Jakarta

The flight to Jakarta was rather uneventful. However, I sat next to a really nice Lebanese guy who has been living here (in Indonesia) for 8 years. He answered lots of my questions, and then insisted on giving me a ride to my hotel in the taxi he was paying for. Sweet!

My first task was to get a SIM card for my phone -- to make calls, and hopefully get Internet when i'm in more remote places. I bought 2, from different companies, since they're just $1 each. 3g broadband internet is available for approx $9 USD for 300MB of downloads per month.. not too shabby, and if it works, i'll be great for email.

Once I got here, I spent the next 2 hours frantically trying to arrange for a flight out of Jakarta, the next day. I hadn't really spent any time planning this trip, and so I tried to spend as much of the airplane as possible reading through the lonely planet to pick destinations.

In the end, I settled on the island of Sulawesi, and in particular, the tiny Togean islands off its coast. However, several of the airlines here in Indonesia are like RyanAir and Southwest -- that is, the flights are dirt cheap if you book in advance, but obscenely expensive as the dates get closer.

Thus, Lion Air was charging $250 for a one way ticket to Massakar in Sulawesi. Eeek.

After a considerable amount of time, I was able to locate a 1 way ticket for approx $100 USD, for tonight at 8:30PM. It's not ideal, but it's good enough. It looks like I'll be spending most/all of the trip on Sulawesi, where I'll be joined by my buddy Mike arrives in a week or so.

Oh -- and I woke up with a horrible cold yesterday morning. I'm hoping it stays a cold, and doesn't turn into any kind of infection.