Friday, October 24, 2008

Outward to Bali

As of this writing, I've been traveling for 36 hours nonstop on about 3 hours of sleep plus catnaps. I'm waiting in the (anemically) air conditioned departure lounge for my Air Asia flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Denpasar, Bali (which is also Indonesia). I'm in Indonesia and Malaysia to give some Microsoft training, and am taking advantage of my proximity to Bali to visit that fabled island.

The low-cost airline canceled my earlier flight for an unspecified reasons - probably not enough people on it - and delayed my flight to 7:50 PM. So unless the driver for my hotel checks that the flight has been cancelled, he'll have probably given up and I'll have to find a taxi to take me to Ubud, the little cultural village in south-central Bali. None of my gadgets, including my supposedly world-enabled GSM 3G AT&T Tilt phone, has any kind of signal at all to call the hotel. This means I won't get to the hotel until probably midnight for a total of 42 hours, obliterating my previous personal record of 28 hours to Singapore. Hope they leave the light on.

Of course, that would be IF I actually had the hotel's address and phone number. Hey, I had a LOT of details to put together!

All things considered, the outbound trip has gone really well. The big things like my rollaboard showing up in the Jakarta airport after following me about 8,000 miles. And I haven't left any of DSC_0006 those little important things - passport, wallet, camera bag - at any of the thirty places I've probably sat down. The fact I'm traveling business class really does make a difference over the long haul of a 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The upper deck of a Cathay Pacific 747 is very futuristic; I feel like Yeoman Rand (I'm dating myself here) should be serving me a coffee or something. It's like a narrow little cubicle farm, only with personal video and really good wine.

I suspect Friday will be a low-key day for me!

*Update* Total time to my hotel: 46 hours. All but 2 hours was waiting for Air Asia, which was delayed another hour. This caused me to be a total of 3 hour's later than the hotel was expecting to pick me up. So more waiting ensured to get that straightened up (image: sitting at the Bali airport pickup area at 1:30 AM, chatting up a taxi driver to kill the time). You can bet I'll never fly them again.

The good news is that the night sounds at my room - which overlooks hundreds of acres of rice fields - are amazing. I recorded 10 minutes of it last night with the teeny Belkin iPod recorder plug-in and will edit it into an MP3. A chorus of frogs, crickets, thunder in the distance…I could put it on a CD and charge for it.

*Update to the update* And Friday wasn't that low-key a day. I recommend using melatonin for timezone-shifting.

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