After travelling through Indonesia for a while, weary of both body and mind from the incessantly fluctuating highs and lows; watching active volcanoes violently spit great plumes of ash into the air, sweating out joint achingly long bus journeys, diving with sharks, rays and thousands of other multi-coloured, multi-formed ocean inhabitants, sleep deprivation from repeatedly rising to pre-dawn alarm clock screeches, meeting human-eyed orangutans face to face in de...

My god, what a rollercoaster this Sumatra ride is proving to be! Sitting here now in Tuk Tuk, Danau Toba (Lake Toba), listening to the waves softly lapping against the grassy shoreline, finally with some desperately needed clean laundry, and hopefully with the worst of last night’s and this morning’s persistent fluctuations between hot sweats and shivers behind me, it’s the first time since I arrived in Sumatra just over a week ago that my mind’s been in ...

Note 1 – Saturday 11th June – Pulau Batam Culture shock! It shouldn’t be, given the time we’ve already spent in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but I guess our four most recent months of travelling, through tourist set-up, expat abundant Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, where no-one even batted an eyelid at a Western face, it being such an unremarkable event, have spoilt us, in a sense (I say “us”, Paula didn’t mention it on arriving in India, ...

Note 1 – Tuesday 7th June. There’s some serious wonga here! (Spellcheck doesn’t recognise “wonga”?) (spellcheck doesn’t recognise “spellcheck”?). Asian faces aside, it’s as though I’ve briefly left the continent to spend a week in America. I say that despite never having visited America, and also in the knowledge that other such cities probably do exist in Asia (Japanese ones, Hong Kong, Seoul perhaps), but nevertheless, that’s the impressi...

Note 1 – Monday 30th May OK, two major changes of plan! Firstly, mine. While I was booking into the hostel, the guy on reception was showing me the different services they offer, including onward transport. I asked about the ferry to Medan - he told me that it didn’t run anymore. What? No! But yes. Air Asia was too cheap, the company couldn’t afford to run the service anymore, it finished in June last year. Recently enough, alas, to not yet to be mentione...