1/15/99: Today was our last day in Indonesia. In fact, it was the beginning of the end of the international part of our big adventure! We’ll be back in the good ol’ U.S.A. tomorrow… Some last minute shopping and relaxing in our hotel room… Late at night we boarded the minibus to the airport, where we were a big disappointment to the check-in folks. We had over 100KG of luggage (more than half of it is gifts souvenirs to bring home…), and they were drooling at the amount that they were going to get to charge us for being over our weight limit for luggage… Until they saw our passports and realized that we were from the U.S… It turns out, that because they want to draw Americans to their country to spend money, we are given lots of leeway to carry extra weight on international flights home… I was left feeling lucky on the one hand (“Hey, I get to buy a lot of nice gifts at extraordinarily inexpensive prices, and have extra weight allowances for baggage too! Cool!”), and somewhat embarrassed on the other hand (“What!? I really am wealthy compared to people in much of the rest of the world!”). What a startling truth to keep one humble and thankful…
NOTE: The photo above, from our tour the day before, shows a Hindu statue we came across as we were taking photos of the rice terraces of Bali, Indonesia.
