from the horizon

I don’t do things by halves, so when I’m going to fail at something, I’m going to do it properly. The goal had been to take a year off, travel the world without the bondage of a job, without the certainty of employment.
I lasted a stunning one… week.

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I left New Zealand with very similar baggage as I had left with for the first time back in 2005. It has been a while since I have been able approach a check in counter without having to worry about how overweight my check in will be, able to carry, rather than wheel, my luggage. I wasn’t going somewhere to live or to work: I was travelling again.

To India. I have always regarded India as a rather challenging travel destination, and I have had friends tell me how it will be a mind blowing experience. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time here yet, however I’m finding it all very… easy. Perhaps it is all relative, and after living in Indonesia, there is just a certain degree of inconveniences, communication difficulties and cultural misunderstandings which I take for granted. Sometimes you’ve got to squat and there usually isn’t toilet paper. Get used to it… and carry hand sanitizer.

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Summer (southern hemisphere, so this means December – February) is a good time to be home in New Zealand. The weather is war, it’s the holiday season and things generally slow down. Yet, I should know by now that a visit back home is not a holiday. In the three and a half years I’ve been away, I’ve been fortune to have been home 5 times, which has helped me keep in close contact with friends at home. However each time there is a rush to catch up with as many people as possible, and take care of all the little  things that need to be taken care of at home: dental appointment, new passport, buying shoes which fit me…

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Sunset in Aceh

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Arriving back to oppression in Indonesia…

Airport Restrictions in Indonesia:
Animals, Guns and Cooking – Understandable
Cooking – Inconvenient
Wheels on Heel – IS NOTHING SACRED!!!

And try to take a bite out of the Big Apple…

For some reason an article titled “Charities struggle to spend cash for tsunami”, with a few chunks cut out of it became an art piece in the Museum of Modern Art. I appreciated a certian irony, given that my trip to North America was partially funded by my Rest and Relaxation (R&R) allowance from the charity I work for, using money donated for the tsunami.

A suitable epilogue to my North American Expedition.

Visit a friend in Boston, and touch on an childhood dream…

Me at MIT

(I don’t think that I’ll ever do that PhD in Robotics anymore)

And to visit Montreal…

Having been in Indonesia for over 6 months straight, they decided it was time I took a holiday. So I decided to go somewhere completely different… Canada.

When my parents came to visit me in Indonesia, I took them to Bukit Lawang, a former Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, bordering on a National Park. They got slightly closer to nature than they expected…

Disclaimer: Contact with Orangutans is strongly discouraged, as it can lead to infection by human diseases. However, as you can see in the video, Jackie, the orangutan, came straight out of the jungle and attached herself to my mother. Some history may put this into context: Jackie had previous had a baby, who died, due to eating plastic rubbish which had been left in the jungle, and since then has been approaching people who entered the park; My mother is a psychotherapist. After the incident Jackie followed us to the river at the edge of the park – her feeling of loss and need for connection was very apparent.