The Equator

We took a small shared pickup to the Equator monument. We have made it! Our reason for being in Pontianak. Here's the monument:

This is inside the monument and is the original monument marking the equator.

Jim called Laura's dentist and his dermatologist and Lower Heating and Air Conditioning in Topeka from the hotel, using Skype. This got us to thinking that here we are on the island of Borneo, one of the last frontiers in the world, sitting in a 3 star hotel, listening to live American music being played by an Indonesia duo. Our room is nicely air conditioned, the hotel has a very well equipped exercise room and spa, and even a swimming pool on its roof. The buffet breakfast is the best we have had in any of our hotels, on any of our trips. It even beats the Hotel Puri in Malacca, Malaysia. Life is good.

We saw in Advertisement in the Jakarta Post that Foothill + DeAnza college from the San Francisco bay area will have a representative in Jakarta to enroll students in their community college. Laura had a student from where we are, Pontianak, Indonesia, in one of her classes at Allen Community College. Glad to see the students coming to the U.S.

The other thing that happened here, is that Jim got his first haircut of the trip.

Pontianak is a town a lot like Hat Yai, Thailand, a commercial center, that is not really a tourist town. The people are friendly, but this is a place to come to go elsewhere. If you need a six foot chain saw, this is here you would get it. A store across the street from our favorite restaurant sells logging supplies and Jim often thought of going in and asking what was the largest Husqvarna saw they sold since he's never seen a six foot chain saw.

Tomorrow we catch a bus at 6:30am to go to Kuching, in the Malaysian part of Boreno. In Kuching it rains 252 days a year, and here, in Pontianak, it has rained every day that we have been here. Not all day very day, but sometime during the day it has rained, sometimes very heavy, and, sometimes more than once in the day.