It's mid-November... Thanksgiving, 'fall colours' AND Hallowe'en have all blown by without my realizing that it's FALL in Canada. Because here, it's all the same. Although the rainy season apparently 'wants to start', it has yet to darken our doorstep.

That is not to say that big things are happening with us here! I am writing to you from PAPUA!? So, to say that in itself is not enough... I should mention that we are on the "Bird's Head", Raja Ampat, in the province of West Irian Jaya, on the west half of Papua New Guinea. We're still in Indonesia... but it's truly another world.

The last few weeks have been incredible. The culminating celebration of fasting month (puasa) in the Muslim faith is called Idul Fitri, and this year it fell at the end of October a short time before the CUSO Conference in Bali. It denotes the biggest time of year for Indonesian holidays... so we took off early from Manado. We first visited our friend Cecilia in her swank (if temporary) home in Makasasar (also on the island of Sulawesi, but at the Southern tip). We spent a lovely 4 days there... lazing in breezy pools, tripping into a cool hillstation called Malino, and even a day-trip to a nearby island!

So, with almost two weeks to go before the upcoming CUSO Cooperant Conference, the three of us headed from Makassar to Bali. The days flew by... and although we had plans to go island-hopping throughout NTT (Lombok, Komodo and Flores), given that the friends with whom we wanted to meet up there were off galavanting in other parts, we decided to hold off on exploring that part of Indonesia for a time when they will be there to provide us free accomodation (!)... so we constrained our trip to Bali.

We went back to Ubud, enjoying the rich cultural scene there, including attending a kchek performance... The awesome power of this dance is overwhelming. There was a national kchek with over 5000 participants held at the end of September to send a message of peace to the world. After seeing the small-scale version we did I can imagine it was an effective message! There is no musical accompanyment in the kchek -- bare-chested men sitting in a circle around a firey candalabra provide the momentum to the dance and the story... the rhythmic chants of chek, chek drive the dancers. I am going to try to upload a video which you will be able to download and watch if you'd like to see a snippet. The culmination of the evening was a fire dance/fire walker... a man in a trance so deep that he didn't feel the searing coals as he danced over them!

Lots of beach time and a few novels later, Cecilia and I decided that we would leave Martin playing in the waves (remember, he is a die-hard surfer and waves are truly non-existent in Manado) and see more of the island. We rented a motorcycle and hit the road. But of course, the roads here... well, it's not like driving in Canada. 1) Indonesia falls into that half the world that drives on the LEFT 2) there are no apparent 'road rules'... and 3) it's PACKED! Anyway, we overcame all these obstacles, and more, and had a fabulous tour. We wove our way throught hte mountains, and got to see what we felt was more f the 'real bali'.

After that it was off to the Cooperant Conference which hopefully I'll get a chance to write a bit more about later! Now, I'm consumed by Papua!