I am writing this from 32sqm room in Tanah Bumbu Regency where the doctor will spend a year of compulsory service.
The battle between joined and sent him off first to this place was tough. Days in last week spent by non-stop googling about the ticket price, calculating benefit and risk, lots of conversation happened between head and heart. After long and hard battle inside, finding the best possible route with the least cost,two tickets bought just two days before the departure.
My travel history had never been this nekat. The tickets price might be quite scary for the saving, but regret of not buying them would surely be greater than the pain of paying them.
Unlike the other trips that had been meticulously planned, this one was almost zero, not because it’s a domestic one but more to limitation of information we got in our hand.
There things that are unggogleable no matter how hard you search for them. The only thing to do is just come and see, then let’s see what we can do about them on the spot.
This trip will be another huge challenge for me because I will travel back to home with the little girl only two of us. Two flights, if one doesn’t sound challenging enough. During traveling, I am so dependable with the doctor. He has more patience in dealing with this girl than me. As a lazy person, it takes something really important until I dare to take the risk to do this kind of thing.
I have my number one pray whenever we go places. For us to meet the kind ones to help whenever we are in need. So far, the prays always answered until the least important thing. Paris, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Tokyo, the trips were greatly enjoyable because of those strangers kindness that we could never payback. This Tanah Bumbu trip turned out to be the same.
We booked differently because the doctor didn’t need the return flight. So when we checked in we turned out to have separate seats. Seven rows differences. I had the thought in my mind to ask for switching the seat with the other person so the doctor could sit with us together.
We happened to seat with a man at the same age with my father, maybe, and when he saw we sat in different row, it didn’t take him long to walk to the back of the plane and asked the doctor if he would like to sit with us. That was very kind of him. I didn’t even say any words about switching the seat.
Arrived in Tanah Bumbu we drove with a fellow obgyn doctor. After some talk and believe it or not, in spite of his thick javanese accent, he is a Gorontalonese. You can meet javanese everywhere, padangnese is also pretty common, but it’s a very very rare chance to meet a Gorontalonese in the land of nowhere. I destined to met one here. In this tight schedule trip.
Another one that makes me shivering more, among thousands of remote areas in this country, this land of my dad’s birth land chosen, more spesifically it was where my late grandma’s spent her childhood.
Never, a single path of life, is a mere coincidence. Every thing happens for a reason.
No matter how overrated people think traveling is, but it’s never for me. I had my very first real traveling back in 1993, and its impact was greater and longer beyond a mere going to new places and showing it to others. It developed many things inside of me that I believe they were something that only could be done and got from traveling.
Traveling is always an eye opener to new things that we don’t know and to learn something new is only exciting by seeing something in other places than our comfort zone.
I don’t remember if London and Tokyo made this much babble within seven days of traveling. Tanah Bumbu made it this much only within few hours of arriving.
In spite of the nice words written above, the mess of having long distance marriage is waiting ahead.
Be kind, please, Life.
I am really looking forward to April….
2019.
A Penny for My Pensieve 