My birthday weekend we tried to drive to the beach, but we didn’t realize the mud had overflowed the dam again. The toll road was closed and of course there weren’t any signs or people helping to divert the traffic. There were some random people waving their arms so we followed them – turned out it was just the locals coercing people to drive through their village. This gave them the opportunity to set up a road block outside the mosque with some boys with buckets asking for money. We found our way back to the road which would allow us to turn around and spent 5 hours sitting in traffic to go the total distance of 4 kilometers. The sunset was beautiful over Mt. Arjuna in the distance, and when it got dark we could see the steam rising from the mud over the wall of the dam closest to us (we couldn’t actually see the mud – fortunately for our travels). We finally were able to get to Malang where we almost checked into a very nice hotel at a golf resort. The man at check-in was not very honest though, and upped the price 20% after we settled so we decided to just go back home. On the way there was a regular police stop and when we started again the headlights in the car were dead. Fortunately the high beams still worked, but it meant that people were flashing their brights at us on the very small, windey road all the way back. Around midnight we drove through the small town of Krian. As we edged past a becek we noticed a very strange cargo – hoofs sticking out of the sides. Once we got past we saw that it was loaded high with cow parts illumined by our tail lights. We passed three beceks without saying a word to each other. Eerie.

I watched TV all day Saturday, which was an experience. There were very tragic soap operas and lots of footage on Bush’s eminent arrival in Bogor, outside of Jakarta: People with Bush masks and ropes around their necks, groups wearing T-shirts that said “Osama bin Laden”, burning flags, and so forth and so on. They don’t ever show that sort of thing in America – that’s one thing I learned living in Ireland and a reason I hardly every watch the news: Media is very biased.