat for 500000rs(35€) with a meal included. For them its a Lot of money, but compared to the 1,4 million, which was the "normal" price made it feel like a bargain.
And again there was a beautifull boat-trip involved.

There was exitement in the air when we arrived to the dock of the island. The fisherman took a big stick with him and immediately standing on the dock pointed towards two dragons just laying there by the path. The man used the stick to drive the other one back a little bit to let us pass. I guess I was expecting fierce raving beasts coming to get us, but the dragons looked vainly interested in us and lazily gave way to let us pass.
They were like big, lazy monitor lizards, only dangerous as hell.
Before it was thought for them to be poisonous, but in reality the "poison" is over thirty different kinds of bacteria that live in some kind of symbiosis with the beast. Actually the dragon is quite a nasty bugger with and because of its backstabbing tactics.
The way the dragon preys is simply by either waiting for say a buffalo to come by a path or something and then just slashing with its tail or then sneaking behind them to get a quick bite. After that its all patience for the rest of the hunt. The lizards then wait for several days for the bacteria to infect the victim and then when the animal is weak enough they go and have a feast.

The whole Komodo experience involved a guide taking us out on a walk to see some wildlife and some dragons in their own environment.
The islands here are suprisingly dry because of a cold current and the environment is dramatically different from jungles on islands just a bit further away: One thing supporting the theory that the myth of the dragon comes from here is that because of the dry terrain there are fires igniting just by themselves, burning down parts of the island almost yearly.
What would you conclude if you sailed past a burning island with savage beasts like you'd never seen before?
My guess would be to relate the fires to the animals themselves to be the cause of the burned ground and raving fires.

Along the path we met a wild waterbuffalo scraching itself to a tree:
A humongous beehive:
Here's a big wild Komodo dragon we saw chilling out under a tree staring at us with an evaluative look:

The natives believe the spirits of their ancesters live in the lizards and thus won't hurt them.

The most exiting incident of the trip was after the walk. Back at the visitors center we were seated on a terrace of a bungalow on poles waiting for the cook to finish his business. While that happened the dragons had gotten a scent of what was happening and when the man came out of the kitchen the biggest dragon sprang on its legs and started chasing him. The man really had to run for it! Them lizards might look pretty slow and they usually are just barely lifting their body above the ground. But when they want they can jolt their legs under their body and run really fast.
These are the dragons that hung out at the kitchen:
After visiting the national park Robert was going to fly back to Bali and I still had to drive my bike back to where I'd rented it from. Anyways the ferry was due to leave the day before yesterday, but they were delayed because "they wanted to let the engines rest". The ferry was leaving next morning and it might be a while till it would come back. Especially if they wanted to let the engines rest a bit more.

I wasn' t planning on missing my plane, so on the boat I went. The Dutch guy Jamie was also on the boat so I even got some company during the ride. Back on Sumbawa he took a bus and I started driving.
I wanted to get to the village I'd met the nice family and finally almost when I thought I'd missed the whole house and it was almost dark I got there.
They gave me food and a room to sleep in. The father and mother of the woman that had originally invited me in were in the house with the children. Their daughter was sleeping with her husband at the police station.
After a good nights sleep and some grilled corn and pleasant efforts of communication I said my goodbyes and drove off.

That day I found myself all the way back to Lombok and decided to take the southern route to see some of the southcoast beaches along the way. Slept in my hammock between two papaya trees.
There is something nice about waking up to the prayer calls of mosks in the morning just before dawn.
Waking up then makes you feel like you have a headstart on the day as even the sun is only just starting on its daily path across the sky, the roosters are screaming their cockadoodledoos. There's a morning mist in the air which makes everything smell fresh and full of life.

That morning I rode down south looking for a petrol station and in a port-town I finally found one with a traffic jam of horses and their carriages surrounding the station. The station itself was packed with people with their canisters cramming towards the pumps in a huge lump.
I had absolutely no idea of what was going on and just stood there and amusedly watched people in their pursuit to get some fuel before all the other people did. Actually my tactics were just about to pay off as there was a guy who came over and made understood that now it was time for the tourist to get fuel.
But just as I was going to get my fill it was over. There evidently was no more. The people scattered in disappointment and I was left scratching my head in some kind of disbelief. Surely there was some gas somewhere? Strange as it may seem to somebody out there it turned out that the whole island was out of fuel and that the reason for the fuss had been the last refill and now that it was gone all they could do was to wait for tankers from Java to come in a few days and bring some in. I decided to drive on to find a cheapish place to refill and then check out some cheap accommodation at Lombok's own Kuta beach as it was said to be a beauty on this island that this far had seemed somewhat less enviromentally interesting as for ex. Bali with its many volcanoes or Sumbawa with its mountaineous regions. Lombok was just one big slope of a volcano.

Turned out the south was well worth a visit. I bought a little bit of rip-off-priced fuel to make it to Kuta and met a guy that wanted to show their traditional(albeit a bit tourist-orientedly kept) village.
Not many traditional houses left anymore. The thing is that concrete is despite its ugliness a very durable material compared to traditional houses which basically need a bit of repair several times a year. So why build every year when you can build from concrete now and worry about its aesthetics some other year?
The elders of the village still lived there in the only concrete house there and hung out on a platform outside of it chewing betelnut and lazily working on different kinds of handicrafts n' stuff. They also offered me some Betel nut and I decided to try some. The taste is quite fowl. Like you could imagine when chewing on some sour root or something. I'd guessed there'd been some kind of a light buzz -but if there was one I was unable to resolve it from myself feeling normally strange.
It did colour my teeth reddish, though. There was a reddish glow in my smile for several days.

Here are some traditional houses from the village:
This is what the Betelnut plant looks like: The guy who showed me his village (and from where I then semi-reluctantly bought a nice batik sarong) arranged for me to get a cheap place to sleep from the place where the local people that work in the guesthouses rent a room.

Guesthouses were lined up along the beach boulevard. The ones owned by the locals were of simple making and often without electricity, but the foreigners had evidently had the opportunity to put a bit of dough into the ones they kept and places were decorated and had small gardens ect.

It might sound like the place is a big tourist attraction, but I guess its still a bit on its way to become one. For at least when I was there there was close to no tourist hanging about at all. Just a few random surfers and some singular groups of people.
I met an old australian guy who told me that he'd been coming here for the past 20 years. He told me that the whole row of buildings on the boulevard were recently built.
He said that compared to the good old times Kuta was already quite spoiled as it was.With these new guesthouses the tourists had moved from the actual village some hundreds of meters away to the boulevard with foreigners owning most of the places, the prices had gone up every year and there were already too many restaurants and guesthouses to actually be able to make a good living with the amounts of tourist visiting.
The way he he put it made it sound like things really weren't the way they'd used to be.
My guess is that they never were.

I was greated by local girls hanging out on the grass by the road with their sarongs and other sellables they made their living from. Once we'd gotten past the "If you buy you buy from me, ok?"'s I had nicest of times chatting away with them and with curious people walking by stopping to satisfy the questions popping to their heads.
The girls hadn't had business for a few days so they were just biding their time waiting for better times to come.
They were'nt bothered about the fact that they'd need to earn some money at some point.
Sometimes it just was like this. All you could do was wait.
And so they did.
The girls showed me the nest of a seasnake that lived in a cavity under the tree on the stone on the beach, the landmark of Kuta.

During the two days I spent there I got to tell them about Finland and various other trivial and not so trivial things. I in turn got to know a bit about their culture and customs, how their family was building a new longhouse, of strange funny foreigners they'd met and miscellaneous other stuff.. Every day somebody in the place I was staying at invited me to eat with them.

I met this older guy, who invited me to his house for dinner. His wife made some fish and rice with a delicious sauce of crushed peanuts, sweet soy and chili.
I really have to make it myself some day.

Even though the man evidently wasn't a wealthy man he gave me an old silver ring as present! Its a beautiful stone ring without the stone, but I'm sure I'll find a stone for it when the time comes.
Hanging out at a cafe held by a local young woman I bought a thief-sword from her brother one evening. Its a cool looking saber with a wooden handle carved into a shape of a dragons head. When you hold it in your hand the dragon stares back at you. I like old worn things. It was rusty and looked worn. I Don't know if it really is old or not, but thats not important. For me it couldn't even be fake.

On the third morning there was fuel.

I'd had a wonderfull time exploring the nearby area and chatting with people. But once again I had to be on my way. A flight to Bangkok via Kuala Lumpur was waiting for me.
I continued towards the end of that particularly memorable strech of my trip along the coast aweing at all the beauty around

Looking backwards my memories fill up with shining eyes and bright smiles.
There's something about Indonesia that really got to me.
Some day I'll be back for sure!

Phew! What a megasized entry this was. I think I might settle for something less ambitios in amounts of text and just concentrate on publishing photos as soon as I get them.

I'll Be flying to India Next week, so I'll post something soon again -I hope! =D