In the internet free zone

We've spent the last few days on a very quiet, vaguely idyllic island off of Lombok Indonesia. It is round, sand-fringed, and tiny. It is surrounded by reefs that crawl with turtles. And, to complete the picture, the water is azure blue.

But every image of paradise has its yang, no? Here it is plastic debris floating in the water (seemingly a major issue throughout indonesia. Surfing in Kuta I was constantly freeing plastic bags from my leash) and coral bleaching due to warming water trends.

Butenough of the serious stuff. internet is slow here. very slow. Like mid 90's slow. so this is our first blog post in a bit, and a great deal has happened. We came here for a very unfortunate reason. We were on Bali, and planning on staying there for 10 days or so with Lynn and Gordon when they suddenly had to leave Bali and return to the states. So Adam and Beth and we decided to change our plans and make a run from Bali, which none of us was finding all that attractive anyway. But the day before we left we had the opportunity to participate in our third New Years celebration in as many months. Complementing our new years in Oaxaca (you remember, the one where we almost watched a 500 year old cathedral go up in flames due to overzealous fireworkers) and Tet in Vietnam, we sat through Nyepi. The idea behind the Balinese new year is that it is the day when evil spirits roam the earth unchecked. So the Balinese strategy for dealing with this is to hide. Everyone goes inside, turns out all of the lights, and stays quiet for the whole day. Everyone. The international airport shuts down (supposedly the only one in the world that does so on a regular, annual basis). So we did the same and, thankfully, made it through undetected by the spirits. We think anyway.

The night before, though, Bali goes crazy with the ohgo-ohgos - representations of the spirits that are paraded through the streets followed by orchestras of cymbals and drums. It is a singularly amazing sight, and we are blessed that we were able to observe it.

So, fully rested after a day inside doing nothing, we made our way to Lombok, where we are now. We've spent 8 days or so now with Adam and Beth, which is wonderful, and plan on trying to connect with them again in Borneo in a few weeks. In the meantime we live a horrible life of snorkeling sessions, horrible food, sea turtle sightings and circum-navigating small tropical islands by foot on the beach in an hour.

We are well and hope that this finds everyone well as well (well, I think that makes sense?)

- Ian