Some pics

Thanks to imageshack I've been able to open a photoblog :

There you go !





Hope you enjoy them ;)

Round trip to the Dog's Island

I didn't want to talk about my very personal adventures here, but I think there are interesting bits in this one. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if I'm not gonna ask people to call me Dundee.

Let me explain.

It was, basically, a nice little trip to go on holidays. Yes it included the nearly desert Asu Island (the Dog's Island) , yes it included a boat trip, and yes we had to bring our own snack just in case. But there were some missing parts in the briefing.
Remember the “road of 55 bridges” ? I am most happy to announce you that I have found a worse one. It's heading to a place called Sirombu. If this name had a meaning, it would be “so damn isolated that you'd better go there by foot”. The first part of the road is nothing but a succession of turns on a very nasty road going up and down, and you'd better have a strong stomach if you don't want to get sick in the car. The second part of the road is nothing but a giant hole sometime topped by some mud in case you'd like like to get stranded. Overall, when you ultimately arrive to Sirombu, you are lucky if you haven't already broken your tail bone and distorted your diaphragm. But this is the nice way, the normal way, the “ok well it makes sense anyway” way. Certainly not the “being driven by an ex rally driver” way. Most unfortunately I and my colleagues had to cope with the second option, I insist to reassure you, we are all still alive.
Sirombu base camp is beautiful, next to one of the most wonderful beach I've ever seen, and everything is quiet, calm, ideal to have a rest. Fortunately. We arrived there after three hours of road snaking and bottom mashing, and directly went to bed, taking the occasion to count our remaining limbs.
The day after, we woke up early and had a breakfast made of fried fish (I'll never get myself used to it) and a talk with the other guys going with us, a pack of jungley-sealy-merry-lads, strong fellows and beverage amateurs. Just time enough to get fully conscious, and it was time to load the boat in the truck.
To load the boat in the truck. Right. What kind of boat can fit in the back of a dump truck ?
You should have been there dear readers, for my face was worth seeing when it discovered that the boat was actually a nutshell lying somewhere between two buildings and two flowerpots (don't ask me for the flowerpots I still wonder myself). It wouldn't have bothered me to use a five meters long boat to have a nice floating moment crossing a lake, even a big lake. But the length of sea that separates Sirombu from the Asu Island... The kind of place where you suddenly realize that you are facing a five meters hight wave when you are gently swimming next to the shore (at least until the wave crashes on your spine)...
Ok, let's load the boat now. Lesson number one, a boat's weight is equal to its total passenger's weight. A boat is heavy. Especially when you are alone lifting one end while the other end is still in the truck, and the seven other guys with you all decided to let go. Lesson number 2, the trapdoor at the back of a dump truck is heavy too. Especially when the seven other guys have decided to think for a couple of minutes about the way to load the boat, when yourself and a torture mate are lifting the door at arm length.
Finally, on the beach, whe came to a point where everything was ready, and we departed. I won't tell much about the sunburns, the sea reflects the sun, I'm not a sea guy, but you can call me crab man by now, and, oh, I'm peeling. In the boat I slowly saw the shape of the island appearing through its misty veil. Small place, you can walk around it in half a day. There may be 20 persons leaving there, sometime not talking Indonesian but only their dialect, living from fishing, farming, and lodging occasional tourists. They define themselves as simple people living a simple life, and they are welcoming and respectful, they don't grin at you as some people do when they see a foreigner, but their smile is honest, as well as their speech.

We finally arrived there at noon, safe and sound, and we moved our bags in the little losmen waiting for us. And it was good. The water was good, the sky was good, the lobsters were good, the reefs with many colorful fishes were good, the magnificent seashells were good, it was a rush.
What was not good was the bathroom it the losmen's kitchen, and for my lady friends, having to pull the water out a well to have a shower. I mean, basic Indonesian sanitary facilities are often resumed to a basin and a hole in the ground, and it's no trouble once you get accustomed to cold water. But in a kitchen, I have to confess that I can't see the interest of it.
Something else was not good. The storm. I was half asleep, on my mattress, laid on the floor of the wooden house's first story, well aligned with my other male friends, and after having launched a searching party to retrieve one of us lost on the beach (I didn't even attended it, personal raisons, the heavy rain maybe) I began to feel a bit more relaxed. That when I felt cold water dripping on my cheek. The ceiling was leaking. No problem, I've seen worse, just pull out the bedsheets and cover your face. And then nothing can happen anymore, except, maybe, if a lightning falls on the house and set it on fire because right now the rain is horizontal and the thunder is breaking my eardrums.

It was a good thing that the storm happened at night. The day after, I had slept 3 hours but I was sure that we could go back to Sirombu avoiding any weather problem. The way back was without difficulties, and once back at the base camp, we had some free time before heading back to our place. I used it playing table tennis. And it was certainly not wise of me, because after two hours twisting madly my legs and arms to get the tiny white ball, I realized that the boat was still waiting on the beach. Loading time again. Well, not exactly loading time, “pushing stranded truck knee-deep in the mud of the jungle and putting stones in the rails hoping it doesn't happen again but anyway it happens again on the way back” time would be more appropriated. And the boat's weight didn't drop in the while, to my great disappointment. The jungle macho men moving stones, it was a nice picture.
So, shower time again, not only red as a cooked lobster but also covered in mud, nice mix of colors. At least after another three hours rodeo, we'd get some rest. I shouldn't hope for things to be right so easily. The driver is sick. We will go back tomorrow morning (ok, well, still there is a nice night of sleep ahead) at 4 am (what was that sleeping part again ?) and head straight to the office to begin our working day (it could be worse I guess... it can always be worse) to install a samba server on a Linux platform (see, I told you).

What shall I think about all that ? After having ridden 400 kilometers of evil road and silver see, witnessed the second worst storm in my life, slept 8 hours in two nights and moved more weight per hour than a mad body builder ?
I liked it. Ok, I complain a lot, but still. All these adventures we shared, the merry men and I, made me live teamwork and cooperation in a way that I had never experienced before, to a point where we didn't even need to talk to know what we were to do next. More, I've discovered a wonderful place, a place everybody dream about one day in their life, leaving a salty blue taste on my lips. It's insane what you can do in two days. In two days you can learn.

PS: Special hail to the surfer mates I met back there, you guys rock.

Free, at last.

Yes, yes, I am using big words here, but regarding the situation I guess they deserve to be used.

Indonesia is getting rid of the IMF. You know, this huge money fund that doesn't understand that small poor countries cannot afford to pay nation-level mortgages interests at the same rates as the US.

This is important enough to be written all over the place. Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, Viet-Nham... They are all "emerging countries" as we use to say when we think "poorer than us". These countries all have a common point : they are all done with their debt to the IMF. Indonesia is now in the list. For a while I used to wonder why a country with so much natural resources and full of people willing to learn and work would stay in a dangerous state of economic stagnation, if not to say regression, when I realized that if the IMF is not responsible for everything (at least not for the tsunamis and the earthquakes), it has maintained the country in an artificial poverty since long. What I also wondered about was that if even I myself could understand that, why no decisions was taken, why no polemics were running around the topic ? The answer, once again, is clear, but you have to dig few inches to get to the heart of the matter, you have to be on the field and see it from inside. Why should France (for instance) care about Indonesia ? Why should the national news show us the immense distress some people are in back there, when we can't get the eyes off the political mistakes we are permanently committing (stupid mistakes I must say, but mistakes in politic are always stupid, follow my gaze) ? Because it's comfortable. Whose for ? Not for us people, regular joes and joettes, we are deep enough in our own problems to consider the economic entanglement of the planet, but for some people who have a deep interest in us knowing as less as possible about our neighborhood, lest we shall begin to think. Imagine what would happen if we were taught in school that it is very handy indeed to flood a potentially very resourceful country in debts, so the big cats can keep on talking big things amongst themselves without being bothered, and still being able to profit from this country's resources (Total I am looking at you) ?

So now, if only this news is as good as it appears to be(politics being the very incarnation of Murphy's Law, everything can happen) , Indonesia can celebrate it's second decolonization, the economic one.

The Road of 55 Bridges

Amanraya.

I couldn't even think about it as a destination. I didn’t know where it was except "somewhere in the south". But after half an hour in the car I understood that we were going far. Where I come from, France, people tend to have a wrong idea about disdtances. A city is not that far if it is 200 km afar, but you hardly can take anybody for a 5km walk.
Here in Indonesia, even more in this island , you can realize that your legs can be far more useful than you think; And when you are on for a 150km trip around the island, you also understand that everything is far when it's above 10km away.

If we’d have been carrying nitroglycerine along the way, we'd be all dead by now. Bumpy is the most accurate adjective I can find to describe the situation of the roads here, and even if you are tempted by a look at the see and the mountains, you definitely come to keeping your head as straight as possible, regretting that your neck's vertebrae are not wielded together. The soil is muddy, partially made of clay over the hard mountain rock, and this is a nightmare when you want to maintain a road in an acceptable state. Add to this the earthquakes and floods and you quickly understand why you end up shaking like a beaten apple tree.

I'm working for an NGO, I have to make myself useful and cooperative as often as possible. So I sought to myself, "You could report what's wrong about theses roads".
Bridges.
A broken road, if not by a major landslide, can be fixed, even temporarily. But what about a bridge ?
Take, for example, this one: one end collapsed and got several tenth of centimeter down in the ground, making it steep sloped and impossible to access for any heavy equipment. The kind that could be used, say, to repair a road.
And this other one, wood over concrete : some of the beams are rotting, some other are not screwed anymore, and some are just missing, it's hardly wide enough for a four wheeler to pass over it, and a truck fell from if some weeks ago. When we ran over it with our vehicle, actually a four wheeler, I heard the wood crack underneath, and I saw the beams moving... Disturbing isn't it ?

Well I'm not gonna repair it myself, but I shall report it, along with the 54 other bridges spread over the 150km between Gunung Sitoli and Amanraya.

Let me tell you about all this.

Hi people.

Welcome in here, may you enjoy the ride, 'cause I probably am to carry you quite far, if you wish to follow me. What you're reading is not a diary, and so much for your curiosity you are not going to be revealed all the aspects of my private life, such as my very own way to wash socks, or my personal opinion on Paris Hilton's new monokini.

But here is something I would like to share with you, since my situation could be defined as quite unusual. What you need to know is that I'm French, and that Jolly Froggy is wandering half way round the world to look for wossnames and whatnot, and experience too.

So here I am, in Indonesia, on a small island that has been almost completely destroyed by the late tsunami and earthquakes, working for an NGO. And I'm neither an architect nor a logistic engineer, but a system administrator. I didn't intend to end up this way, mind me, I speak Indonesian well enough to be a translator, and that's what I wanted to be. A translator... languages, words, people, dictionaries. Well, I'm not to be picky on that, and as for suicide-bombing one's brain, sysoping is quite as effective as linguistic. Of course instead of the magical dance of phonemes and concepts, I get to cope with the wonderful mill of ip conflicts and algorithms, and it's not even as if I was an endowed certified operator of the top notch class. You live and learn I guess, and currently I'm learning PHP. Life is beautiful.

Here, now you know almost everything I can tell you about me, myself, I , and my ego. We shall keep in touch, friend (or foes) of all horizons, soon the plane will take off and there will come a handful of , indeed, very useful informations and point of view from far far away.