Goodbye Indonesia

Hello all,

Well that's it, I've gone. It's quite strange. After my holiday with Mum, I returned to find that all was not very busy in Flores. A couple of days later Debbie got a bad burn on her leg from a motorcycle exhaust. It then became infected and she got blood poisioning and had to go to hospital! All of this meant that she couldn't go diving. It took her a couple of weeks to get better. As soon as she was, I knew it was time to talk to Kath & Earnest. There just wasn't enough work to justify 3 full time staff. None of us were making enough money to break-even! There were pretty cool about it and a few days later I was told that I had to leave the country by 28th Feb. Much quicker than I'd expected!

It was incredibly sad to leave the diving which was totally fantastic. it was also hard to leave behind Golo and my friends there. I nearly balled my eyes out when saying goodbye, they were all laughing at me for crying! Luckily, Judith and Ingrid and Nicky (2 dutch owners + kid) were going to bali for a short holiday and we were on the flight together, so i wasn't immediatly stranded by myself.

I miss Golo, and the nights out at Paradise doing ballroom dancing with the local gay aerobics teacher, drinking arak and gambling, playing badminton, the view across the bay, my friends. I don't miss the food, days with no work, the bad pay, sitting in the office.

On my last night, they got out 2 special bottles of arak (the local licquor). It takes a couple of months to make - one was coffee and the other mango. They were pretty good : ) We all got fairly toasted and ended up watching professional arm wrestling on TV!

Once in Bali, after a quick visit to the dentist, I headed to Padangbai to try out the diving there. The diving was pretty good. Corals not great in comparison to Flores, but it makes findng fish a lot easier and I got to see several animals that I'd not seen before. Also had a fantastic night dive.

From Padangbai I made the 12 hour return trip to Lombok to get my exit visa. 5 hour ferry ride and 1 hour by bus (each way) for a 1 minute meeting!! Someone decided to liberate me of 400,000 "just in case" rupiah (about 40US). I only discovered this when trying to buy a burger in McDonalds... (I needed some comfort food!). I couldn't buy the burger anyway. As it was I only just had enough money to get back to Padangbai. I spent my last rupiah when I boarded the ferry back!! Its so rare that I have money stolen so am not that bothered and hope it was used for a good cause.

Things like that make you remember the value of money. To me 400,000 rupiah means :-

1 weeks wages (in flores anyway!)
1 days diving (if I'm paying)
2 - 3 days expenses on the roada very cheap night out in the UK : )

To an indonesian, it would mean :-
2 weeks - 1 month wages
2 months of school for a child

In Padangbai, I met a guy called Lewis from London. We got on really well, aided by the fact that he had a Harley Davidson!! He dives too (that's how we met), and we spent the last few days together, hanging out and going for rides on his bike. It was very nice to be on a decent motorbike again.

I'm now in Kuala Lumper. Arrived yesterday. Took my passport into the embassy as it's pretty much full and now have a week to kill before I get a new one. This is going to be really hard! There's nothing to do in KL and I have no real interest in Malaysia anyway. Nor is there any diving on the West coast.... HELP! Tomorrow I'm going to head off to Melaka to see if that's any better. I've already done all the toursity things I wanted to do here - which was see the Petronas Towers. Quite interesting how they built it, but the skybridge isn't so hot. Looked much more exciting in "Entrapment"!

So that's about it for the mo. Hope you're all well and happy,
lots of love
kx