Have a lovely time, that is.
3 nights and 2 days of relatively pollution free living is balm for the soul and other poetic stuff.
If we'd stayed a bit longer, we might have partook of a Balinese Boreh: this is a centuries-Old recipe using purely and simply on herb and spice.
Yep, there's nothing like a weekend of good food, or so we were told. After all, we are what we eat, and who's to quibble over mealtime rituals, eh?
We didn't have time to try the Tropical Fruit Bath. This treatment begin with a hour massage the followed with blended fresh papaya to the body as mask then cover with plastic sheet and leave for 15 minute.
No, we didn't have time for all that because the aim of the weekend was to get reacquainted with Son No.1 and his wife A, and to get acquainted with two-year old K.
These are her hands and one of her Dad's.Son No.1, who's in the posh hotel business (rather than the homestay we booked for his tribe) did tell me that the only comment about his website came from a GM who really liked the writing about Jakarta. Apart from the fact that I wrote that bit, ahem, it lead into a discussion about writers, and he told me the tale of a journalist/football reporter friend of his who's written a few well-received books about marital life and has now been commissioned to write a book about what an expectant father can expect before the arrival of a boy or girl.
Sadly, although his friend and marital partner have been practicing steadfastly, she has yet to get the happy news of expectancy, or, as Son No.1 put it, "they've been working their butts off to get pregnant."
I suggested that therein probably lay the fundamental reason for their failing.
And thinking of missing children, it is ten years ago this month that the Suhartoist military thugs were 'disappearing' student activists and shooting them from the toll roads overlooking campuses.
Suharto may have gone, hallelujah, but the responsible generals have yet to be brought to task, so I ask you to remember all those parents who continue to seek closure.
My written memoir of that period can be found in my May 1998 archives.
