Traveling

My first trip overseas was 1987. My wife at the time was doing fieldwork in India, and I took my Christmas break to visit her. I purchased an inexpensive ticket from a travel agent on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The result was one of the most intense travel experiences that I’ve had in 20 years of travel overseas. The flight left San Francisco and stopped first in Anchorage, Alaska. From there we went on to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and finally Bangkok where I spent two days waiting for a flight from Bangkok to Delhi.

Those were the good old days for smokers because you were still allowed to smoke freely in the back of the plane. That did a bit towards passing the time on the long-haul flights.

Two years after my first trip overseas, I moved to Indonesia and began a life that included international travel as one of the benefits/necessities. During my early years in Southeast Asia, I loved the traveling. Each trip was a chance to experience something new. Southeast Asia was experiencing tremendous growth then, and every trip to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore or Bangkok or Jakarta revealed new buildings, new restaurants, new bars – glimmering urban landscapes that always captivated me.

From 1989 to 1998, I was based in what was then called Irian Jaya on the island of New Guinea. In my early days there, the only way to get to Bali during my vacations was to take the milk run. We went from Timika in Irian to the island of Biak just off the coast of New Guinea, then on to Ambon in the Malukus and then Ujung Pandang (now Makassar). Finally, after a 45 minute stopover, we would leave for Bali. Merpati used the old Folker F-28. These planes were cramped, smoked-filled, and hot. Finding a seat was often problematic as it was generally first-come, first-served. I left the seat-grabbing to my wife after we married (before that I just let myself get pushed to the back of the line and take whatever was available).

Getting to Bali was always an adventure. We would get up at 2:30 and wake the kids up. At 3:00 in the morning we would line up to take the non-staff bus down the mountain to the airport in Timika. The bus had stiff plastic bucket seats and most of the passengers were chain-smoking Indonesian workers. After a three-hour drive down the winding mountain road, we’d arrive at the terminal which consisted of an insufficient number of hard seats and benches set in a fenced-in open-air room. We’d sit there with our small children until 12:30 when the flight left for Biak.

Compared to the Timika airport, Biak was spacious and comfortable. It was decorated with appropriate statuary from the tribes of Irian and, on occasion, you could get a cold beer from one of their small fridges. After a 45 minute wait, we’d shuffle the kids back on board and do a 90 minute flight to Ambon. The waiting room there was barebones in the early days but was upgraded the last time I was there in 1998. We’d do another 45 minutes there which was enough for the kids to get a snack, use the bathroom and then get back on board for the 90 minute flight to Ujung Pandang.

Arriving in UP was almost like being in paradise. The terminal was large, the toilets fairly clean, there was a lot of space for the kids to wander, and you’d see an occasional foreigner there. In the last few years that we were there, they had a little bakery and pizza as well. I actually spent a fair amount of time in Ujung Pandang over the years due to flight cancellations. UP was interesting, and you could never tell when the university students were going to go on a rampage over something so there was always a chance that something interesting would happen. An example would be the time we went to eat at a rooftop restaurant which just happened to have a brothel on the floor below. That was fairly amusing.

After another 45 minutes we would make the hour flight to Bali and then the long 2 hour ride back north to Singaraja. Nothing like the old days of travel.