Playing with Riski

This is Riski, our house-helper Ibu Anik's 7 year-old. One day she brought him to work and the boys played a bit together.

Digging for 'pets' (snails and worms).

Check out the Mick Jagger lips.

'Eh! (look!)' Reuben makes up for his lack of language ability (English or Indonesian) with his charm and devastating good looks.

Checking out the action on the street.

Sate Ayam (chicken sate)

Most nights Pak Sul cruises the streets calling out 'Sateeee'. Costs 30,000 rupiah (AU$3.30) and is very good.

He cooks the sate on site over hot coals.

Steam a few veggies, put on the rice cooker and Voila! we have delicious dinner.

A new mountain, a new home

View from our second floor balcony.

Philip did a heroic job of walking/motorcycling the streets looking for 'to rent' signs while I tried to keep the kids entertained back at the guesthouse. Our new house is a short walk to language school in one direction and Soren's kinder in the other. Fantastic.

The boys enjoy the small yard, and lots of space to play inside.

The house came with basic furniture but it was still quite a task getting it set up. A wonderful new friend lent us his motorcycle for a week, and took us in his car to a big electronics store.
The house was full of dirt and dead critters when we moved in. Taps, toilets, powerpoints and the water pump were broken or missing. Figuring out what on earth was going on with the workmen became a cross-cultural comedy of errors, but after 10 days of no reliable running water, I was running out of laughs!

Now it is clean and functioning, we love our new home.

Hunting & Gathering

We stayed in a lovely little guesthouse in Malang while we looked for a house to rent. I loved the Javanese furniture!





Breakfast.

For lunch and dinner, we discovered lots of warungs around town.



Bercakap-cakap (chatting).

Here you can order a fresh juice: any combination of orange, watermelon, apple, papaya, rockmelon, pineapple.. Two guys, two blenders and a generator worked flat out all day.

Eat-in or take-away.

Off we go again

Sentani Airport.

Tired boy.



Transit at Makassar, South Sulawesi. Our turn to have a laugh at language mistakes.

Reuben making a run for it.

Trying to escape reality at Makassar airport. It worked; thanks for the books Mum!

Packing (again)

We stored most of the stuff from our Sentani house in the roof, to allow another family to make it their home while we're away. It was painful to pack up and move again, having just made the massive transtion from Australia.

Weevils

Everything is bursting with life in tropical Papua, even the rice.