Indonesia - Feb 17 & 18, 2013

Indonesia is comprised of some 13,670 islands. The three largest island regions are Borneo, Sumatra and Java on the western portion of New Guinea. One of the most famous islands is Bali, elevated in Western tradition to a romantic tropical paradise. These four islands form the trunk of the nation which extends in smaller islands further out in all four directions around any of these land masses. All in, the Republic of Indonesia wraps around one-eighth of the earth’s circumference. It is the largest country in Southeast Asia and geographically, is bound to the major surrounding land masses by a series of shelves, volcanic mountain chains and deep sea trenches. This connection to the surrounding land masses makes Indonesia very susceptible to earthquakes. Indonesia is home to a population of in around of 240 million inhabitants. I am combining our visit to Jakarta and Semarang in one post as we were here in 2011 and did some detailed touring at that time, the highlights of Jakarta are a great see as the must visit to Borobodour. But having done both in the crazy traffic in these two centers so we decided to take the free shuttles to major malls on both our days in these two cities. In Jakarta we were able to pick up some okay wifi at the mall - enough to download some e-mails and to Skype with Dustin (technology can be soo amazing), then get some cash and take a cab over to another mall, the Mall of Indonesia, why you may ask, well they have a spa in this mall called “Lotus” where we were able to get full body massages for 90 minutes for a whopping $8.00 - well $10.00 with tip, yes Canadian (the amount was actually 75,000 Indonesian Rupias), after we simply came back to the ship, lounged by the pool and had a swim, hot tub and sauna - so we called it a spa day. Today, after the shuttle we jumped into a cab a visited an amazing Buddha Temple, then to chinatown (for ten minutes as the rain began to fall) then back to the mall and in my case got a $5.00 haircut and an $4.00 huge lunch - things are very inexpensive here, very. We have a sea tomorrow and then we have our two day overnight tour in Bali, we are charging up our batteries for our time on this mystical island. Some pictures of our time over the past few days... On both days our ship was met with a warm local greeting of traditional culture performances.