Sad Goodbyes

Don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened. Don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened. Don’t be sad it’s over be glad it happened.

That’s what I keep telling myself. Could this summer have possibly gone by any quicker! At least it ended with a POWER AWESOME week. Here’s the latest:

We spent the beginning of the week in Ubud with our new found friends; Poliman and KeKoa. Poliman lives in Ubud, an inland city of Bali, and we stayed at his tiny little place for a few nights. He took us all over. He drove us to a volcano and lake nearby and to a local warung for lunch. Honestly, we’ve liked most of the food everywhere we’ve been, but we’ve really struggled in Indo. The norm is to eat at a warung, like a little restaurant place. What they have to offer is pre-fried chicken, tofu, pork, etc. Don’t get me wrong, fry anything and its good- but when it’s been sitting cold in the window all day it’s really not that appetizing. I like my French fries hot, not cold and stale thank you; same for chicken. And Alex has no right to call me a food snob for that, cuz he hates it just as much as I do! Ok, so the warungs aren’t that good, but, I have a new obsession for tempe burgers and tofu curries. We also really like their fried rice and noodles (mie goreng and nasi goring). So we found a few things we liked in the end.

Ubud was really cool, but probably the coolest thing was the monkey forest. There are millions of MONKEYS!!! We had food with us and they would just climb all over you like crazy. Alex was a lot braver about that than I was. So much so a monkey literally SAT on his head. Yuck! They were really funny monkeys though and it was so fascinating to watch them interact and to see how incredibly human they can seem. We saw them running around playing with each other, swimming, picking lice for each other, and even some unwanted x-rated surprises. We didn’t know we’d paid for that on admission.

We saw and Indonesian movie about their Independence day called Merah Putih. It was pretty good until it ended abruptly without any story development or plot line. I guess that’s how they like their movies here.

Tuesday we took a five hour ferry ride to another island, Lombok. Again, late night arrivals are never fun, especially when everyone says FULL FULL FULL. We felt like Joseph and Mary, except for the pregnant mom having a baby part. Anyway, we ended up sleeping outside on a bamboo exposed hut with a raised deck. It was actually really awesome and the most awesome part, it was $FREE.99.

Lombok is AMAZING! We rented a moto and cruised all over in the sunshine and through another monkey jungle. We actually saw this trail as we were driving by in the inland jungle and decided to try it out. We ended up finding ourselves in the “office” of the local villagers. Everyone was busy at work cutting down trees and chopping at coconuts, searching for berries, carrying logs and huge baskets on their heads, washing clothes, etc. We walked around on the trails for a long time and ended up finding our selves at a river. We walked down it only to discover the coolest boulder you could jump off into a deep spot in the river. It was so fun! And a couple villagers who were bathing came over in their underwear and swam with us. It was so peaceful and quite there, we loved it. When we’d pass people on the trail we almost didn’t want to say “hello” too loud and disturb the beauty of the place. That night we had a fish b-b-que with some friends we made and tons of fun playing card games with them.

From Lombok we took another short, very over-overcrowded catamaran journey to Gili Air, a tiny island off Lombok. It was gorgeous!!! Island paradise post card worthy for sure. There are no cars or motos there, all transport is by horse and carriage. It’s really small, you can walk around it in an hour and the sands are so white and the water so crisp turquoise it hurts to look at it it’s so beautiful. Again, accommodation was hard to come by, and so we stayed in a farmer’s house and he moved in with some family for the night. It was awesome, especially the madness that occurs at the 5am prayer call. Seriously, as soon as the call goes off every animal in the farm starts to screech, bray, bark , meow, scratch, cluck, honk, STOP! Maybe it’s just my half-awake dillusionalness that makes it seem like insanity but Alex says the same so maybe both of us are crazy. The chickens are the worst of all.

Anyway, Gili Air was incredible. We went on one more dive there and it was awesome! Totally different than Koh Tao, Thailand and so fascinating. They say Indonesia has the most diverse fish population and I think it’s true. There were so many new fish we’d never seen before! Highlights were: SHARK !(small white tipped reef shark), eels, cuddlefish, sting ray, and SEA TURTLE. I loved the sea turtle so much!!! It was awesome!!! Besides that just plain old being there and swimming in the turquoise sea was amazing! It was like swimming in blue Listerine! It was so blue!!!

After Gili Air our journey home commenced. We took an 8pm flight out of Denpasar, Bali which was delayed until 12am; as they say in China “unconvenience happen”. Thus we arrived in Kualalumpur, Malaysia at 3:30am. We walked through the streets of China town at 4:30am until we found a place; it was really magical walking there at that time of night though. Anyway, after a few hours of shut eye we found the LDS church in town and enjoyed an AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME service. People were so nice to us and so welcoming. We spent the day in KL exploring and then took a 1am flight to Tianjin, China. We got to Tianjin at 7am and took a train back to Beijing. The super kind Christensens are letting us stay with them until we leave Wednesday. Two more flight transfers and we’ll be back in cozy Provo.

I’d like to thank Rebecca Goldrup for her powerful poem “moveing away from beJing” and add a little to it:

First wean we moved to beJing

We said lots of nihous

To lots of chines pepol

And now wer saying ziJins

Lots of tears

Comeing out of our

Eyes going on

The plane and

I figered why its

Hard to spell ziJin, Chào ông, Lear heouy, Sawatdi, Twáme naw, Selamat tinggal, and Jumpa lagi

Its because its hard

To say ZiJin, Chào ông, Lear heouy, Sawatdi, Twáme naw, Selamat tinggal, and Jumpa lagi



So long China and South East Asia, we hope to be reunited with you soon!!!