I am sitting in a Starbucks at the Domestic Terminal of the Denpasar Bali Airport. I have made it through two of the five flights for my arrival in Alor… and LOTS of diving. I feel like all I have done so far is sleep. And the good news is that the longest flights are behind me. Now I just have short flights… but one doozy of a five hour layover in Jakarta. At night.
I flew the Hello Kitty Airline. It was kinda weird. How can you trust an airline that shows little cartoon characters flying the plane. Everything all the way down to the barf bags were branded with Hello Kitty.
I tried to watch several movies and I got the gist of most of them… but the novel I’m reading totally sucks. I think I just need to give up on it and move on.
I know when I go to check in for my domestic flights they are going to charge me for overweight baggage. The question is how much will they charge me? Regardless, my Eva flight from the states round trip was only $630, so I feel I’ve got a lot of money to play with before I feel like I’m not breaking even.
It’s funny. I’m in a weird place for this trip. I also feel like I forgot something. Something big. But I can’t put my finger on it. The only thing I can think of is that I didn’t go through my envelope of foreign currency and see if I had any Rupiah sitting around.
Speaking of Rupiah, I decided to get some out before I left the international terminal. I quickly looked up my little currency converter app and decided that I’d get out up to $200 USD which if I rounded out to even Rupiah, that would be about 2,000,000 Rupiah. When I put my card in and went to choose an amount, the largest amount was 500,00. What kind of amount is that?
They also had another screen you could go to in order to enter an amount, but I didn’t want to try that. So I just chose 500,00. Once I got that money out and safely to my wallet, I figured out that this was worth 500,000 Rupiah. Which is all but $34.96 USD. Woot! I’m rich!
Well, at least it is a little walking around money.
I’m a little obsessed with my technology and the organization of my nudi photos. I finally got to a life list spreadsheet. Hallelujah! I’ve been saying I’m going to do that forever. And, the Nudibranch and Sea Slug Indentification volume 2 (aka NSSI2) just came out, so the timing is really good. In fact, maybe while I have layovers I will work on this some more. It’s not all that hard since I have all my unique sea slugs for each trip already listed. The final result I’d love is to print my favorites for the wall.
I should try to get fun headshots this trip for the “nine box” to put on my bedroom wall. I have to remember that… and when I crop those to get to an exact square with room to wrap around the canvas.
This is the 8th time I’ve been to Indonesia:
January 2006 Tulamben (Scuba Seraya)
February 2011 Wakatobi, Tulamben (Scuba Seraya), Ambon (Maluku Dive Resort)
Sept/Oct 2012 Sangaeng/Bima (Cheng Ho), Tulamben (Villa Markisa)
Feb 2014 South Rinca (Cheng Ho)
Sept 2015 Beyond Komodo (Cheng Ho), Tulamben (Villa Markisa)
Nov/Dec 2015 Raja Ampat (Arenui)
Nov 2017 Lembeh (NAD)
I first go with Graham and Diving4Images to Alor for 10 days, then I’m off to the Aggressor where I dive Komodo. They called me to tell me that I will be the only person on the charter who is not in a particular group… they rented the rest of the boat. It sounds like they are a local Indonesian (or Asian of some sort). I told them that as long as they do not want to change the itinerary and we still do all the dives, I’m fine with that. It will be nice to just be alone. And underwater. J
I’m not sure if Christianne is going to be at Villa Markisa when I’m there. I already reached out to Anouk. She will be back in Belgium during the time I’m there, so I’ll miss her.
