Photo Credit: http://www.bata.com/bata-in-indonesia.php

Thursday, July 19, 2012

West With the Night

Beryl Markham's West With the Night is one of my favorite books.  It's been years since I read it, though, and I hadn't thought of it until yesterday.  I think it was yesterday.  When you cross both the equator and the International Date Line, yesterday gets complicated.  With the sun long gone before my flight from L.A. began, we were chasing it around the globe at well over 500 miles per hour.


Flying primarily in the dark for hours, dawn came slowly.  The surreal feeling of perpetual night turned my thoughts back to Markham's book.  We were headed west with the night, too.  I'll have to read her book again to see if the title is a metaphor.  We checked into the hotel last evening after negotiating the airport Customs line and traffic through this megatropolis.  Yes, Rusty.  It's crowded!  Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, has an estimated population of 9.7 million.  It seemed to sprawl on for miles as we made our way through the city to our hotel.  I look forward to today, our first day of meetings and workshops. 

The view of Jakarta from my hotel room

2 comments:

  1. Looks more modern than I thought it would.

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  2. Yes. Yesterday I went to a mall. With the exception of the names of the stores, it felt very much like the malls at home. As with many cities, though, there are modern areas and areas where people suffering economically are struggling to survive.

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