2024 In Review: Replenishing, Regrouping and Re-exploring

Om Mani Padme Hum

 

Lipah, Bali, December 31, 2024

It is that time of year again when it’s time to cast my mind back over the past 365 days and remember what I got up to this year, and what I did with the precious gift of time. It was an unusually quiet year from the travel point of view, after a few years of frenetic movement. I didn’t visit a single new country, something that is a relatively rarity for me; I resolve to do better at that in 2025!

On the lift in Gudauri

With my colleague Greg in Bakuriani

The year began in Leysin, Switzerland, where I was staying with my sister Audie and her family after the end of Stanley’s Travels. A couple of days after New Year’s, I packed my life into a couple of backpacks, plus a bicycle and a ski bag, and flew to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I had accepted a mid-year position teaching mathematics at QSI Tbilisi, the international school where I had taught science from 2018 to 2020. I was excited to return to Georgia, one of my favourite countries in the world, and also looking forward to recharging my financial reserves after a few years of economic inactivity. Since I was only going to be there for five months, and since Terri and I had done a lot of exploring of Georgia and the rest of the South Caucasus during our previous stint there, Terri elected to spend the time in Bali and visiting family in New Zealand.

My favourite descent in Gudauri

I was inheriting not only my predecessor’s classes, but also his apartment. Although it was a really well-appointed apartment in a fairly fancy apartment building on Abashidze Street, one of the swankiest streets in the upmarket Vake neighbourhood, its location was really poor for someone who had to commute 17 km every morning and evening to the far northern suburb of Dighomi. During my first stint in Tbilisi, Terri and I had lived about a 10-minute bicycle ride or a 15-minute stroll from school, and I had appreciated how little time I spent commuting. This time was different, as every morning I caught a staff bus at 7:15 am through light morning traffic and then caught a taxi home through Tbilisi’s notoriously dense afternoon rush hour congestion. The morning trip took about 25 minutes; on a lucky day I could get home in 45 minutes, but it sometimes took well over an hour. I hate being stuck in traffic, and I hadn’t had an appreciable commute to work in 18 years, since my time teaching in Nihonmatsu, Japan. As the weeks progressed, I could feel my mood darkening, and I often arrived home feeling utterly drained and immensely frustrated by crawling through stop-go traffic or sitting in hopeless traffic jams for what seemed like hours.

My colleague Ana in Bakuriani

QSI had shrunk in numbers since I was last there, largely due to the pandemic, and it soon became clear that a lot of mathematics hadn’t been taught to the students over the previous few years. Several of my classes were really far behind where they should have been, with a lot of confused students. It made for a lot of hard work, extra help sessions and scrambling to get the courses completed in time. I found it stressful and not as much fun as it had been the first time around; it’s always hard to come in halfway through the year! In the end, though, I managed to get almost everyone through their required units of mathematics, and my AP Statistics students performed well on their exams, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

On the way up to Lomisa Monastery

I tried to get out and about on weekends, at first joining a ski group that headed up every Saturday to Gudauri. As was the case previously, it wasn’t a particularly brilliant ski season, with not much snow at times, and it wasn’t the hit of adrenaline and pure fun that I was craving. The most fun I had skiing was accompanying the junior high school, and then the following week the high school, on the annual school ski trip to Bakuriani. The kids were enthusiastic skiers, well behaved and a lot of fun to hang around with on the slopes. I also had a great day of ski touring with an American friend up to Lomisa Monastery on a day with unusually good snow.

During the week I was frequently home quite late and lacking in energy to do much other than to go to the gym and pool in the basement of my apartment complex. My one real weekly social staple was attending Tuesday evening pub quizzes at Pub 44, where I took my turn every few weeks as the quizmaster. When I wasn’t hosting, my teams did fairly well, although there was stiff competition from some of the other teams who had some very knowledgeable members.

Angkor style

Angkor Wat

At the end of March I had a week off for spring break, and I flew to Cambodia to meet up with Terri. It had been 23 years since I was last at Angkor Wat, and Terri had never been there, so we spent a lovely, leisurely week poking around the immense Angkor complex and around further-flung temples, some of which were new to me. Angkor and its art continue to be the most impressive ruins I have ever seen anywhere in the world, and I was ecstatic to be back again. We rented a motor scooter and spent our days zipping out to distant temples, crawling through the ruins, climbing up to viewpoints, photographing and trying to make sense of the intricate bas-relief carvings that adorn so many of the walls. It’s precisely the sort of travel that I enjoy, delving deep into the history and culture of a country, and Terri and I had a fabulous week. All too soon it was time to fly back to Tbilisi for my last two and a half months.

Giant trees envelop the ruins

At Ta Prohm

Ancient Shiva lingams in a river, Kbal Spean

More Angkorian carving

When I returned winter was over and it was both warm enough and light early enough for me to forsake the staff bus and the hated taxis and start cycling to work. It took about 50 minutes in the morning and 55 minutes coming home, so it took not much more time than going by vehicle, and it left me feeling a lot more positive. It was also warm enough to start playing tennis with my colleague and fellow tennis fanatic Greg; we had many an after-work match, with me winning more often than not, but usually featuring lots of hard-fought points.

Protests on Rustaveli Avenue

The Georgian reads "Russian Slaves!"

Another pall hanging over my time in Tbilisi was the increasing autocracy of the Georgian government which was run by the malevolent hand of the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. Throughout my time in the country my Georgian friends and acquaintances lamented the drift of the Georgian government away from Europe and the goal of joining the EU. In April the government began to force through a "foreign agents" bill known colloquially (and derisively) as the Russian Law, as it was modelled in its wording and its intent on a similar law passed in Russia in 2012 that has been used to methodically crush all independent media, NGOs and civic society in that country. Street protests, attended by tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of ordinary Georgians outraged and worried by the direction of their country (including a number of my students and colleagues) raged throughout April and into May. The government eventually passed the law, but the stage was set for the current round of even larger protests against the transparently rigged election in October. One of my biggest hopes for 2025 is that the protests, supported by a sizeable majority of the Georgian population, succeed in the same way that the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2014 did: with the sudden collapse of the Georgian Dream regime and the flight of Ivanishvili to Russia.

And then, before I knew it, it was graduation day and I was packing up my life to return to Switzerland (to drop off my bicycle and skis at my sister’s) and then on to home base in Bali. It was great to get back to swimming every day, diving occasionally, working out on our backyard pullup bars and in the new gym that had opened in town, hiking and kayaking. Our little corner of Bali really is a great place to be based!

Graduation at QSI

In early August we set off on what was meant to be a months-long hiking trip to the Himalayas. The plan was to spend August and early September north of the Himalayas and free from the monsoon rains in Ladakh and Zanskar, and then to move west to Nepal to try to hike a big section of the Trans-Himalayan Trail, linking together the highland parts of a number of classic hiking areas. We set up an itinerary with a Kathmandu trekking agency (the permits and logistics of part of the hike are complicated) and then flew to Leh, via Delhi. We had spent a wonderful summer trekking in Ladakh in 2012 and were looking forward to having more time to do longer treks.

Shanti Stupa, Leh

The first gorge of our trek

Up on the Niri La

As it turned out, trekking in northern India had changed during our dozen years away. A number of the classic trekking routes are now paved roads, and so finding a route that’s actually worth trekking is hard. A few days of asking around turned up really high prices being asked for horse rental, guides and cooks. In the end we went with a guy who wasn’t really a full-time guide anymore, but who still does a few treks a summer. He came recommended by friends of ours from Leysin who had trekked with his family before, and his prices were still high, but much lower than what other agencies were asking. We spent a few days acclimatizing in Leh, which was groaning under the sheer volume of tourists, most of them domestic Indian tourists seeing their own country, often on convoys of Enfield Himalaya motorcycles. Leh was much busier and noisier than I remembered from previous trips in 2005 and 2012.

The Himalayas are a botanist's playground

Phuktal Monastery

Eventually we hopped on a bus to Padum, Zanskar, which would be our starting point. I had managed never to make it to Zanskar in my previous visits, and it was high on my to-see list. We spent nearly 12 hours taking the long way around, through Kargil, after floods damaged the shorter direct route. We spent a couple of days buying provisions and meeting our team, and then headed for the mountains.

Marmot

One way to get across with dry feet!

Himalayan wildflower

We spent 8 memorable days trekking from the village of Zangla (35 km north of Padum) to one of the new roads at Tanze, and then another 4 days from Tanze to the big Manali-Leh highway at Sarchu. Most of the time there were no other tourists in sight, and very few locals. This part of Zanskar has no roads, which is why we were trekking there and why very few Zanskaris still live there. The scenery was stunning, and the walking was physically demanding without being dangerous (unlike, say, our hike along the Inylchek Glacier in 2019). There was lots of wildlife, including plenty of bharal (blue sheep) and a few snow leopards whom we didn’t see but who left evidence in the form of scat, paw prints and, one memorable morning, claw marks on the neck of one of our sturdy horses. It was great to be out and about in the mountains, and our horseman and our guide were good company (and cooked us some great meals!). The geology and the stark desert landscape, deep slot canyons and steep passes were all stunning and exactly what we were hoping for.

One of the rivers we followed

Gompa outside Shade village

Great view below the Lar La

Shade village

The river gorge near Phuktal

Showing off my swollen face

Sadly, what we weren’t hoping for was what happened over the last few days of the trek, as I got a serious dental infection that had my face swelling up like a balloon. I was worried, as we were completely unable to get out any other way than by walking. Luckily I self-medicated with antibiotics (Terri always has some on hand) and the swelling stopped getting worse. Once we reached the road at Sarchu, we flagged down a car to drive us straight to Manali, the nearest big town. There the hospital diagnosed a severe infection, prescribed some more antibiotics, and said that this would be a recurring problem until I had the offending tooth removed. I had broken the tooth in 1990 and had a root canal performed on it, and this had long outlasted its life expectancy. We decided to cut short our trekking, fly back to Bali and have the tooth dealt with there.

Proboscis monkey beside Santubong River

And so, unexpectedly, less than a month after setting out, we were back in Bali. I had to stick around for a while to have the offending tooth extracted, and then have an implant put in. We elected not to return to the Himalayas, and instead stayed in Bali. I used some of the time to look for a teaching job for the 2025-26 school year. I joined Search Associates, and spent lots of time watching for jobs to pop up in schools that interested me. My early target list included schools in rural Japan, in Colombia, in Ecuador and in Oman. Oman and Colombia were slow rolling out their available jobs, while Japan, with the falling yen, was no longer really lucrative enough to justify working there. (How times change; in the 1990s and early 2000s working in Japan as an English teacher was the best-earning gig I have ever had, before or since.) I talked with various schools, including in Singapore, Phuket, Almaty, Cebu, Prague and Ecuador, but in the end it was an unexpected school that I hadn’t even intended to apply to that offered the best deal. It was also in a part of the world that both Terri and I are very familiar with: Zambia. So in August of next year I will start teaching IB Higher Level Mathematics and IB Physics at the American International School of Lusaka. We are already looking forward to forays into the African bush, and we may even end up re-using the camper insert from Stanley (sitting unsold and unused in Cape Town) and installing it into another pickup truck.

Bearded pigs on the beach, Bako

Hiking in Bako

Colugo, Bako National Park

We did get to do a bit of travelling around Indonesia and the wider region. In September I had to go abroad to obtain a new and improved visa, and Terri and I chose to fly to Kuching, on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo. I was last there in 2001, while cycling across the north end of Borneo, and I remembered the city and nearby Bako National Park quite fondly. We were there for 8 days, and it was great fun. Terri really liked the feeling of the city, and how easy it was to get around. We spent three nights out at Bako, seeing the wonderful proboscis monkeys as well as bearded pigs, silvered langurs and some extremely mischievous macaques. We also spotted culagos (so-called flying lemurs) and Wagler’s pit vipers, and had some vigorous hikes around the park in search of hornbills (we struck out) and pitcher plants (we saw thousands, of several different species). We also visited the orangutan rehabilitation center at Semenggoh (Terri’s first orangutans, living wild in the forest reserve, but still keen on being fed bananas at the feeding platforms), saw some Irawaddy dolphins in the estuary of the Santubong River, and had a lovely hike through the dense primary forest of Kuban National Park. All in all, it was a great trip and a reminder of the fabulous nature that can be found in Southeast Asia.

Pitcher Plant

Big male orangutan, Semenggoh

Clark's anemonefish, Jemeluk

Banded snake eel, Lipah

Whale shark, Saleh Bay

In early September we finally bought our own motor scooter, a Yamaha Lexy that fits two big Westerners with ease. For years we had rented smaller motorcycles, usually Honda Varios, and we were tired to trying to squeeze onto them with shopping or diving gear. The Lexy has been a game-changer for us, and now we wonder what took us so long to buy one. In October we took it on a road trip for 8 days, out across Bali’s neighbouring island of Lombok and onto the next island east, Sumbawa. We went to Sumbawa in order to swim with whale sharks, something we had done before in 2016 in Madagascar (and which I had also done years before in Donsol, in the Philippines). The whale shark spotting was a bit of a disappointment, a crowded tourist circus with a dozen boats and over 100 tourists in the water with one pint-sized juvenile whale shark. The sharks are fed by krill fishermen to attract them to their boats, and it has become a standard stopping-off point for tourist boats plying the Labuanbajo-Komodo-Lombok route. Far nicer was the little surf town of Sekongkang where we spent a couple of days relaxing and watching Aussie and Spanish surfers riding the waves. On the way back we drove through the highlands surrounding Mount Rinjani, and spent a lovely night at the town of Senggigi on the northwest coast of Lombok.

Tourist scrum around a whale shark

Bunaken coral

In late November we ventured further afield, this time by plane, to North Sulawesi. I spent a month in February, 2005 getting my Divemaster qualification on Bunaken Island, and had spent a week muck diving in Lembeh Strait in 2008, and I was keen for Terri to experience some of the best diving in the world. It was rather more expensive this time than two decades ago, so we rationed ourselves to one day of diving on Bunaken and three days at Lembeh. Both places were as memorable as I remembered: Bunaken’s coral and abundant turtles were amazing, while we saw a lot of weird and wonderful underwater creatures, many of them new for us, during our stay at Lembeh. I hadn’t had an underwater camera when I was last at Lembeh, so I had a fantastic time snapping photos. After we had finished diving, we spent a night at Tangkoko National Park, an hour’s drive from Lembeh, where we saw the world’s smallest primates, the otherworldly spectral tarsier, as well as some wonderful birds and the endearing (and highly endangered) Sulawesi black macaques. We flew back to Bali reinvigorated and excited about diving and wildlife.

Blue-toothed triggerfish, Bunaken

Green sea turtle, Bunaken

Greater blue-ringed octopus

Flamboyant cuttlefish

Hypselodorus whitei

Spotfin frogfish

Ceratosoma trilobatum

Spectral tarsier, Tangkoko

Terri finally makes it to Borobodur

Our final excursion for the year was a brief flying visit to Yogyakarta so that Terri could see one of the great wonders of the cultural world, the immense Buddhist temple of Borobodur. I had fond memories of exploring Borobodur back in 1996, but much had changed since then. The temple is a victim of its own success, and a draconian new visiting regime has been introduced in the past two years, with limited numbers, expensive admission and pre-set admission timings. We almost didn’t get into the temple; we had to wait outside for several hours before entering in the last tourist wave of the day. The sculptures and the setting and the history are as impressive as ever, but the entire pre-packaged mass tourism experience was disappointing. Luckily Prambanan, the old Hindu temple complex near Yogyakarta, was far less restrictive and despite the tsunami of Indonesian school groups while we were there, it was still a great place to walk and explore. I was glad, though, that I had had the chance to see both places decades ago when they were less crowded and when I could take my time to explore in depth.

On the top level of Borobodur

Buddha statue atop Borobodur

Borobodur relief

On the way home from Denpasar Airport, we stopped at a private hospital that caters to medical tourism and both had extensive physical checkups done. As we age, it’s probably a good idea to spot problems before they arise, but we were both very happy to have no detectable health issues. As I approach my 57^th birthday, and still thinking about the death of my mother last year, I definitely am more aware of my own mortality and the limited supply of healthy years that I have left, so I’m glad that I’m as healthy as I am.

Shiva statue at Prambanan

While we have been occasionally out and about in Southeast Asia, while we have been in Lipah there has been a big project going on, with a three-storey extension to our house being built. It has been a slow and somewhat frustrating process for Terri to oversee, and we are living in a certain degree of noise, dirt and squalor, but when it is finished, I think it will revolutionize our life here. The final story of concrete is just about ready to pour, and after that we will have an immense new terrace to sit on and gaze out over the Bali Sea.

Bas relief at Prambanan

So that’s been my 2024: less travel than usual, but still a bit of re-exploring familiar places, along with earning some filthy lucre and planning for future adventures. I hope that you, my dear readers, have found your own fun and joy in 2024, and that 2025 brings more in the way of peace, fulfillment and learning. Until the next time, I remain

 

Yours Truly

 

Graydon

Gentian