Malaysia and Singapore

No place on earth is as cosmopolitan as Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian capital is home to a blend of Chinese, South Indians, Malays, Thais, Koreans, blacks and whites. Sit at a cafe and people-watch, and you'll see Chinese girls wearing short skirts and tank tops, redheads pushing strollers, Indians in saris. Even the Muslim women can't agree on the 'proper' way to dress: you're equally likely to spot women draped head-to-toe in black burqas, with only their eyes showing; others wearing brightly-colored headscarves, cinched at the chin, with regular clothes, and yet others wearing a transparent scarf loosely over their head so that their roots and their ears are exposed.

There seem to be no ethnic tensions in Kuala Lumpur: this rich blend of diversity gets along famously. The city could be a living advertisement for racial harmony. After spending a week there, I've figured out why. The people of this city have united over one common, shared love: Shopping.

Yes, shopping. Kuala Lumpur is the world's biggest shopping mall. It's not so much a "city" as it is a vast network of malls. The train stations connect from one mall to the next, letting passengers on and off directly inside the mall. And each mall has a pedestrian crossing that connects, underground, from one mall to the next, so you can walk across whole neighborhoods without ever stepping outside for air.

Of course, the constant air-conditioning that malls provide are, for us, the prime reason to go, as KL is devestatingly hot during the day, and a stroll through a crowded shopping-plex provides the ultimate relief from the sticky, muggy heat. So all week, we strolled past Cartier, Fendi, and Lancome counters, we browsed books at Kinokumiya, ate masala dosas at the Food Court, and watched $2.50 screenings of newly released Hollywood films.



We stayed for so long because we had to wait for our laptop's hard drive to get replaced. Did I mention our power cord was stolen about 3 months ago? Well, it was -- the laptop was fine, but the cord was lifted. As a result, we spent 2 months hauling our MacBook, now a giant paperweight, around primitive parts of Indonesia that aren't modern enough to carry contact lens solution or tampons, nevermind the possibility of carrying replacement power cords. (Ask me how I know.)

When we finally flew to KL, the city that's a shopping mall, we made a beeline to the Mac Store. But alas, as soon as we plugged our laptop in, tingling with excitement at this reunion, the hard drive immediately crashed. I blame the thieves. I don't know why or how, but I blame the thieves. It seems like too much of a coincidence.

Nonetheless, we lost all our data. All my journal/diary entries from this trip -- notes I was keeping for the book I plan to write -- have disappeared. Most of the photos we've taken on this trip are gone. We now have a souvenir hard drive wrapped in tin foil. And we stare at it, glumly, knowing one year's worth of journal entries and photos are sitting somewhere in that hard drive, refusing to get out.

So when we said good-bye to the Billabong stores, Arabian Oud perfume shops and sushi conveyor belt cafes that characterize Kuala Lumpur, and headed south to Tioman Island, I made sure to keep notes by hand. And since I'm too lazy to dredge them up in order to write this entry, you're going to read strictly what I can remember off the top of my head.


Tioman Island: home to the cheapest beer in Malaysia, thanks to its status as a duty-free island, which means its cans of Carlsburg aren't subject to the "infidel tax" that the Islamic-influenced government assesses on alcohol. (They're both morally opposed to, and profit handsomely from, alcohol consumption).


But beyond the cheap beer -- which still isn't cheap -- wildlife is the best reason to go to this little island in the South China Sea. There are no cars on Tioman Island, no paved roads; only a dirt path that bikes occasionally travel. Hardly any people live on the island, other than hotel and restaurant operators; if it has an indigenous population (which it may or may not), it's quite sparse.

As a result, if you look high into the tree branches on Tioman Island you can see pythons napping in the sun. At night bats fly overhead, hunting the mosquitos that live in the island's dense forest. Thank God for bats. They're nature's DEET.

Tioman Island is overrun with monkeys, big grey long-tailed monkeys with fluffy white beards that leap tree-to-tree. Its skies are filled with tropical birds. Its grounds are covered with monitor lizards, big scaly creatures with sharp claws that look like little Komodo dragons. These monitor lizards, from head to tip of tail, extend longer than the length of my leg.



The wooden walls of our beachfront bungalow on Tioman Island was home to spiders the size of my hand. I used to sit on my porch at night and watch geckos on the ceiling nibble at bugs and insects.

The island is completely overrun with cats, all of which resemble each other in color, size and design, representing a starting lack of genetic diversity and a high degree of inbreeding. Most of the time they meow pathetically at your doorstep, but I'd occasionally spot a cat with a gecko in its mouth. And it's no coincidence that Tioman Island was one of the first places in the past few months where we didn't have any mouse or rat problems.

And because the island is so small, and car-free (in fact, it's pavement-free), its also de riguor for all bungalows and restaurants to be on the beach or in the forest (the only thing seperating ocean from forest is about 35 feet of sand.) Though every meal was eaten on a wobbly table while sitting in a cheap plastic chair, it was always directly on the beach.

We spent 6 nights on Tioman Island and were sad to leave so soon, but we had to hurry if we wanted to have enough time to visit 3 more locations:

(1) the world's oldest rainforest, where we spent 1 night sleeping in a shelter deep inside the jungle

(2) Malacca, the world's most recently-crowned 'World Heritage City' by the United Nations. Malacca was made famous for the pirates in the Straits of Malacca, and

(3) the richest country in Asia, Singapore. I didn't think I'd like Singapore -- it seems to business-like and boring, like "California run by Mormons," as the guidebook says -- but it's actually a really sweet place to visit.

First of all, it has paved roads, and stoplights, and neatly-trimmed hedges. It's buildings have to live up to a building code. It's avenues have medians and pedestrian crossings. In a word, it's developed. This alone makes me love it.

Singapore appeared, to us, after a year of rats, tin roofs and trash heaps, after a year of dirt roads, potholes, and diesel exhaust, after a year of buildings that are so crooked that your round items actually roll from one side of the room to the other.

After all that, it's wonderful to see a country that has neatly-trimmed hedges. Someone in the country owns a hedge-trimmer! Wow!

Singapore is home to a great riverfront (eat your heart out, Cincinnati!), the world's sweetest city botanical gardens (worthy of an entire day of your life, easily), and home to the universe's most incredible zoo. I saw orangutans for the first time in my life, thanks to the Singapore Zoo. (Fun fact: in Indonesian, "orang" means human, and "utan" means forest. "Orang-utan" is literally the man of the forest. And with their opposable thumbs and the expression in their eyes, they really, really do resemble humans. Picture your hairy Uncle Steve. That's what an orangutan looks like.) The Singapore Zoo even manages to keep polar bears, despite it's location 1 degree from the equator. I went there twice in the 2 days we spent in Singapore, and I regret that we didn't stay in Singapore longer, just for the sake of spending more time at the zoo. If I lived there, I'd go to that zoo monthly. And I'd go to the botanical gardens near-daily. Seriously, this place is worth seeing. And its air is clean, and its people are well-behaved.

In Singapore, you can ask someone on the street for directions, and they'll give you directions. Just like that! Without asking for a tip, without trying to sell you a taxi ride, and without saying 'oh, I'm going that way, follow me,' and then leading you to their perfume shop where they morph into a high-pressure salesman. I'm shocked by the honesty. Shocked. And I love Singapore for it.

But I've written enough for now. Stay tuned.

And P.S. -- no, the photos on this posting we not taken by me. You'll have to wait until I load the Malaysia photos onto our brand-new hard drive. This takes a lower priority to everything else that must be done to get this new hard drive up to speed. Because guess what? We lost all our Southeast Asia photos in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2009, and now, frankly, I don't care anymore about loading photos.

Renting a house in Bali

We've been on the road for 10 months now, and many people have been asking us: "aren't you homesick?"

Not exactly. We're not homesick for Colorado, per se, but we do miss HAVING a home. We miss being able to unpack our belongings. We miss being able to store food in the refridgerator and cook our own meals. (The service is quite slow at most restaurants, so every breakfast, lunch and dinner turns into a one-hour affair. There's no such thing as snacking; no such thing as grabbing a 'quick bite'.)

The solution? When we arrived in Bali, we decided to settle down in one place for three weeks -- that's the longest we've spent in any area -- and rent a house.

For the first time in a year, we've unpacked. I mean, really, unpacked. We've put our clothes on shelves. We put our sunblock inside a drawer. Our books are in a cupboard. We've even used hangers. It's amazing to use a hanger. Remember that everytime you see one. When you can open the door to a closet or cupboard, and see your shirts just hanging there -- not bunched up inside a stuff sack at the bottom of a backpack, but actually hanging up, as shirts are meant to do -- it feels like order is restored in the world again.

The house a two-story beauty; two bedrooms, wood floors, tiled roof, floor-to-ceiling windows, and an enormous front porch that looks over a koi pond. The kitchen is a detached from the house, due to a culture that sees cooking as servant's work -- the kitchen is made of concrete and has no windows, so when we're cooking we occasionally lapse into coughing and sneezing fits and have to run outside for air. The rats are everywhere, so we have to store everything in the refrigerator -- Oreos, Ritz crackers, cooking oil, ketchup, all must live in the rat-proof fridge. In spite of this, the rats ate our soap and toothpaste on the first night; items we forgot to protect.

The rats accessed it because the bathroom, though attached to the house, is "outdoor" -- it's made from stones and has no roof. There's just a big hole in the wall, and when you step through it, you enter a beautiful garden with plants and flowers and a stone fence, with moss creeping up the stone and plants growing through the cracks. And on one end of this stone fence is a little showerhead, and that's where we bathe. It's quite beautiful to shower outside; like being under a waterfall.

We chose to live in Penestanan, on the outskirts of Ubud, Bali for two reasons. First, its a lush region where life can't help but grow. Life is everywhere. Vines creep up tree trunks and wind around fences. Little plants grow on the vertical rise of each stair. Trees bloom with pink and red flowers, whose petals get blown to the ground by the wind, so that the streets are littered with flower petals. The Balinese people leave offerings of rice to the gods every morning, and chickens and birds spend the afternoon pecking at the offerings. Caterpillars climb up walls, ants build highways along the sidewalks, and we can see every variety of butterfly and bird known to man -- purple/red/white/orange/violet butterflies and blue-white-black winged birds with long curious beaks.

There are water fountains and water fixtures everywhere (apparently water fountains are quite cheap: just dig a hole, fill it with water, stick a jug in the center and attach a pump.) Fish, usually koi, live in all of these, and all day long they dig up insects from the bottom for food, so all through breakfast we listen to fins splashing as the koi dive-bombs to the bottom of a pond, and the afternoon soundtrack is the crowing of chickens and twitter of birds, and evening brings a symphony of insects (along with a smatter of mosquitos.)

Nighttime is also when the geckos come out to hunt, big blue-striped geckos bigger than the distance between my middle fingernail and my watch. We watch them, sometimes, as they hide behind a clock or a roof tile, waiting for a praying mantis or a smaller gecko to wander near, and then *snap*, they catch their dinner. Life just keeps happening in Ubud, playing out its many dramas.

The town of Ubud itself, about a 20-minute walk from our home in Penestanan, is dedicated to art. There are galleries and museums strewn all over the city, and spas and restaurants offering 1 hour Balinese massage for $5 dollars, or one-and-a-half hours for $7. Every night there are cultural performances, which I usually shun (cultural song-and-dance feels contrived, when most of the locals are listening to Bollywood soundtracks on their mp3 players). But Ubud is like the New York City of Balinese music and dance; the cultural performances are the authentic production of talented lifelong dancers, who get on stage in silks and gold and heavy makeup and tell the Hindu saga of the Ramayana with their hips.

But the art and culture isn't the second reason we chose to live near Ubud; our second reason was for the food. For the first time in nearly a year, we can eat more than rice. I repeat -- we finally are free from the obligation of eating rice and noodles. These supermarkets sell bread; real sliced bread. They even sell brown bread and focaccia bread, which now tastes to me like manna from heaven. And I nearly fell down and wept with joy when I saw that they sell cheese. Cheese! I can't remember the last time I ate cheese, except on the occasional overpriced pizza. But here it was in all its varieties: feta, brie, goat's cheese, cheddar, mozzarella, edam, gruyere. I bought it all and ate until I was sick and loved every moment.

Five weeks in Flores, Indonesia: an anthropologist's dream

Most people go to Flores for a week, hit the tourist hot spots, and jet away. We stayed for 5 weeks.

Why, you might ask? In a word: transport.

The roads on Flores are undivided unmarked lanes, suitable for one and a half lanes of traffic, and filled with two lanes of cars and motorbikes flying around blind curves and weaving around each other. Buses are filled with live chickens, chain-smoking passengers, and sacks of potatoes. The bus conductor hands you a plastic vomit bag when you board, and all through the ride, you watch and smell fellow passengers get carsick. When you're trying to get off the bus, a team of 10 hawkers surround you, blocking your exit, yelling "taxi? taxi?" The daytime heat this close to the equator is oppressive, and you sweat buckets as you haul a backpack around.

In other words, there's ample incentive not to move around too much. If you find a nice spot, you stay there.

We found our first nice spot in a verdant hilly town called Moni, in eastern Flores. Because of Flores' arduous terrain, ethnic tribes speaking distinct languages and practicing various faiths blossomed in valleys that are as close as 20 kilometers apart, but seperated by the volcanos in between. Moni is a tiny village of Catholics -- population: 300 -- who speak a local language, Lio.

The village has only one road with very occasional traffic; the odd motorcycle cruises by every few minutes. It has a tiny number of cafes, where chickens wander freely around your feet as you wait for your order.

Once at dinner, we ordered chicken. "How many people want chicken?" the waiter asked. Three of the four of us raised our hands. He nodded. "Okay, I go kill it," he said, and began walking out back, where the livestock roams freely in the fields. "Wait, no, no!" We couldn't stomach the thought of issuing a death sentence -- fresh as the meat would have been.

The same is true for vegetables. It takes at least an hour, sometimes 90 minutes, for the servers to bring you a simple fried rice with vegetables, and I suspect this is because they're picking the vegetables after you place your order. All the houses and cafes onto terraced hills where the villagers grow rice, corn and various staples.

We stayed in a spacious guesthouse, elevated on stilts to protect it from the nearby creek. It was built entirely from rough-hewn wood, with big gaps in the floorboards that allowed the sun to shine through (and that you could lose earrings or loose change through.)

All the furniture was handwoven bamboo, which means its both authentic and uncomfortable. (Suggestion Box: A few cushions could really improve a bamboo couch.)

Every morning we awoke to the sound of hogs squealing in the field next to our house; in fact, we awoke BECAUSE of the volume of hogs squealing.

Space is ample in this village, so our guesthouse had a wraparound front porch and an actual living room -- yes, a real-life living room, a room with just a coffeetable and chairs, and a sink (sinks are a luxury here), and a door connecting to the bedroom.

This guesthouse bore the closest resemblence to a "house" we've seen in the last 10 months, and having that living room plus porch was a major reason we stayed in Moni for so long.

Most tourists dash into Moni, spend one day seeing the tri-colored volcanic lakes nearby, and promptly leave. We defied convention by staying for a week. For the first two or three days, this confused all the villagers. "Why aren't you leaving today?" they'd ask, or they'd try to sell us on a taxi ride to the tri-colored volcanic lakes.

But after we'd stayed for 3 days, they understood that we were comfortable, and we weren't leaving. And that's when Moni became really, really nice. That's when locals stopped trying to sell us things, and just started to talk to us like fellow humans.

So we spent our days reading books, splashing around in the nearby waterfalls, and taking long walks through the lush green rice paddies. The showers at our guesthouse were too cold, so we bathed in the same place all the villagers bathe -- in the natural hot springs. For a week, we got to unpack our belongings, spread them out, and LIVE somewhere.

Then we flew across Flores, and took a boat to some very remote islands off the western coast. These islands had the capacity to hold 24 people -- in their 12 bungalows -- but only 2 bungalows were occupied. In other words, we had the island all to ourselves. White sand. Clear blue water, great for snorkeling -- in an average morning, we could see moray eels, stingrays, parrot fish, angel fish and all kinds of multihued coral. The front porch of the bamboo bungalow made a perfect spot for reading.

Our days fell into a blissful routine: watch the sunrise, eat breakfast, read, go snorkeling, eat lunch, read, go snorkeling, take a walk, watch the sunset, eat dinner, read, fall asleep by 9 p.m. We stayed for 10 days.

I took a break from paradise long enough to complete the next level of my scuba-diving certification. I completed four dives in Komodo National Park, some in water with very strong currents, and recieved my new license to dive down to 60 feet, independent of a divemaster's supervision.

We also saw the Komodo dragons -- enormous lizards. "Lizards" is too weak a word. The Dragons are larger (from head to tail) than I am tall. The adult lizards outweigh me, outrun me, and are natural predators against humans. They're also cannibals; the mothers eat their own babies. Many scholars believe that the mythological Chinese dragon is based on the Komodo Dragon.

Komodo dragons are also nearly extinct. They only live in one place on earth: inside Komodo National Park, a series of islands off the west coast of Flores. (Between the dragons, the skeletal remains of the prehistoric "hobbit," and the vast array of tribes and languages, Flores is an anthropologists' dream.)

Update on the motorcycle victim and the da-da-da-da guy

On the motorcycle accident victim:

"You'd need an entire team of microvascular surgeons to repair that leg," our medical-student friend declared. It was true: the muscles, tendons and ligaments had been ripped apart. Bone was visible.

"These doctors just stitched up a flap of skin over the wound. They didn't repair the torn muscles," our friend said. "He's going to have serious problems with that leg for the rest of his life. He might not be able to use it again."

On the driver:

Hermanns, the driver of the car that hit the motorcycle, was still at the police station a full two days after the accident. Through the grapevine (Flores is a close-knit island), we learn that his fate is dependent on the whim and discretion of the officers, and on the severity of the victim's injury.

On the da-da-da-da-da guy:

Allegedly, this 21-year-old guy was perfectly healthy until 7 months ago, when he fell down during a drunken brawl and hit his head. He isn't mentally retarded, as we presumed. He has a severe head injury. And with no way to properly treat it, he now spends his days chained to a bedpost, flailing his arms and repeating the sound "da-da-da-da-da."

Shattered silence ... and window

Video of the "da-da-da-da-da" guy.

_______________________________________________

We heard his voice the first night we slept in Labuanbajo, and we couldn't believe what we heard. We thought it was a one-time affair.

But we heard his voice again the second night, and the third night after that. And we heard it during the day, sunrise to sunset. His tone never changed. Nor did his words.

"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

He repeated that phrase, day in and day out. We asked around; we discovered that he is a mentally handicapped 21-year-old man whose affliction causes him to be handcuffed to a bedpost. And from that bedpost, day and night, night and day, he repeats the sound, "da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

By the time our Group of 8 finally left Labuanbajo, we agreed on two things. One, we felt sorry for him and his family. It must be awful to be, or to care for, a mentally handicapped person in a country where resources are practically nonexistant. Second, on a more selfish level, we agreed hearing his incessant "da-da-da-da-da" was driving us bonkers. We were glad to have a peaceful night's sleep in the next town.

When Sara and I returned to Labuanbajo -- a small port town on the western coast of the Indonesian island of Flores, an island which rose to fame as the archeological site where the the three-foot-tall "hobbit" was discovered -- we checked into the same hotel and didn't hear his voice. One night passed, then another, without disturbance. Silent night.

Then the sound of "da-da-da-da-da" shattered the day. Sara was in the room when the sound started, but she felt confused. The sound wasn't coming from its usual direction. She went to the window to look out, to see where the sound was coming from. She spotted the guy. It was the first time she'd ever laid eyes on him. He was standing shirtless by the water, flailing his arms, chanting "da-da-da-da-da." Strange, she thought. How did he get untied from his bed? She looked away for a minute, and then, fortunately, looked up just in the nick of time.


He was standing 10 feet away from her, outside her bedroom window, swinging a stick through the air. She watched as a split-second later, he reached his arm back and hurtled the stick toward the window. She covered her face with her arm as the wood shattered her bedroom window. Glass shards flew everywhere.

She caught her breath. Except for a few minor scratches on her back, she was uncut. But glass shards were covering her room, her belongings. It would be a long, cautious afternoon of cleanup and moving.

By the time she looked out the jagged hole where the window had once been, the man was gone. But his voice carried through the distance.

"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

Trauma on the Trans-Flores Highway

If only we had left the hotel five minutes earlier. If only lunch had taken 1 minute longer. If only we hadn't pulled over at the drivers' aunts' house to get a pair of pliers. If only we had to pause for a bathroom break.

If the timing had been 1 minute off, we wouldn't have rounded the blind corner at the exact moment the motorcycle came barreling downhill in the other direction, hugging the curve a little too far inside.

But our timing was perfect. All I remember is the crunch of plastic, the sound of headlights shattering. The thud of his body hitting the side of our SUV. The wide-eyed frenatic face of our driver as his neck whipped around to watch the motorcyclist flip over. My moment's hesitation before I opened the door and ran outside, to where the motorcyclist lay moaning on the ground. The blood spilling from his head and leg. The bone protruding near his right knee.

The medical student among us whipped off his t-shirt and used it as a tourniquet. I ran to grab our first aid kit, not knowing how far away the nearest hospital might be. Locals rushed from their homes to stare. Three Indonesian men grabbed the motorcyclist, picked him up by his arms and legs, and carried him to the backseat of our SUV. My friends scrambled to get out as the local men loaded the victim inside. Our driver sped off with the motorcyclist moaning in the backseat. Our medical student friend, still holding his t-shirt against the victim's leg as a tourniquet, rode along, elevating the motorcyclists' leg and not letting him see the wound.

We got directions to the nearest clinic. By stroke of luck, it was less than 2 kilometers away. We walked there, single-file. Taxi drivers and touts shouted at us during our walk, wanting to make a quick buck off the Westerners, as they always do -- "you want taxi?", "hello, hello, where you go?" "I sell you pearls?" -- but their words sounded especially hollow. How could they even think of goading us into spending money at a time like this?

The clinic was bare, empty, white. It had 4 rooms with not much more than a bed inside each room. When we arrived they were operating on the victim's leg. The injury wasn't as bad as expected. Nothing had shattered. His bones were intact. The gash in his knee was severe. He looked like a cadaver; tendons and muscle visible. A man in a green military uniform and flip-flops was sewing up a flap of skin over the gash. It fit together like a bad jigsaw puzzle, leaving a border of visible muscle around it. The room had no lightbulbs. The man in flip-flops was operating by the light of the afternoon sun streaming through west-facing windows.

A Muslim woman in a white headscarf and flip-flops was swabbing at his superficial cuts with cotton balls. She placed a blue trash can under the operating table, where his blood was flow into. Sometimes the blood barely dripped into the trashcan; other times it gushed like a broken dam.

The motorcyclist kept moaning and groaning, his voice low like a dying animal. He never screamed, never yelped in pain, never raised his voice. He seemed to be in shock. Occasionally he'd lean over to vomit off the side of the operating table. I later learned that was a symptom of head trauma. All I could notice at the time was that he was regurgitating mostly rice.

A crowd of children with dirty clothing and bare feet stood in the open double-doorway of the operating room, watching the gory sight with passing curousity. They were all boys, around 8 years old, distracted from their football game. None of the adults paid attention to them.

A man with glasses and good English came to speak to me. He said he'd seen Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" and asked how much this operation would cost in the U.S. "I don't know - $10,000?" I said. He asked for $16 for the ambulence that would come transfer the patient to a larger hospital.

The driver told us he'd have to stay in town for at least 2 nights, sorting things through with the police. Apparently under Indonesian law, when a car and motorcycle collide, it is always presumed to be the car's fault, even if (as in our case) the motorcyle had crossed over into the wrong lane. Ultimately the final arbiters are the police, and our driver was now faced with the task of convincing them of his innocence. He told us to catch a bus to the next town and be on our way.

The G8 Summit

Sara and I have now met up with 6 -- that's right, 6 -- of our friends from Boulder. Now we're traveling around Indonesia as a group of 8. It's like a party on wheels; a group of friends, all from Boulder, all who have known each other for years and years.

We reunited on Gili Air, a small island off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia. Gili Air is a storybook-perfect location: it has no roads, no pavement, no streets of any kind. It's small enough that you could (and often do) walk in a circle around the perimeter of the island in 1 hour. The water is crystal-clear. If you're standing in the water you can see your toes below. The water is filled with coral life, with makes it a great snorkeling location (perfect for spotting sea turtles, barracudas, angel fish, parrot fish, or just swimming through the seaweed).

As a group of 8, (I've started calling us The G8 Summit), we rented out an entire small hotel (actually, there was one French guy staying there alone, and he quickly became our new friend and an Honorary Coloradoan.) Each of us were staying in wooden bungalows with large front porches that opened out directly onto the sandy beach. We'd gather each morning in a gazebo for complimentary breakfast, where we'd sneak bites of our eggs to the hungry stray kittens who always knew when we were eating, but who cuddled with us and played with us even when we were food-free. Then we'd spend the rest of the day swimming, snorkeling, reading, and going on walks. The restaurant next door served the world's best vegetables-with-peanut-sauce for $1.50, and mixed fruit smoothies for $1.

We befriended several local Indonesian guys living on the island, who told us stories about the year or two that they lived in Saudi Arabia as restaurant servers (many of them have worked in the Gulf temporarily, because the pay is better, but most returned because they missed their families). They were sad when our Group of 8 left, but even paradise gets boring after a few days. It was time to move on to bluer waters.

After 2 solid days of interminable bus-ferry-bus-ferry transit, we've now arrived on the island of Flores, which in my opinion is far superior to Bali. Bali is the place you go if you're either 1) an avid surfer, 2) interested in seeing temples, temples and more temples, or 3) a 16-year-old Australian on Spring Break. Bali is so over-developed that it's turned into a maze of concrete and big-box retailers, and its narrow roads are congested, even at midnight. Flores is the island to visit if you're interested in getting back to nature; it's the island of coral reef life, lush forests and mountainous terrain.