With a fresh new visa stamp in my passport I am starting another mini-adventure in Indonesia. The first leg of the trip will be from Medan to Padang. I checked my Lonely Planet and it said the bus takes around 20 hours. I don’t mind traveling by bus or train, but I have a tolerance level of around 10 hours. So I decided it would be better to fly.
Indonesia Matters has a great article on the pros and cons of booking airline tickets in Indonesia. …

I haven’t read anything by John Leake, but his next novel on the tsunami and how it destroyed Aceh, should be interesting. It is going to be interesting to see how he is going to tie it into Bali, without it looking to much like an expenses trip paid by his publisher.
“The initial idea came with the cataclysm that was the tsunami. I was on the island of Maui on 26 December, 2004 when the reports of the tsunami came through. It was unfathomable to me that an entire …

I wrote recently about foreign English teachers being underpaid in Indonesia, but then I saw an article in a free magazine for expats living in Malaysia, on finding an overseas maid.
The article gives two options for employing help from overseas.
An Indonesian maid will cost:
- 450RM a month (around US$125 a month)
- work seven days a week
- and salary is banked into the maid’s bank account at the end of every month, as she is not able to ‘carry cash for the first two years working in Malaysia’.
A Filipina …

You would think that Australians would have learnt their lesson not to touch drugs in Bali or Indonesia.
Another Australian has been arrested for carrying five grams of cannabis, which he now faces prison time of up to 10 years.
The arrested man was Jason Scott McIntyre, 33 years old from the Northern Territory.

After continued protests the Buddha Bar in Jakarta is changing its name to Bataviasche Kunstkring after the Dutch-era building that houses it.
The interior however will remain the same.