INDIA 2025: FROM LOS ANGELES TO AMRITSAR

 November 20-22, 2025

In December 2024, Bob and I and my sister Chris and her husband Stan had a wonderful trip to India that included time spent in Guwahati, Kaziranga National Park, Delhi, Varanasi, Agra, and Jaipur. We checked many things off our bucket list, but one remained: to see a tiger in the wild. In spite of five or six safari drives in Kaziranga National Park, the big cat escaped us.

Foreseeing this as a possibility, Bob had purchased a five-year, multiple-entry visa instead of a 30-day, single-entry visa. I think his plan (unbenownst to me) was always to go back and try again. I think it may have been on the flight home that he suggested another trip.

We reached out to our reliable travel partners from the first trip and also included my brother Dave and his wife Bonnie and proposed traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday when I had a full week off from school and could add a few extra days. Both couples enthusiastically agreed, and Bob started planning.

Dave and Bonnie left three days before we did so that they could squeeze in some of the experiences, like the Taj Mahal, that we had on our first India trip. The plan was to meet up in the Delhi Airport on November 22 and fly from there to our first location: Amritsar.

With a time change of 12.5 hours, it takes two-and-a-half calendar days to get to Delhi from our home. We left the house on Thursday morning, drove the two hours to the Los Angeles Airport, left our car in the LA Hilton underground parking lot, and boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to London at about 3:40 p.m.

A good omen?

The flight was 10 hours and 20 minutes long, and we arrived in London on a beautiful day with blue skies and a great view of the Thames curlicuing its way through the city.

We could even see the London Eye on the South Bank:

UGANDA 2025: A TRIP WITH OUR GRANDDAUGHTER

 July 15-17, 2025

In 2023 we took our oldest granddaughter Savannah on a trip to Colombia. She didn't get to choose the destination. We were already planning a trip there, and when we learned she was interested in the country, we invited her to join us. She was 16 years old and made a great travel companion, so we decided to take her younger sister Ella on a trip when she was 16. Because of the advanced planning, she got more say in her destination. In 2024, a year before we intended to travel, we asked her where she would go if she could go anywhere in the world. Without hesitation, she said "Africa!"

It didn't take Bob long to start exploring where we could go in Africa where he and I had not been before, and he decided on Uganda. Uganda?? Really??? Well . . . okay. Like Colombia, it straddles the equator, and we all survived that trip. How much different can it be?

A lot, as it turns out. Here are just a few significant differences:

-  While their populations are almost identical, hovering around the 53 million mark, Colombia is about 4.74 times larger in total area than Uganda. 

- Colombia has a richer, more developed economy. ($7,914 GDP per capita vs. Uganda's $1,073 GDP per capita)

- Uganda has a much younger population, in fact, one of the world's youngest populations with 43.5% of people under age 15!

- Uganda is landlocked while Colombia has both Pacific and Caribbean coastlines.

Before our trip, I knew very little about Uganda, other than that it was ruled by the brutal dictator Idi Amin during my teen years. Of course, I also had known little about Colombia other than that it had been the home of the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar who was particularly active during the 1980s and 1990s.

Gee, those both sound like great countries to take your granddaughters to, right?

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 - JAVA: SURABAYA, PART I (CITY TOUR)

 July 7, 2023

We made our way out of the jungle of Borneo and to the airport in Pangkalan Bun, a small facility with just one runway. I love the blue sign below. At first I thought it was a play room for kids--a nursery--but then I realized from the image that it is a room where mothers can nurse their babies.

We flew on Nam Air, an Indoneisan regional airline based in Jakarta.

Our flight from Sumatra to Surabaya on the island of Java took about an hour and a half. Surabaya's Juanda International Airport is the third busiest airport in Indonesia. In 2019, it had about 24 million passengers. Compare that to the 3rd busiest airport in the United States, Denver, which had 34 million passengers. The numbers are a lot closer than I would have guessed.

I was a little surprised to see Beard Papa's--a Japanese creme puff chain--in the Juanda Airport. Of course, we have them in the US too, usually attached to Asian grocery stores.

INDONESIA: OFF TO BORNEO VIA JAKARTA AND SOME THOUGHTS ON SUMATRA

 July 4, 2023

Our second night in Bukit Lawang was much quieter than the first as all the partiers appeared to have left, but it was still unbearably hot. We woke up at about 5:00 AM, and at 7:00 Bob got up to walk the grounds to look for birds and other animals. It was a beautiful morning.

I took a shower, then tried to get my hair to dry on its own. I eventually unplugged everything in the room and used my hair dryer on its lowest setting. The power stayed on and eventually I was able to dry my hair. It was my first day in Indonesia I didn't start the day with a wet ponytail.

Bob didn't see much on the property. When he got back, we went down for breakfast at about 8:00. Bob, worried about how much he had been sweating and possible dehydration, ordered a large bottle (~ 64 oz.) of water, a Coke Zero, and some juice. He drank at least 80 oz. of liquid, hoping to restore the equilibrium in his body. 

By the way, check out the cool lighting in the main dining area--dozens of woven baskets with lightbulbs inside.

We both ordered the crepe I'd had the day before, but this time with bananas in the batter in addition to the chocolate sauce. We also had passion fruit/tamarind juice that was beautiful to look at but not anything special to drink. 

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.

COLOMBIA: MEDELLIN, PART 2 - LUNCH, BOTERO PLAZA

 March 22, 2023

After walking around Comuna 13, we were hot, tired, and hungry. It was time for lunch. Our driver picked us up when we got down to the flatter part of town and took us to a restaurant Jakob thought we would enjoy.

There was plenty of street art to see on the way, even on the freeway underpasses.

La Familia Restaurante specializes in platos típicos, or local dishes. The most expensive thing on the menu was about $10.

COLOMBIA: PLANNING A TRIP AND GETTING TO CARTAGENA

 March 14-15, 2023

About a year ago I read an article in what I think was the New York Times Travel section about how while Colombia was once considered one of the most dangerous places on earth, it was now actually a great place to visit and pretty safe as long as the usual precautions were taken.

I mentioned that to Bob (All it takes is a mention), and before you knew it, he was working with a tourist company to plan a trip during my spring break at the college where I work. 

Our main destinations were Cartagena, Bogotá, the mountains around Pereira, and Medellín.

Then, when our daughter and her family came for Thanksgiving, we learned that our oldest granddaughter was totally obsessed with...take a guess...Colombia! She had been studying it, had written a story set in Colombia, and had even learned how to make arepas, Colombian pan-friend cakes made from special corn flour and eaten as is or stuffed with cheese and other fillings. She made some for us, and they were delicious!

Anyway, she couldn't believe that we were planning a trip to Colombia, and we couldn't believe that she already knew a lot more about Colombia than we did, and then suddenly, Bob and I looked at each other and one of us said, "Do you want to come?"  She seemed pretty excited by the prospect, and once she cleared it with her teachers (the time we were planning to go was NOT her spring break), we started to process of getting her a flight, adding her to our hotels and tours, etc.