A Long Journey !

SINGAPORE - May 8

My rear is still feeling the effects of sitting for a long time on a series of uncomfortable seats!


The flying times were: five hours from Detroit to Los Angeles (LAX), 13 hours from LAX to Taipei, and five hours from Taipei to Kuala Lumpur. The Traverse City - Detroit trip and the Kuala Lumpur - Singapore trips took about an hour each.

It started out nicely enough at Traverse City airport, but by the time we got to Los Angeles, stood in line for an hour with a gazillion other people to check in at the Malaysian Airlines counter, and staggered into the waiting area at 12:30 a.m., it wasn't so nice any more.

The 1:30 a.m. flight was packed with folks from India, Malaysia, the US, and a handful of Europeans. The Malaysian Airlines flight is also a code-shared Air India flight, and the flight was full of Indian expatriate professionals (lots of computer and IT types) going back to India after assignments in the US. I sat next to an American couple from S. Dakota. The husband was working for a US company owned by a Malaysian conglomerate, and was en route to a business meeting-cum-vacation in Kuala Lumpur. The missus was along for the vacation part.

The flight from LA to Taipei, Taiwan, was 13 hours long. The seats had individual movie screens to keep us entertained while we were awake, with food being served several times. Most everybody managed to get some sleep.

When we arrived in Taipei, we all disembarked, lined up for a security check, then poked around the airport mall for a few minutes, then trooped back to the waiting room again to board the flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All in all, not a particularly exciting transit through Taiwan!

Five hours (and one movie and several shorts) later, we arrived at our flight's destination, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here my seat neighbors disembarked, and most of the Indian passengers went on to India. I sat around at the beautiful airport waiting for my flight to Singapore. I whiled away my time by sipping iced coffee at the airport's Starbucks, and calling our good friends Patrick and Philomena Augustin, a Kuala Lumpur couple Patricia and I know from our Peace Corps days more than 30 years ago.

Finally, I boarded a Malaysian Airlines shuttle flight to Singapore after 3 p.m. local time. The last leg was a tolerable one-hour flight after a nice rest in Kuala Lumpur.

As we approached Singapore, I could see from the airplane window the outline of an artificial island planned, designed, and constructed by the engineering firm where I once worked. The island is being filled with incinerator ash and other relatively clean solid wastes from Singapore. When filled sometime in the middle of the century, the island will be capped and used as an open-air recreation area --- parks, golf courses, etc. I worked on the planning phase in the early 1990's in Singapore with the environmental engineering firm of Camp Dresser & McKee, Inc.

To-my great surprise, this island, Pulau Semakau, has a Wikipedia entry! Click on this link and learn about the island in whose creation I had the honor to participate way back then.

Thanks for letting me toot my horn... :-)

NEXT: A couple of days in Singapore...

Starting a Banda Aceh blog ...

Hello, folks! I thought I'd try using this blog format to post some text and photos from the big island of Sumatra, Indonesia. A Wikipedia location map of Indonesia is to the right, and a more detailed picture of Sumatra is on lower left.

I will use this space to periodically post some photos and text so you can see what I see out there in Indonesia. In addition to the blog, I've added Aceh-related news items from Google News on the left-hand side of this page.

I will be departing Michigan, tentatively, on May 4, arriving in Banda Aceh in May 8 after overnight stops in Singapore and Medan. (I need to spend a whole day in Singapore to get the non-immigrant visit visa for Indonesia.)

First of all, where am I going? See the figure at left. My posting will be in the city of Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. For a quick-and-dirty look at its history and culture of this very unique province of Indonesia, check out this Wikipedia article.

This is the area of Indonesia that was devastated by the December 26, 2004 tsunami. Anywhere from 100 - 250 thousand people lost their lives. Here's some "light" reading from the World Bank on what they're trying to accomplish, through projects like ours, in Aceh province and Nias island.

Currently, there are a total of 17 projects that aim to bring this province back to its feet and bring it into the Indonesian mainstream. You can see the list of projects here. (The page loads VERY slowly, probably because it's on a local PC server in Jakarta!) Our project is No. 13 on the list.

The project to which I'm assigned ("Infrastructure Reconstruction Enabling Program" --- IREP), will be to help the Indonesian agency in charge of the reconstruction effort coordinate the efforts of five regional reconstruction offices to design and construct infrastructure in the province and the island of Nias.

To see some photos of the various reconstruction project areas that a European photographer took in and around Aceh recently, point your browser to this page (may load very slowly).

OK, folks, watch this space!