It's the truth and it don't make a noise.: Sempu Island

Last weekend (November 3rd and 4th), I had the opportunity to join an English professor on a trip to a very remote village to carry out a teacher training workshop. It was a workshop on "classroom English." Apparently, the Indonesian government encourages all teachers in high schools (not just English teachers) to speak English in class as much as possible. This is a difficult task to achieve for a lot of more rural, poorer areas, because there just isn't that much English spoken out in those areas.
All in all, the plan for the training sounded pretty sweet: Saturday morning, drive out to a remote village near Malang, assist with a training, and then drive a little further to this tourist destination, Sempu Island, to stay the night and enjoy the beach the next day before coming home on Sunday night.

So, I invited Jen along--my fellow Fellow who is thankfully always up for anything! (Why this characteristic is important will become clearer later on in this post.) After about a 7-hour drive, with lots of stops to pick up food and get tents, etc., we reached the school.

Introductions. Aliv, the trip coordinator, is sitting on the far left. The school headmaster is the one speaking.

Just happy to be here!

About 20 teachers attended the workshop. Most of them spoke almost no English (only two were actual English teachers).

"Performing" a role play (I just read my lines): I am the teacher, Jen is the student.

The workshop finished later than expected, since it had taken us longer than expected to drive out there. Consequently, our trip to Sempu Island was delayed, and we didn't reach the boat that would take us to the island until it was almost dark out. Aliv asked me and Jen, "Is it OK if we reach the island at night?" Of course! No problem! we said. Little did we know, once we reached the island after a 20-minute motorboat ride, we would have to hike 1+ hours in the dark, over rocky, volcanic terrain and lots of roots to trip us up. Plus, it was freakin' humid. And Jen and I had flats on. We had been told that there would be camping, but that was it.

However, it wasn't like we were gonna turn back now. We trooped through it--dripping sweat and fogging up our glasses and slipping around in our shoes.

On the shore, waiting for the boat to take us across to the island.

Pretty view from the boat trip.

On the boat, blissfully unaware of the hike that awaited us in 20 minutes.

Inadequate hiking shoes.

At the end of the hike. Need I say more?

So we survived it. The guys set up the tents, we ate top ramen for dinner over a tiny little propane camping fire (there is no fresh water or electricity or pretty much anything on the island--you have to pack everything in). And then we pretty much went to bed. Just on the floor of the tents. Apparently Indonesians don't use sleeping backs or pillows or mats when they go camping. This was something of a downer to discover, as well. But I still managed to get a pretty decent sleep.

And the next morning, we woke up to this:

The tide was out, so people were climbing around on the coral. Live coral! Although it kind of grossed me out because I think it was the kind of coral called brain coral. Slimy and brainy looking. But cool!

Beautiful warm but not too warm water.

There was this neat hole where the water from the ocean came in during high tide.

Hooray! (I went swimming in these clothes, and got to see one really cool fish--it was bright, electric blue, with electric yellow fins, and kind of a boxy shape. Anyone know what it might have been?)

We also saw monkeys in the trees right above us, thankfully not tame enough to come down and try to steal our food, but still really cute and fairly close. We spent most of the morning just lounging around, swimming in the water and finishing up the Top Ramen for lunch. (Yum. Just kidding.) Then we packed up and hiked out--it took us a little less than 2 hours coming back. I'd thought it might be faster coming back, because we had light this time, but it was so hot, we had to make lots of pit stops to hydrate and catch our breath.

The guys traveling with us kept saying, "Es" and "Es degan," which means ice, and iced coconut juice respectively. We stayed focus on the delicious juice we could get once we got back to land.