INDONESIA: FROM BALI TO CALIFORNIA AND REFLECTIONS ON THE TRIP

 July 14, 2023

Our guide and driver picked us up at our hotel and drove us to the Denpasar International Airport, also known as the Ngurah Rai International Airport. It looks very Balinese in its architecture.

I think this statue by the airport must be Ngurah Rai, a Indonesian Lieutenant Colonel who has been named a National Hero for his role in the Indonesian War for Independence against the Dutch after World War II. He died in the Battle of Margarana and appears on the 50,000 Indonesian rupiah bill.

The airport is very busy, serving over 25 million passengers a year. I love all the Balinese touches. 

INDONESIA TRIP: SINGAPORE, PART III - GARDENS BY THE BAY AND JUMBO SEAFOOD RESTAURANT

 June 30, 2023

After our time in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, we called up another Grab ride to take us to the Gardens by the Bay, one of the iconic tourist sites in Singapore. We drove through the business district/downtown area to get there, and I was struck by the variety and aesthetics of the city's architecture.  Almost every building had something unusual or interesting about it.

By the time we got to Gardens by the Bay, we were hot and tired from walking around the botanic gardens.

INDONESIA TRIP: SINGAPORE PART II - BOTANIC GARDENS

 Tuesday, July 1, 2023

It finally stopped raining, or at least diminished to a very light drizzle, and we could move on to what had been our first planned activity for Singapore but which got bumped to early afternoon because of the deluge: a visit to the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

We got our hopes up when we saw this sign, but alas, no wild monkeys or otters approached us.

A few steps into the garden and we already knew this was something special. Check out the waterfall around the base of the palm tree. I've never seen that before! This is one of three gardens in the world, and the only tropical garden, to be honored as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

INDONESIA TRIP: SINGAPORE PART I - OLD AIRPORT ROAD HAWKER CENTRE AND THE SINGAPORE NATIONAL GALLERY

 June 30, 2023

Because it was raining as it can only rain in tropical areas--like water from a firehose--we needed to go somewhere indoors. We rearranged our plans and headed to the Old Airport Road Hawker Centre. "Hawker Centres" are basically huge food courts, and they are very popular in Singapore. Opened in 1973, the one on Old Airport Road is supposed to be the biggest (over 160 food stalls) and the best.

The stalls were just beginning to open when we arrived, and there were already quite a few people scouting out the many options.

We learned right away that we needed to bus our own table.

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.