INDONESIA: BACKGROUND AND FLIGHT TO SINGAPORE

 June-July 2023

When he was a young boy going to the zoo on a regular basis, my husband Bob was intrigued by the place names "Sumatra," "Borneo," and "Indonesia" on the cages of many of the monkeys, the orangutans, and the Komodo dragons.  He dreamed of going to those exotic places some day and seeing some of his favorite zoo animals in the wild.

About five years ago, he started to think it might be time to make his dreams come true and started to plan a trip to Indonesia. That trip was in place and we were ready to go in June 2020. However, when the world shut down in March 2020 at the start of the Covid epidemic, all of Bob's planning and almost all the advance payments we made for the trip went down the tubes.

The map of Indonesia below shows that the country was widely affected by the disease. Of a population of 277 million (compared to the US population of 332 million), about 6.8 million got Covid (compared to 103.8 million in the US) and 160,941 died (compared to 1.1 million in the US). About 75% got at least one dose of the vaccine (compared to about 82% in the US). The Indonesian numbers of infections and death seem very low, but apparently there were significant issues with reporting. Some research claims that the "official" numbers may reflect only 2% of the real COVID-19 infections in Indonesia.

Anyway, Indonesia, like most countries, closed its borders to non-essential travel on April 2, 2020. The country remained essentially closed to tourism until late-2022.

Bob started looking into rebooking our trip in November 2022 when he reached out to Adventure Indonesia, the tour company he had worked with to plan the aborted trip. He was pleasantly surprised to find they would honor some of the money we had already poured into the trip. We were lucky to get a refund from Singapore Airlines for the round-trip flight from LAX, but we lost the money we had spent on all the inter-island flights we had booked. Adventure Indonesia honored pretty much everything else--ground and water transportation, guides, food and hotels that were part of the package, etc. We were so relieved that the money we had spent was not a total loss.

JAMAICA: OCHO RIOS AND DUNN'S RIVER FALLS AND KONOKO FALLS

 February 18, 2023

Ocho Rios (Spanish for "eight rivers") is a town on the north Jamaican coast. Many believe Christopher Columbus first set foot in Jamaica just outside the city.

Our hotel in Ocho Rios was a once grand multi-building complex, but it is now in a bit of a dilapidated state. Our room had no hot water, no AC, no wifi, and a cockroach on the bed.

However, they had a great sign on the office wall.

We were worn out by heat, humidity, and walking, and in spite of all the hotel issues, we just needed sleep.

The next morning we were in no rush to get started. Chad was snorkeling, and we had a plan to meet at 11:00, so we drove down to the Ocho Rios Craft Market. It was about the junkiest tourist trap we've ever seen, not even meriting a photo. Nothing was original. It all looked like it was made in China. There were multiple stalls, all selling the same items, and every vendor claimed to have made the items in his/her booth. We decided we needed breakfast instead of shopping.

Definitely not a breakfast spot:

PORTUGAL, LISBON: GETTING THERE IN THE TIME OF COVID

 June 21-22, 2022

This post probably has a bunch of information in it that no one but Bob and I care about, but since this blog functions as our trip journal, I want to put it down here anyway. Feel free to scan or skip.

Three weeks before we were scheduled to leave for Portugal, when we were babysitting our granddaughters for a week while our daughter and son-in-law were on a getaway to Mexico, Bob started feeling ill. He test positive for Covid on the evening of May 30th. I took him to the Urgent Care the following morning. They did another test, also positive, and prescribed Paxlovid, an antiviral developed to treat high-risk Covid patients. He went into quarantine in our daughter's basement.

Two days later I woke up sick, tested negative, but went to Urgent Care, where I tested positive. Later in the day our oldest granddaughter also tested positive at home. It was clear we needed to go home before we infected everyone. Our daughter and SIL canceled the remainder of their trip and booked a flight home. Feeling that it wasn't right to expose a plane full of people to Covid, we rented a car and drove the 650 miles home.

After three days on Paxlovid, Bob tested negative (at home) for Covid on June 4. It was ten days before I tested negative on June 11. However, Bob had a rebound on June 10, something that occasionally happens with Paxlovid. The rebound commonly lasts three days, but on June 20, the day before our trip, Bob still hadn't had an official negative test, which was required for entry into Portugal. (As far as we could tell, Portugal was one of the last EU countries to require that, and it was on every site we looked at. I see that the requirement was officially lifted on July 1.) It was 21 days since Bob's original positive test. He hadn't had any symptoms for days, so a friend who is a Physician's  Assistant wrote a letter for him that cleared him for travel, but we were still nervous about Portugal's requirements.  We weren't sure if the letter would be accepted as it wasn't on an EU form, which seemed to be required, but visitors from outside the EU can't use the EU forms. So complicated. 

ECUADOR (AND PANAMA): MARCH 2022

 March 16-17, 2022

Background:

Back in 2019, Bob began planning a trip for the members of his law firm and their spouses to the Galapagos Islands in March 2021. Bob booked a yacht that would hold eight couples. Five of the rooms would be taken by the attorneys and spouses, and we found three other couples to join us, including some close friends of ours, so that we could fill all the rooms. Then Covid-19 hit in March 2020, and after it became apparent that travel would not be possible in March 2021, the trip was postponed. 

Over the ensuing year, Bob's partners dropped out one-by-one for various reasons, as did our friends. However, Bob would not be deterred. We cast about among our other friends who enjoy travel and came up with two new couples, and one of those couples had friends who wanted to join us, making four couples total. For several months at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, we bounced back and forth as to whether or not we should commit to the trip, knowing that we stood the risk of losing a substantial downpayment. We had been badly burned in 2020 by our aborted trip to Argentina and another trip to Indonesia that we had fully booked. (Trip insurance, which we had, did not cover any of it.)

NEW MEXICO, DAY 5: SANTA FE'S MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

 June 29, 2021

I had no idea what Santa Fe's Museum of International Folk Art was. I had never heard of it when Bob added it to our itinerary. He knows I love folk art and art museums in general, and so the name attracted his attention.

It was raining when we got to the museum complex known as "Museum Hill." Four museums are on the site: the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the Museum of International Folk Art. In addition, there is also the Botanical Garden at Museum Hill. So much to see and so little time! 

You could easily spend two days on this hill, but we only had one afternoon, so we made our way to the Folk Art Museum.

At first, it seemed like a normal art museum. We paid our entrance fee and started down a hallway, passing

Triple Eyes (2007) by Alexander H. Girard

When we entered the main exhibit room, however, we discovered an art museum unlike any other we have visited. It was a very large room, warehouse sized, absolutely crammed with dioramas of scenes from various cultures along with dolls, masks, religious folk art, costumes, toys, and so on. More than 100 countries are represented. It is an eye-popping collection. In fact, the Folk Art Museum houses the largest collection of folk art in the world.  There are more than 135,000 artifacts, about 10% of which are on display at any given time. I could have spent the entire day in this huge room with its warren of displays. Bob, on the other hand, was a bit overwhelmed. It's more my thing than his.

Here is a sampling of a few of my favorites. It may seem like a lot of photos, but it is a small fraction of what I saw. I am not going to try to group them together by type because that is not how I experienced the museum.

TEXAS, AUSTIN: BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART, UT AUSTIN, AND TORCHY'S TACOS

March 25, 2021

On our last afternoon of the trip, we spent a few hours in the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas. Founded in 1963, it is one of the largest university art museums in the United States. The current building, erected in 2003, was funded in part by a $5 million donation from the wife of James Michener, but then the Houston Endowment made a $12 million donation in honor of its then-chariman, Jack Blanton, and the museum got its new name (although there is a Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building).

The entry way is designed like an atrium, and hanging from the ceiling is Thomas Glassford's work Siphonophora (2016), which looks like a giant sea creature.

When we were there the Blanton had a special exhibit of artworks collected by Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), a part-time art history professor turned print collector. Over about 50 years he amassed a collection of about 3,500 prints covering 500 years of art history. It is an incredibly diverse collection. Here are a few of my favorites. 

(L) The Holy Face (1649) by Claude Mellan and (R) Haitian Woman (1945) by Henri Matisse:

ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL: OUR LONGEST/SHORTEST VACATION EVER, PART 3 (THE JOURNEY HOME)

March 13-14, 2020

On Thursday night (March 12), after we had gone back to our hotel and gone to bed, my brother Dave was contacted by the Church's legal counsel in Argentina. He said the government had drafted a proposal that would call for an mandatory 14-day quarantine of visitors to Argentina from high risk countries: China, Japan, Iran, South Korea, all of Europe, and the United States. The proposal could be formalized at any time, meaning that we would be in quarantine, unable to travel and possibly unable to leave the country. He advised that we get back across the border into Brazil as soon as possible and that we catch a flight from there back to the United States.

Major bummer.

Dave shared this information with us at breakfast, and while we sat at the table together, the Joneses and we booked one-way flights for later that day that would take us home. At over $1,200 a ticket, it was an expensive decision, and we doubted that we would be able to recoup any of our losses on three other flights we would no longer be able to take--to Buenos Aires, to Patagonia, and back to the USA.

The disappointment was immense, but our decision would turn out to be the right one.

Our incredibly patient, tolerant driver agreed to take the four of us back to Brazil, and then drive back to the Argentina side of the border to take Dave and Bonnie to the airport to travel to Buenos Aires on the flight we were supposed to join them on.

We said a tearful good-bye to Dave and Bonnie, the three Kenison siblings in tears (it's genetic), grateful for the very short time spent together and mourning the lost shared experiences that should have been ours during the next few days. We would have a great story to tell, but we would rather have had the trip we had planned.