Off To Indonesia

Hi everyone,

Today, the rubber hits the road! My partner, Audrey, and I spent all Saturday running last minute errands, sending last-minute email questions (“should I bring a camping stove or not?”) and packing all sorts of equipment into two rubbermaid totes and our personal bags. Packing’s been a comically awkward fusion of my outdoor life with my professional life, packing everything from tarps and mosquito nets and hiking boots to literally 110 pounds of sensitive electronic equipment, all crammed into two rubbermaid totes and our personal bags. We’ve got eNodeBs, EPCs, one thousand SIM cards, mounting hardware, antenna cables, ethernet cables and routers, extras of everything, a power strip, and all sorts of other tools, all *just barely* under the airline weight requirements and padded as best we could with styrofoam. At 11pm we lugged it all down to the airport, and at 2am we were off to Jakarta. If you check it out on a map, you’ll notice that Jakarta’s actually way out of the way from Bokondini (as in, 7 extra hours of flying), but Jakarta’s where international flights have to land in order to clear customs and enter Indonesia.

We met our teammate Matt (who flew in from fieldwork in the Philippines) at the airport, and after a day or two, the three of us will head into the field, with a small regional flight taking us from Jakarta to Jayapura, an even smaller flight from Jayapura to Wamena, and then finally a truck ride out to Bokondini. Once in Bokondini, our plan is to stay with a couple of Christian missionaries who have been working in the local community for the past twenty years or so. Scott and Heidi have been instrumental in helping us figure out what the on-the-ground logistics will be, what we’ll need to bring and do, not to mention opening their homes to us! We’re already incredibly grateful for their support, and we haven’t even arrived yet 🙂

Okay – well that wraps it up for this post, stay tuned for more content and pictures as we move through Indonesia and get further out into the jungle!

Author: Spencer

Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. I work on expanding Internet access and connectivity worldwide. View all posts by Spencer