Climb now, work later

Having set with the ball rolling with respect to working and doing research into possible teaching institutions and teaching possibilities, it could be time to begin exploring the climbing potential that Indonesia offers. Despite nearby Thailand and Malasia being well know for their aundance of developped areas, Indonesia appears at first glance to have received relatively little attention, as far as the climbing world is concerned. There are no topos published, as far as I can tell, but with a quick glance on rockclimbing.com  and a trawl through their pages on Indo it's easy to find rudimentary information on the sort of places where climbing has been developped. The picture above is from the site and appeared with a caption explaining that the topo was created in "1988 when the French came" and is described as "where it all began regarding rock climbing in Indonesia". Good stuff. Citah 125 is located at an hour's drive from Bandung which sounds promising, with trad and heaps of sport said to be on offer.

Language teaching, language learning.

In addition to teaching language it will be necessary to get learning at least a few words, in order to get on with daily life comfortably. Having only really holidayed in Europe I have always enjoyed being able to communicate with people in their own language, at least to some degree. To this end I found a lovely site [1] which hopes to teach a very basic amount in one week. We'll see. AC is obviously proficient in Indonesian and from what I'd gleamed from hearing her speak the language, I'd got the rather misguided impression that Indonesian was some sort of Creolized Pigin. It turns out that it is a development of Malay. The reason that I had thought that it was perhaps developed from a Pigin was partly due to the large number of words that I recognized as being of European origin. Also, the grammar, as explained by AC, seemed simple e.g. pluralization through reduplication. The reason for the European flavour of the language turns out to be the influence of Dutch, Portugese, English. The the use of Indonesian as lingua franca in the area for centuries may partly explain the simple grammar, but I think as with many languages, while certain aspects of the grammar are fairly simple, others are difinately not. To this end, any effort to learn anything more than basic Indo will require exactly that; effort.

[1] http://www.seasite.niu.edu/indonesian/percakapan/indonesia7days/indo7days_fs.htm