So two trips to the Home Affairs Department and one more to the Forestry Department and now all I (supposedly) need is to have someone pick up my letter from the Forestry Department allowing me entrance to Gunung Palung National Park on Tuesday (maybe) and to have them fax it to me.
I’m flying to Borneo (Pontianak) on Sunday. I’m very much looking forward to leaving Jakarta, though Friday afternoon and today (Saturday) have been relatively nice. No trips to ministries. I went to the Eijkman Institute Friday afternoon. It was pretty nice; one of (the?) premier biotechnology institute in Indonesia. They do a lot of work with pathogens there, especially malaria, tuberculosis and bird flu, as Indonesia leads the world in cases of, and deaths from, bird flu. They also have all 4 (well, probably all 5) species of malaria parasite that cause illness in humans, which I guess for me is a w00t. I had a conversation with a researcher there and met a forest ecologist who works in Sarawak as well. There may be some good opportunities for collaboration with the people working on malaria there. The institute had some pretty nice facilities and a new BL3 lab to study bird flu. To get there we went past some of the nicest suburbs in Jakarta; very nice homes, including the American ambassador’s, which was huge and guarded like a fortress.
After that, I headed back to my hotel, ate at an Indonesian place in the mall food court and then watched some local news (including bird flu victims’ corpses being burnt) various Aussie sports and some of the Olympics opening ceremony. There was rugby, Aussie Rules Football and a third game, the name of which I’m not sure. It’s closer to American football than either Aussie Rules Football or rugby, though it has 5 downs, no first downs and no forward passes. This morning I watched the Yankees lose to the Angels on the YES network (we don’t actually get the YES network, but ESPN Southeast Asia or whatever version of ESPN it is puts it on for some Yankees games I guess). Then I headed down to a small street carnival type thing going on in front of my hotel and had some good food, none of which I know the name of, but it was mostly seafood. They also had great sweet iced tea. I was planning on spending some of the afternoon on the internet, but it seems that every wireless network in my part of Jakarta is down. The one in the hotel and the one at the coffeeshop and even all the other ones I could normally pick up but not logon to from the coffee shop. Weird. So instead I’m just reading and writing; I’ll swim a bit later and maybe visit the nearby mosque.
I’m very much looking forward to making it back out to the field. I have a meeting Monday morning in the large city in Borneo I’m flying into but after that I hope on Tuesday to take the boat down to Ketapang, my base of operations. The boat takes 7 hours but if you swing the extra $2 for a VIP seat it’s not supposed to be too bad, and you’re a VIP then. The stay in Jakarta has reinforced that I do not generally like staying in large cities, even if they are interesting. The forest is calling me.
As a human interest note, Jakarta is full of canals. The Dutch had at one time wanted to make it a tropical Amsterdam. As anyone who has been in the developing world could guess, these canals are now cesspools full of untreated sewage and all sorts of other flotsam produced by the teeming masses. Many houses and other buildings hang out over the water with their waste going directly into it. As you can imagine, the water is absolutely disgusting and smelly. I hadn’t seen anyone near it until Wednesday afternoon, when I saw three boys bathing in it. Shudder. Having now been several places in the developing world on various continents, it seems pretty clear that there is very little difference in how the poorest or richest live between the various places (though Kinshasa’s urban poor may have been a step lower than everywhere else’s); the main difference is how large the middle class is. I guess it probably doesn’t require much thought to figure that out though. Jakarta does have much more security than any of the other places I’ve been, though. Kinshasa had a good bit too, but Jakarta has metal detectors at every entrance, guards that go through cars at most parking lots, etc. But then again, they also are the only place I’ve been with a real terrorism problem.
Well hopefully my next post will be from Borneo. While I should have ok internet access in Pontianak, where I’m flying into, I’m not sure about Ketapang, so my posts may become less frequent.
-------------------------------------------------Update: So while the hotel and coffee shop wireless were out, my computer wireless card has also decided to go down. Ethernet via cable is working now...
No comments:
Post a Comment