We’ve arrived in Pontianak now, it’s pretty freakin cool! It rained hard yesterday afternoon and I thnk it’ll do that every day here.
The internet is pretty flaky, but come on, it’s Borneo! I’ll do a good solid update soon, promise.
PS went to the equator today (c: Pictures are forth coming!
Well, we arrived in Jakarta today and are on the way to Pontianak tomorrow morning. I’m not surehow the internet will be ther,e hopefully we’ll have some form of access.
Jakarta seems cool so far, even if we were stuck in traffic for an hour getting nto the hotel. I”m gonna go for dinner now though, there is an Irish pub in the vicinity and I’m looking forward to a Kilkenny!
Picture post!!
The Road outside our hotel
Statue in the Park
I think he’s telling the imperialist Dutch to get out of his country
Non-dutch kids playing soccer
Shanties down by the river
Not all Indonesian’s live that way
Street vendors
We had dinner here last night… cost Rp 25,000! ($3!)
Old dude sitting on a chair
Well I’ve definitely been working too much lately and my sleeping schedule is all mesed up too. We’ve been flying a lot and trying to get a bunch done but the weather has been a problem and we’ve had some computer troubles as well. C’est la vie though! (shouldn’t I know a Bahasa expression for that by now?)Speaking of Bahasa I can successfully count to 10 and probably all the way to 100 if I really tried hard. Tonight we went out to a street place again for some sate and I managed to order dinner and get an avacado drink all in Bahasa (c: It was tasty too! There were these two kids, probably 16 years old or so, playing guitars and singing and they were both quite good, it was awesome to hear. They had some good songs and their voices blended just perfectly, it was obvious that they practised! What was less obvious was who was paying them, they didn’t approach anyone for money as far as I saw… and that is a rare thing around here! Dinner for two of us was a startling Rp-24,000 (~$3 CDN) and this time the meat was identifiable too, definitely a bonus.
After dinner I went back to the grocery store around the corner and picked up a few things. The one I couldn’t resist was the Pro Sweat, no amateur sweat for this guy!
I was also short on toothpaste and since they didn’t have my usual brand I was faced with a difficult choice… fortunatly “Smile Up” came to my rescue! I just hope that use won’t turn me into an androgynous light-skinned asian cartoon… that’d be unfortunate for sure. The green bottle is chilled green tea with honey in it and is so good I may have to find a case of it here before I go home.
In other news I’m getting fairly sick of Medan, we’ve been here now for a long time, and the trip to Makassar only served to show my that the world is wide place and doesn’t have to involve a sprawling industrial city! Fortunately our next job is likely to take us to the island of Borneo, which would be just awesome. Hopefully if the weather cooperates here we’ll be island hoping again in no time!
(as a footnote, I think rather than use “Cheers” or “Regards” to sign off emails I’m gonna start using “Smile-UP”!)
Today was actually not as stressful as the last few days, and for that I am very grateful. I didn’t have to fight with anyone, I didn’t have to explain myself to a dozen different people and I didn’t have to run around putting out fires all day long.
I got up at 4:30 though, and we were in the lobby at 5:15 to head out the airport. The last few days we’ve been having all sorts of problems and I wanted to make sure that everything went as smoothly as possible. Fortunately, it did! We launched a flight around 630 and I went back to the hotel and ate a nice big breakfast of rice, noodles, fruit, grilled fish and really bad coffee before crashing hard; I’d been up until 2am the night before getting things sorted for the flight… I won’t go through all of today, but it as a decent day. Dinner tonight was good, we went to a little roadside place that served sate and I had some avocado juice with chocolate in it! Super good! The sate wasn’t completely satisfying so we did a little padang-crawl to the next place and had nasi campur, rice mixture. Here I also had some sort of juiced fruit, the name of which eludes me now, but it was pink in colour and frothy like a smoothy, again, super good!
I am slowly learning the language and even a rudimentary understanding makes a huge difference in both comfort level and enjoyment not to mention efficiency when it comes to work. The people here are great too and all attempt to teach me some words whenever we meet; there were a few folks in the flight briefing office that wouldn’t let me do anything else until I had learned to say “good afternoon” properly, and I’m proud to say that I can now, salamat sore (sal-am-at soar-eh).
Makassar was a great city an I’m sorry we didn’t have more time there; we were so busy with the working that I didn’t really get a chance to explore the city at all. We did find some good places to eat, I had some awesome chilli crab, took a ride in a bicycle cart to get to the money changer’s office, went for a great walk along the ocean shore and met a lot of amazing people. There was Umar who works at the airport, he helped us set up our tripods on top of a building there; there was Dedy who worked for Adam Air and provided us with a car, even at 4am; there was Karl, a diplomat with the US Embassy whose table I stole at breakfast one morning and we ended up talking, and there was Lan the cute front desk lady who always had a smile for me.
I also got to meet First Air Marshall Eddy Suyonto, I finally have his rank down properly, and if I ever forget I can read it off the business card he gave me. After we met Eddy for the first time I was sitting with Ari, our one security officer, and we were chatting about things. I asked him if he had ever met a General before, to which he replied that he had; I mentioned that I had never met one before and that it was a neat experience for me. Ari looked over at me and said “General human too, they just like us” and smiled. I couldn’t help but laugh, it was a perfect answer.
I’m afraid I have very little to actually say about the matter of the search, we were featured in a few newspaper articles, included a picture of some of the crew (but not me); I got some phone calls from Indonesian newspapers asking me about the search, we had agreed not to talk to the press so I tried to put them off nicely, I am still curious though how they got my number.
Click here for a PDF thats actually readable
Mostly we just worked autonomously in the areas we were given and did everything we could to help. There was a daily briefing at 6am but I didn’t go personally; we have a lot of ex-military people on the crew and it seemed wise to send someone who already knew the rules-of-engagement rather than me fumbling my way through it. All in all a very positive experience and I’m glad I had the chance to be there for it.
The next few days should settle down into a bit of a regular schedule as we work our way through this project and hopefully everything goes smoothly for us, meaning of course, the fewer fires I have to put out the better!!
I’m really stupid busy lately, but here are some pictures from Makassar and Medan for you. I’ll try and fill in the stories when I get a chance.
Over the last few days I have been tremendously busy organizing the crew to get us here to Makassar so that we can assist in this SAR mission. It has been at times trying and others exceedingly fun; and the balance of both is where the payoff is.
Our biggest hurdles were the permits to get the airplane here (as of writing we should have them soon) and also airline tickets to get the crew here. Since I can’t affect the outcome of the permits I only had to worry about the airline tickets. We had a battle finding some that got us here soon enough, the travel agent at the hotel said they were all booked up until Tuesday, by which time we had hoped to be flying already. We tried to call in some favours from our military liaisons but a language barrier prevented any actual action. Finally we did some digging of our own and found out that the travel agent hadn’t checked anything other than economy seats; and we found enough seats for everyone in Executive Class on Garuda airlines. Success! Let me tell you, Exec class is nice! Linen table cloths and wine and all sorts of fru-fru things to class it up made it a really nice flight. Our first flight was delayed for some reason by about 30 minutes or so nothing major, but a delay all the same. We had to connect in Jakarta to another flight and only had a short time to do so; the delay meant that it would be very tight. As we were descending into Jakarta our other plane was already boarding! (A short aside here, arriving in Jakarta at night was a singular experience, the city stretched from horizon to horizon with lights going on in every direction as far as I could see. I don’t know how much area it covers, but its gotta be a lot!) Since our other plane was already boarding I was ready to dash up the jet-way and try and find the gate, but fortunately our SO had a clearer head. He asked the guy standing in the jet-way about the flight and the guy basically said “yes, we’ve been waiting for you”. We dashed out a side exit, on to the tarmac and into a waiting bus the drove over to where the plane was waiting for us, the engines already warming up! They quick checked our boarding passes and we were up the stairs and back on another plane.
We also found lodgings here that are right on the ocean; I’ll post some pics later, the internet here is really slow and expensive so I am trying to use sparingly (ok, it’s not that expensive in Cdn terms, but in Indonesia terms it is!) The sunset tonight was spectacular! Oranges and reds all over the sky… just awesome!
The crew was split into two different flights, I was on the first flight with one of the radar operators and the junior of the security officers. While we were waiting for our flight we talked with the SO a little about the language and which words we knew or didn’t. The word “boo-lay” (sound it out, I don’t know the proper spelling…) is what they call white people; or more specifically white people from the US. Our SO seemed to think it was hilarious that we knew what it meant and were also aware of the people in the seats ahead of us taking sneaky pictures of the boo-lays! They weren’t so sneaky really… I waved in a few of the pictures and made the people laugh, but I could see it quickly growing tiresome. After that we asked our SO what they would call a guy who was black but from the USA, would he still be a boo-lay? He leaned back and roared with laughter, the subtleties of Bahasa are still lost on me, but that really struck a chord. He said they call people with black skin niggers; I’m guessing that boo-lay has the same connotation to it.
Today we are waiting for the plane to arrive here in Makassar so that we can start work, and I need to meet with a whole bunch of people in order to get our clearances and narrow down the scope a little. I tried to get the junior SO (a Captain) to help me out but he said we should wait until the team is complete and the senior SO (a Colonial) are here before we go and talk with the SAR commander (one Marshall Eddy Suyanto). He said it would be better if the team was complete before we went to see him, otherwise he may dismiss us; seemed like good advice to me.
This process gives me a new perspective on global SAR. Yesterday I was thinking how people always complain about Canada’s DART team not being deployed quickly enough after disasters; but we are already in the country and can’t get here to help for nearly a week… I can see why a foreign military team could take two weeks or longer to arrive on site. As I said at the start this whole experience is proving to be both challenging and exciting; and I’m looking forward to seeing how everything develops.
——-
Update 12 hrs later:
So I cracked and went to talk to ATC just to get things rolling… and roll they did! I must say, the people here have a flair for class too that presents a very civilized contrast to the open sewers and garbage in the streets. I don’t feel like telling the whole story right now, so let me suffice by saying that we met with the head of Air Traffic Control here and then also with the manager of the airport, then with both of them together, and each time they served us coffee while we talked. In the end they agreed that since it was a humanitarian mission they would be helpful and let us get on with things as much as possible. We also set up a meeting with Mr. (Commander? Marshall? His rank seems to change…) Eddy Suyanto tomorrow morning, which I am currently preparing for. Should prove to be interesting!!
IFSAR- Interferometric Sythentic Aperture Radar
SAR – Search And Rescue
Quick update, a lot has happened since new years. We moved bases back to Medan to take advantage of some amenities here but it isn’t quite as nice a town as Batam is. Before we left Batam we had a few good thunder boomers, our last night there was a torrential downpour that I got caught in as I ran home from dinner; I was totally soaked to the skin but the thunder and lightening show was worth it. I was watching the storm from the balcony in my room and there was a flash of lightening that absolutely lit up the sky like it was daytime and right behind it was a massive thunderclap, so loud it triggered car alarms! I nearly jumped off the balcony!
Today we are back in Medan at the same hotel we were at when I was here last time, it is kind of homey feeling since I am only one room down from last time too. The biggest news here is the disappearance of a flight roughly 5 days ago, an Adam Air 737 was flying from Java to Sulawesi during a stormy period. They initially thought they had found the wreckage and even some survivors but they quickly recanted and said they didn’t know where the plane even was! Today I start hearing rumours from the office that we might head over there, and not 5min later one of our security officers, a Lt-Col came by to talk about it as well. Seems we are going to go in and map the area where they suspect the plane went down and hopefully we can find it when all else has failed. I’m pretty excited; it is a chance to do something meaningful in a time of need, and while we probably won’t find any survivors we can at least offer peace of mind to the families who are still waiting for answers.
I had a few other stories to share but they all got pushed out of my head by this latest excitement… if I think of them I’ll post em (c:
The start of 2007 was both tremendously unique and eerily familiar. I find myself an ocean away from home but so many of the traditions are the same here that at times it didn’t feel different at all.
We “got the starty parted” with a few bottles of beer in the Food Court at the back of the hotel, a 640ml bottle of Tiger will run a fella Rp-25,000 and with plastic tables and chairs and an open-air environment it is perfect for sitting and enjoying. The other bonus is that it is frequented mostly by locals and staff of the hotel and is a very “real” sort of places, so many of the ex-pat places around here don’t have that “real” feel to them. After a few bottles each we “got dressed for dinner” (shoes and long-sleeve-pants vs sandals and shorts) and reconvened at the Candlelight dinner that was hosted by the hotel. Let me tell you, there is nothing more romantic than a table of 7 guys at a candlelight dinner! It was excellent food though: lamb stew, roast beef, turkey, fried rice (nasi goreng), steamed veggies and all sorts of good stuff with your choice of red or white wine. There was a nice 3 piece band providing some light music for dinner and they did many cover tunes; but I think they were singing phonetically because it didn’t really seem like they knew what the words meant.
Only so much candlelight can be tolerated before a table full of guys starts to get rowdy, and really who can blame them! We headed off to a nearby part of town that has some good pubs and a few places run by ex-pats; first stop was a seedy little place with a pool table and some beer and lots of “ladies” dressed up in evening gowns. We didn’t stay there too long, there were too many good places to visit and not enough evening to see them all properly. The next stop was supposed to be the Ice Pub, but right next to it was a place called Steps that had a lot of loud music coming out of it and a lot of good party sounds, so we detoured inside and actually spent most of the night there. There was a live band playing American cover songs, but these guys knew what the words meant, and the place was packed with locals and ex-pats alike. It had a good “live” feel to it with tons of energy and people everywhere just having a really good time. The night crawled on and I danced on a crowded floor, had a beer or two, and out of nowhere someone handed me a glow stick and a paper trumpet with a noise-maker inside. Everyone was blowing their faces off on these things and, to quote a fictionally anchorman, when in Rome… People started screaming and yelling and the noise level must have been enough to deafen people blocks away; when the countdown finally began I think everyone started at a different time because the noise just escalated and when I think about it know, I’m not even sure it was midnight… it didn’t really matter though everyone was having way too much fun to worry about the clock. The band struck up again and we partied late into the night, the paper trumpets quickly turned into swords for duelling matches and the glowsticks got waved and tossed into the surging crowd, I know I had a great time, I’m pretty sure everyone else did as well.
New Year’s here seemed just like New Year’s at home for the most part, people partying and making noise and having fun and all the stores and shops are shut down today. This morning there are remnants of fires in the streets where people lit up bonfires or something, I’m not really sure… I do recall seeing a fire going in the street with a few people sitting around it when I was on the way home but didn’t really think much of it then. All in all an excellent and memorable experience.
Selamat Tahun Baru!
Powered by the ZenLite Theme
