Indonesia – 2013

Denpasar I’m sitting in the Denpasar airport in Bali, awaiting the start of my 30-hour flight to the U.S., while pondering what has been one of the great mysteries of travel to me: time zones. How can we have moved closer to the United States from Surabaya, and yet the time gap has grown? It’s … Continue reading »

Surabaya It isn’t every day you wake up and find your picture in the newspaper, with the caption, Professor Bisnis AS Kagumi Indonesia,” but that was how we started the day. If you don’t believe me (although you should!) check out the Jawa Pos and read about how and why the 15 members of the … Continue reading »

Surubaya A full day of business activities that ended with a visit to what might well be (with apologies to the Chicago Tribune) the World’s Greatest Newspaper, and certainly one of the best businesses to work for, started with a visit to a bicycle maker whose tag line was, “From Indonesia to the World.” The … Continue reading »

Surabaya If yesterday’s business visit took its theme from “With a chicken, we build a nation”, the motto of the group we visited, today’s two visits share a common theme in one of Indonesia’s natural resources—the forests and forest products, which have helped Indonesia flourish (partly because of the sale of commodities to China and … Continue reading »

Surabaya (or in the old days, Soeribaea) We are in Surabaya, 420 miles east of Jakarta, and 7 degrees south of the equator. The capital of East Java, it’s a city of about 3-4 million, on the Java Sea, with some intriguing mountains in the distance. It took us most of the day to get … Continue reading »

Jakarta Indonesia has over 17,000 islands (over 5,000 unnamed, so if you want to buy me a present….) and 34 provinces—and, believe it or not, we visited over 5 of them, from Aceh to Papua in 3 hours today. All without  leaving Jakarta. Let me explain.  Jakarta has a park, developed in the 1970s, which is … Continue reading »

Jakarta The first time I took Mrs. Hoyt to Shanghai, we were having dinner in the old Sassoon Hotel along the Bund, and she noted, “Foreigners built as though they were going to stay forever; only the buildings have remained.”  That’s as true of Batavia—er, Jakarta—as it is of Shanghai, though to a much lesser … Continue reading »