home sweet pineapple

though i was born and have grown up far from these shores, coming back to the tropics after 5 months in europe does seem like a home-coming of sorts. the sweet smells of incense and kretek, the chirping of the cicadas and the calls of the geckos, the rattling of the motorbikes and the short but intense patter of a tropical rain shower... the tropics do seem to have a way of growing on you. (which reminds of a long discussion i had years ago about the colonial age concept/fear of "going native" and joseph conrad's 'heart of darkness,' but maybe more about some other time....)

for all the criticism that bali rightly gets about being over-run and spoiled by the tourism industry, it is, at the end of the day, not such a bad place to chill after an intercontinental journey and prepare for a return to timor leste.

speaking of which, my hopes that the denpasar-dili flights would no longer be flown by merpati but by some other, more trustworthy airline, have not been fulfilled...