Jakarta, Hilton Hotel, Friday, 1996-05-31 21:00 local (Z+7)
This will be my last message from the 1996 Hajj. If all goes as planned, I'll leave out of here at 17:00 tomorrow, operate the 12 hour leg to Honolulu, get about 8 hours sleep in one of the mini-rooms at the Honolulu terminal, and then jumpseat on a redeye to LAX/SFO/SEA and on home. At least that's the plan of the moment and assumes crew scheduling will release me at Honolulu.
I'm ready to go home, all the more so since I got really sick yesterday evening. After 7 hours of severe diarrhea and vomiting I could no longer walk to the bathroom, was getting chills, had a fever, and knew I was seriously dehydrated. It was time to call a doctor. Fortunately, the Hilton has a doctor on the staff, in fact a full clinic in the basement I'm told. At one in the morning, the doctor gave me a shot to stop the vomiting and a bunch of pills, which I have been religiously taking. I just had a small meal a few minutes ago. We'll see if it stays down. I think it will. Outside of a lot of stomach gurgling, a feeling that I'm not quite as strong as normal, and continued loose bowels, I'm feeling pretty much back to normal. I've had my share of the trots in my time, but I never had anything like last night.
It's actually been a fairly easy Hajj for me. Only two round trips to Saudi, and on the second one, we deadheaded back since that was the last flight from Jeddah to Jakarta. Thursday and Friday I've had here in Jakarta while they took care of some last minute add-on flights from Jeddah to other places in Indonesia and readied the airplanes (three of them still here) for the return to JFK. The planes are painted in Garuda Indonesia colors (Indonesia's nation airline) for the Hajj, so they have to have the Garuda name stripped from them before the return.
For some, these Hajj assignments are a real blast. A number of the pilots and ground personnel have “arranged” a live-in Indonesian gal for the duration. The hotels here have no problem with you bringing anyone to your room. You don't have to bring them in discreetly or register them. You just do it openly, they don't care. In that way, it is a very tolerant society—in spite of being Muslim. I don't think there is an organized sex-trade as in Thailand. Apparently you just go to one of a number of well know discos, meet up with someone to your liking, and make arrangements from there. The captain I've been flying with is a real whore-hound. He goes out and finds a different gal each night. I asked him what the cost was. He said $50 for the night, or if they like you, they don't charge. Sounds like there are a lot of semiprofessional gals here. This whole business is facilitated by the fact that when we go to Saudi, we don't check out of our rooms in Jakarta. I saw one of our female pursers with a young, cute Indonesian guy. I suspect she installed him in her room for the duration. Hey, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and the hotel makes no distinction.
Indonesian society is not tolerant in all ways. President Soeharto has just decreed that Indonesian women will not be allowed to participate in the Miss Universe contest. Actually, I agree with the reasons he doesn't like the contest. He basically feels judging a woman like so much livestock—for physical beauty only—is wrong. I agree with that, but I don't think prohibiting it is very smart, and if a gal wants to participate, that should be her business, not the state's.
An item of note concerning my favorite political cause, drug policy reform. Another judge, the most prestigious yet, Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has come out in favor of drug legalization. He wants to legalize marijuana first and then, if the sky doesn't fall in, proceed with the rest. Interestingly, his views on the subject were published in a British journal, such is the reluctance of the U.S. establishment to publicize dissent on the subject.
David, if you should encounter trouble logging on to CIS at some point, here's a little item I discovered. I couldn't hook up with he 9600 baud line of Infonet World from Jakarta, although I could get to the 2400 Infonet line and the 2400 Sprint line. It seems WinCim 2.0.1 uses XON/XOFF flow control rather than hardware flow control, and some of the networks CIS uses won't accept that. So, in \cserve\cis.ini, you can tell it to use hardware flow control by adding FlowControl=3 as below in a [Connector ...] set. The following got me going in Jakarta:
[Connector (Jakarta IFN 9600)]
FlowControl=3
Okay, time for bed...supper is staying down...stomach has stopped gurgling...I may survive yet. <g>
Terry