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: THESE ARE A FEW OF OUR FAVORITE THINGS

 March 14-23, 2023

After many of our trips, starting with some of the trips we took with our kids, we have made a list of all of our favorite experiences and things we want to remember. We decided to do that for this trip. So, in no particular order other than this is the order we came up with them, here are our favorite experiences, places, people, and things from our trip to Colombia.

- Fruit EVERYWHERE! Mangosteen was our favorite, but we also enjoyed granadilla, dragonfruit, lulo, and guanábana.

- Fruit juice of all kinds, but especially the kind mixed with milk (probably sweetened condensed milk).

- And speaking of juice, the raspberry grape juice with dinner in Bogotá was Judy's favorite.

- Cartagena--everything about it. It was our favorite city, and Carolina was our favorite guide.

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.