A River Found, A Kitchen Created

The weekend was a good time. On Saturday Rachel and I got up and went for a nice run before the sun came up. Then I got ready to head out for an adventure and Rachel put in some time at work.

My adventure was to go with my friend Maison to a place where he thought there might be good whitewater. It was at the intake for a water treatment plant he had worked at before. We met up with the director of the water utility in that area and he went up there with us. He was a very nice person and I had worked with him very briefly in 2005. He is also very clever, his water utility is well run and delivers reliable service to its customers. At the water treatment plant he showed us a 10kW hydropower generator he had built. He said he had worked out the details by trial and error. Very clever.

The river itself was really great too. When I saw it I was reminded of the steep creeks of New England that had been home for a while. The water level was low and Maison and I headed upstream for about an hour. There were lots of good looking drops but the water level was low. It rained a little on us, maybe 20min of moderate rain. We decided to head back down and saw the water level had risen a little. We climbed up out of the river and when we looked back down we saw that the water level had risen very rapidly! There must have been a lot of heavy rain in the catchment. The level was rising at about a foot a minute! Soon it was a real torrent and the whitewater looked excellent. Although you'd have to start on it after it had peaked and was dropping! We went downstream to where the gradient had dropped a little and found more and more good rapids. Great stuff! There are many more rivers like this here. All I need is to get a creekboat and a team of people.

I got home a little late, around 6pm. We had a look at a second hand car that was for sale for about $1,500 but everyone felt it was likely to breakdown pretty quickly. We think maybe the best plan will be to buy one in Jakarta and pay someone to drive it up here. The price is much lower in Jakarta and we feel we may be able to get something good for $5,000. It shouldn't lose value over a year or so and we should be able to reclaim the money when we leave.

Sunday, we had a family trip out to the composting location that I had seen. Everyone really like seeing the lovely environment. We think it inspired people a little bit because Abeng started talking about keeping the house tidy and cleaning things up.

We had lunch at a "Padang" place which is like a buffet that they set out on the table in front of you. We had to ask them to remove the birds from infront of us that still had their feet and beaks!

I was starting to feel a little off colour so I didn't play touch in the evening or go for a surf in the afternoon. Instead we went shopping and got some more things for the house like a fridge, some benches to make a kitchen, things for a stove and some shelves for holding spices. We are going to have a kitchen! We got some plates, knives, spoons etc so we can have breakfast or a dinner if we want in our own place. It is very nice to finally have some things set up.

I got sick at night. Just had the runs. It wasn't too bad just meant a lot of trips to the bathroom. By monday morning I was ok. We still feel that the sanitation at the house is not good enough, particularly the septic tank, but there is a lot happening there and we think it will be better. Soon we will have trucked water supply and an enclosed chicken proof washing area. Then we will move onto the septic tank.