Back in Bali

Well, I'm back in Bali, at the south end of Sanur this time. Most of the other tourists here are thirty years older than me. The tour of Papua finished yesterday upon arrival at Denpasar airport. As always just after a tour, there is a lull in motivation and mood. Next stop is likely to be Nusa Lembongan, off Bali, or Sulawesi. But really I need to sit around for a few days, eating western food, watching DVDs and deleting photos. Moving every night becomes enervating after a while.

We flew from Biak via Makassar. Biak is on the Pacific Ocean. Very few places in south east Asia are on the Pacific. You have to go to the Philippines to see it - or to Papua, if you count it as part of Asia. We flew over Ambon, Holland's old clove island, and then across the Banda Sea. Just off Sulawesi we saw a string of atolls, which are very unusual in southeast Asia, where almost all reefs are fringing reefs.

(PS as you might expect, there are few internet connections in Papua. The only one I got to use was in Biak, and it was too slow to blog on. I have seen almost no news in the last six weeks, although the news that some guy called Obama has won some election or other has reached Bali. The world sighs with relief.)