My plan is to spend a day here in Jakarta and then fly to Borneo for a week, where I will meet with my old traveling companion Irvan. Borneo is the big island in the middle of Indonesia, north of Java. Then we will go to Sulawesi (also known as Celebes), that large island that look like a pretzel southeast of Borneo, again for a week. Finally, the grand finale will be a visit to the island of Flores, a smaller island east of Bali, after which I will say goodbye to Irvan and Indonesia and fly to Sri Lanka.
After a few hours of sleep I joined Fakhry in the luxurious lobby and we headed for the Technical School of BMKG (itself called STMKG), which has been created to educate the future generations of meteorologists, climatologists, and geophysicists who will operate the 150 BMKG stations distributed all over the country. BMKG provides services related to meteorology for air and marine traffic, climatology for rainfall and stream flow forecasts for agriculture, and its geophysics division that is responsible for natural hazards monitoring such as earthquakes, slope stability, liquefaction, and tsunami monitoring. Fakhry himself is in the seismic hazards section, works as a signal analyst, and is a graduate of STMKG.
The point of visiting STMKG was to meet with some of the faculty, among which I count with some old friends, take a look at their brand new 8-stories building and its state-of-the-art laboratories, and meet some of the students who did a great job explaining the tools they use for forecasting and monitoring. It turns out that today Friday is a holiday, so the people who joined me were actually using one of the days in their 3-day weekend to be there, for which I was very grateful. Being a government-supported school students and faculty wear spick-and-span white uniforms, which made me very conscious about my informal travel outfit, but that didn't deter paparazzi students and assistants to take a million shots in the course of my visit.
The highlight was a cameo appearance of my friends Prof. Rita (the very influential director of BMKG) and her wonderful Executive Secretary Ibu Okke. Rita and I met 35 years ago at a conference in Puerto Vallarta, and even though we have only seen each other sporadically over the years we remember those early years in our careers fondly. Okke, being a wonder woman, keeps tabs on me while I am in Indonesia and makes sure that the different offices of BMKG know I am coming their way so they can assist me as needed. Thanks to these two good friends I enjoy the luxury of traveling like a VIP.
In the afternoon Fakhry and I visited the National Monument, a vast park surrounding a needle to commemorate the independence of Indonesia in 1945 (a bit hot because there is only grass and no trees), and while there visited the museum at the base of the needle, which through beautiful dioramas relates the history of the Indonesian nation, from the arrival of Homo erectus in Flores half a million years ago, through the struggles of the early Hindu kingdoms, the unification of the archipelago by military leader Gadjah Mada in the 14th century, the Dutch East Indian Trading Company takeover, the Japanese invasion, the end of the World War II (when the Dutch assumed they would just come and regain possession of the archipelago), and the 1945 declaration of independence that started Indonesia in its course of modern history.
By then I was getting sleepy, so I went back to the hotel, had a nice nap, and met with Fakhry and his charming wife Cidra (pronounced Chidra) for a very traditional Indonesian supper. Cidra and Fakhry have been married only seven months, but they were engaged over two years ago, so I had heard much about this wonderful woman, who currently works as an International Relations agent for a company that facilitates international finance agreements between Indonesian and overseas companies. We had a delightful evening exchanging stories and laughs.
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