We’ve also been out of internet contact for the last 2 weeks or so… So to catch you up on everything I’m going to give a quick run-down with links to our Best Moments from all over so you can see what we’ve been up to:
Two weeks or so ago, we headed to the island of Lombok, below Bali, for a couple of heavenly days by the black sand beach (crazy – black volcanic sand!)

Then we went to the Gili Islands for three days of decadent beachside lazing about… And diving. Incredible diving! Extraordinary coral and marine life, really like diving in a gigantic aquarium. And I saw my first giant turtle! Wow.

From Gili Air we headed to Amed, where we spent Christmas (and got engaged! Did I mention that? Is it getting annoying yet?)

Amed is a charming little fishing village, very un-touristy, where we spent five nights and had a whole heap of lovely experiences – We went diving around a shipwreck (wow! unbelievable) and I did my first drift dives (very exciting, past the most amazing coral pyramids and over a coral wall into vast blue nothingness);
We swam with a turtle on Christmas Day (it was my Christmas wish – giant turtles are simply amazing in real life and when we went out to snorkel I told Mark all I wanted for Christmas was to swim with a turtle. And we did! He found one and we swam wit it for twenty miraculous minutes);
We indulged in a Balinese feast, with all kinds of traditional dishes and bamboo wreaths that signify ‘forever love’ (a mere two days before our engagement – it obviously worked);
We hired a motorbike for a day and drove past some incredible views and vistas – the real Bali as far as I’m concerned;
We visited the Royal Water Palace and swam in cold spring water baths built for the king (cold water! A rare thing in these parts);
And then….

We flew to Jakarta (yesterday afternoon) and decided to splurge on a nice hotel to properly celebrate our engagement and ring in the New Year in style. And what style it was! A gala dinner with TURKEY (heaven heaven heaven! We didn’t get any for Christmas and I was so sad) and piles of delicious food with… An Indonesian Beatles cover band! They were amazing. Check them out. Seriously cool.

If you’re looking for some more in-depth footage of all we’ve seen (rice paddies, beaches, islands, me in a wetsuit and some incredible views) as well as how the last two weeks have been for both of us, check out our latest video diary, live on YouTube here.

And now it’s 2010! And we’re flying out of Indonesia tonight (at midnight) and heading home for 3 days to refuel on fresh insulin (which I desperately need – my night-time insulin hasn’t worked properly the last two nights) and then we’re off to South America! So when next we speak I’ll be saying ‘Hola!’

Till then – HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

It’s part of our Round-the-World Travelling with Diabetes journey, and essentially what it is is a wee bit of inspiration for all of us… Obviously my chronic condition is diabetes, because that’s what we’ve had to live with, but what we want to say is that no matter what your condition -  whether it’s something emotional or mental or physical – no matter what’s holding you back, you can take heart in the fact that it is possible to follow your dreams.

As an illustration of this, we’ve had a handmade heart made in every country we’ve visited. The end of Vietnam was such a whirlwind that I didn’t have a chance to post our Take Heart Vietnam video, but here it is now:

And then here’s the one from Indonesia:

Which do you prefer? (I love them both – you know how I feel about hearts!!)

So here’s how it happened…

Yesterday around 6pm Mark told me he had a surprise for me, and that I had to meet him on the beach in half an hour… We’ve been staying in a charming little fishing village called Amed, on the North coast of Bali (in Indonesia) for the last five nights, and we’ve loved every second of it. Not at all touristy (unlike the rest of Bali), fantastic scuba diving, incredible snorkelling, and superb grilled prawns and Indonesian delicacies eaten right on the beach. Divine.

So I head down to the beach and there’s a part of me that’s thinking, ‘Is he about to propose?’ because it was all so mysterious. But I had a feeling he might propose on Christmas Day and he didn’t, so I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

I walk to the restaurant where he said he’d meet me, and what do I see? No Mark. But the waitress was all clued up, handed me two fresh mango juices (our favourite, unbelievably sweet and fresh and yummy) and told me to wait a few minutes.

Less than two minutes later, I see Mark heading towards shore on a local fisherman’s boat. Looked something like this:

I climb on board and off we go, on a ’sunset cruise’, he tells me. So we’re sitting out there soaking up the view (a volcano, an island fringed with palm trees, an endless horizon in the other direction, the clouds streaked pink with sunset just around the corner, a half moon starting to rise) and sipping our mango juice.

Dusk is my favourite time of day, the ocean is my favourite place to be, I have a thing about endless horizons. And Mark’s all fidgety and looks nervous, so of course I’m wondering what’s up. Then he pulls out a dozen candles and lights them and I start to feel like I know what’s coming up…

After many more minutes of a really magical slice of my life, Mark turns to me and says, “Will you marry me?”
I was so happy I couldn’t even speak – crying and laughing at the same time, honestly it’s the best feeling in the world! But of course I said yes.

And then he gave me my ring – a bamboo ring he’d found in Thailand (and been carrying around for the last four months!) with strips of silver that he’d had a local silversmith in Gili Air (the island we were on last week) put in. I love it! It’s just perfect – I told him once that I wanted a ring I could swim in the sea with. It’s so me.

And now we’re ENGAGED!!! And we are both on Cloud Nine. It’s a lovely place to be.

As Mark puts it, “After flying in to Jakarta, Indonesia, we travel to Yogyakarta to see the Hindu temple of Borobudur. A diversion to the Bromo region to see the active volcano Gunung Bromo and then off to Bali. Add to this the drama of failing insulin due to exposure to heat while traveling and the past week or so has been a roller-coaster of highs and lows.”

Check it out here, or click on the video below:

I mentioned this fleetingly in my blog post about what we’ve learned in the last couple of months on the road, but I’d like to elaborate on it a bit… Only because I’ve suddenly had great insight into how much where you are affects how you are, and I want to unpick it a bit.

Let me set the scene:

We’re in Ubud, in central Bali, cultural heart of the island and home to endless rice fields, palm trees, red-roofed traditional houses and stone carvings of weird and wonderful creatures. Also home to a heck of a lot of tourist shops. The main drag is ridiculously touristy – it could be any main street in any country, in fact. But step just a little off this main street and it feels as if you’re in the country: roosters, birds, nature on all sides. The plan was to stay here for 4 days, but we couldn’t decide where to stay, and left it rather late. We eventually decided on Hotel 1, which got great reviews on TripAdvisor, and sounded lovely. Looked lovely, too, when we arrived, set in a tropical orchid garden and with really friendly staff. The problem came when we wanted to go to sleep, around 11pm, and our neighbours, a pair of long-stay women, decided to crank up the cheesy girl tunes (From a Distance and Forever Young, I ask you with tears in my eyes!) and cackle and chatter late into the night… I went out to ask them to keep quiet, but they were actually inside their room. It didn’t sound like it – the walls were made of bamboo, the windows had no glass.

We left early the next morning to find somewhere else to stay.

Hotel 2 seemed far better than Hotel 1. Much bigger room, great little balcony looking out over a rice paddy, free internet. We were really rather happy there till we were woken at 2am by noisy neighbours who had just arrived and wanted to talk (loudly) for an hour or so… I eventually asked them to keep it down, but they were up at 7am again, chattering away. Who was it who said hell is other people?

Again, though, we’d foolishly chosen bamboo walls and no glass in the windows. We wanted to experience ‘authentic’ Balinese life by staying in a home stay, i.e. you essentially stayed in someone’s home. We quickly realised we’re not cut out for communal Balinese life.

So finally, yesterday we found Blessed Hotel 3. Perched in the middle of rice paddies on all sides (take a look at the view from our balcony!) with a huge balcony, massive room and best of all, brick walls! We had the best sleep ever last night, entirely uninterrupted.

What it made me realise, though, is what a profound impact where you are has to how you feel. Yesterday morning I was exhausted, irritable, headachey and fed up. Yes, lack of sleep two nights in a row will do that to you, but so will being somewhere that feels wrong. The manager at Hotel 2 was awful, our shower stopped working (first thing in the morning) and he couldn’t be bothered to apologise for it, he didn’t seem to care that we were checking out 2 days early, we kind of felt like we were in the way. And I’m sure that contributed to how we felt: it was my first real day of travel fatigue.

But today I woke up to a cool breeze blowing through the room, in the middle of gorgeous views on all sides, and walked out to my balcony where the lovely manager brought us a delicious breakfast, with a smile. And I feel happy. Really happy. So pleased to be here, experiencing Bali, so eager to continue exploring and travelling for the next few months. I suppose I never realised how important where you are is to how you feel. Now that I have, I’m going to make sure (as much as I can) that we rest our heads in lovely spots.

PS – It makes me wonder, too, how important a lovely home is to our levels of happiness. Something to think about, hey?

Interestingly, though, it hasn’t been all good or all bad. I suppose that’s like life – some highs, some lows.

First off, to set the scene: When I last blogged we were in Jakarta, the capital of Java, in Indonesia. Mark had a bad cold and we were both exhausted from our long travels to get to Indo and the hectic pace of our last week in Vietnam. From there we went to Yogyakarta, the ‘cultural heart of Java’, on a delightful train (seriously, the best train we’ve been on in South-East Asia). It took about 8 hours, but it was so comfortable the time flew by. We stayed in Yogya for 3 nights, spending a day at the incredible temple of Borobodur – the largest Buddhist temple in Indonesia. For some reason, all the local tourists kept asking Mark and I to be in photos with them! We managed to catch it on film, here:

We spent all day exploring Borobodur (we chose to take the local bus instead of a tour, so we had 2 hours each way sitting next to and chatting with the locals, which was waaay more interesting than sitting in a sterile tour bus). By the time we got back that night we were exhausted, though, so we went for dinner just down the road, and I ordered ‘comfort food’ – fillet of chicken, which I thought would be sauteed, but turned up fried. And dangerous. I woke up in the middle of the night with a nasty case of food poisoning and spent all of the next day unable to move from my bed except to crawl to the toilet, and with honestly the worst headache I’ve ever had. Food poisoning is the devil! I had no idea how vicious it was. It’s the worst of both worlds – headache and nausea. Eeuch.

The next morning we had a bus to catch, at 7.30am. I woke up feeling better, but still weak and now with Mark’s cold (obviously my immune system had taken a hit from the food poisoning). We spent 11 hours in a minibus that day, a minibus with only the vaguest sense of air conditioning and a driver who knew no fear – he quite happily overtook other cars even if it meant bearing down on the wrong side of the road towards a bus! Yikes. Still, we got to see a lot of stunning Javanese landscape (endless rice paddies, lots of farmers, interesting small towns) and actually sitting down all day probably did my cold some good. We eventually arrived in Cemoro Lawang, a small mountainous village near the famous Gunung Bromo volcano, around 7pm that night, and were lucky enough to be booked into the delightful Java Banana hotel. What a treat.

Most people, believe it or not, make this arduous 11 hour journey for just one night. Gunung Bromo is still active (but only smoking) and the thing to do while in Cemoro Lawang is take the sunrise tour:
You wake up at 3am, take a jeep for an hour to the lookout point at Mount Penanjakan, where you can watch the sun rise over the volcano. Then you take the jeep down to the foot of the volcano and walk up to the crater itself. Awesome!
Here’s how Java Banana describe the sunrise:

“Little by little, from a state of darkness, minute by minute, the sun unveils the dawn in Bromo-Tengger-Semeru, in its incomparable beauty. Mount Bromo stands in the middle of the Tengger caldera and greets the morning, welcoming it with its periodic puffing of smoke. Bromo is visibly the most active and the most prominent on the stage of the theatre of Bromo-Tengger-Semeru.”

How could we resist? So the morning after our day of minibussing, we woke up at 3am to the freezing cold, and set off in the darkness to watch the sunrise. It was really exciting, actually, heading off into the great unknown, about to see our first volcano. And the sunrise was beautiful, illuminating the scene from total darkness to total light in a subtle but spectacular way… Mark will post pics soon, I promise.
It was also FREEZING, unbelievable seeing as we were so boiling hot the day before! From the sunrise vantage point we headed down to the base of the crater, and walked right up the rim, so we could look inside the volcano belching sulphurous smoke. Pretty darn incredible. Take a look:

We spent the rest of that day resting and recovering, and trying to find an alternative route to Bali, so that we wouldn’t have to do another 11 hour minibus trek! We ended up taking the train for most of the way, but it still took us over 11 hours… You can read all about it here, it was a really difficult day.

So there you have it! Our most eventful week ever. We had ancient temples and volcanoes, food poisoning and colds, all-day minibus journeys and diabetic drama. What more could anyone ask for in a week?
Well, some peace would be nice. I’m feeling worn out, to be honest. This week we plan on taking it easy. Having some down time in Sanur, where we are now (on the coast) and then heading inland to Ubud. I’ll keep you posted, I promise.

How has your week been?

It was without doubt the worst diabetic day I’ve had since I came out of hospital post-diagnosis.

Before I begin, let me explain some numbers, so that what I say makes sense to you:
Non-diabetics (normal people) have blood sugar between 4 and 7. Diabetics should always aim for below 10 – 7 is the magic number, but I’m happy anytime I test in the 8s too. Between 10 and 12 is high, over 12 is really high, over 16 is dangerously high and I start panicking. I’m hardly ever over 16 – it means something has gone very wrong (i.e. my insulin isn’t working).

Yesterday, Thursday the 10^th of December, promised to be a somewhat challenging day before it began. We woke up in Cemoro Lawang, the mountainous village not far from Gunung Bromo, the most famous volcano in Java, Indonesia. The plan was that at 9am we would catch a public minibus down the mountain to Probolinggo (1 hour), then catch a train to Banyuwangi (5 and a half hours), then catch a ferry to the port of Denpasar (45 minutes), a bus to Denpasar city (3 and a half hours), and a taxi to Sanur (20 minutes), where we would finally be in Bali and wouldn’t move for 5 days. That’s what was keeping me going: the thought of staying put for a few days. I’ve had a cold all week, so my blood sugar has been slightly high the last few days (I blamed it on infection and simply took more insulin). All in all, though, I was feeling strong.

Everything went smoothly till I tested my sugar two hours after breakfast (we’d just boarded the train) and found it was 15.9 – crazy high considering I’d taken slightly more insulin than usual at breakfast, because of my cold. I thought maybe I was going high because it was so hot (SO hot, like sitting in a humid oven, and we’d been waiting on the platform for an hour) and took another 3 units of insulin, which would definitely take me down to below 10. So far, not too worried.

Two hours later, I tested to see if the insulin had worked (you have to wait 2 hours for it to get into your system).

It hadn’t. I was still really high – 13.4.

So I deduced that the heat had killed my insulin, and took a fresh pen from the cool pack in my backpack. Not too worried. Fresh insulin would sort me out in 2 hours. I had a small lunch, took a generous injection, and waited.

2 hours is a long time to wait when you’re not feeling too well and not sure what your blood sugar is going to do.

When I tested at 3.45pm my blood sugar was 18. The highest it’s been since I came out of hospital over two years ago and figured out carbohydrate counting. The 2nd pen had obviously also been heat damaged, and wasn’t working at all.

And this, dear friends, is when I freaked out. Because if an insulin pen that was in my cool pack wasn’t working, that means that all the insulin pens in my cool pack might not be working. I’ve been as careful as possible with my insulin, but as you know it was left out of the fridge for 2 days last month, and most of the places we’ve been staying in lately haven’t had fridges, so it’s been going in a communal fridge. The weather is so hot here that to take it in and out of the fridge probably doesn’t help, and I’d come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t as effective as fresh insulin. But if it wasn’t working at all that was dangerous. Really dangerous.

We were only due to arrive in Sanur after 10pm. If the next insulin pen didn’t work I wouldn’t be able to eat anything until we could find a hospital or emergency room that could sell me insulin. We’d have to buy insulin to last the next 3 weeks. Who knows if that wouldn’t get heat damaged too – Bali is having its hottest summer ever known.

But on top of all these fears racing around my head was one clear question: Were we idiots for trying to do this? Was 4 months too long to travel in sub-tropical climates with diabetes? Was I being really stupid and careless with my health? For the first time since we left home, I felt scared. I wanted to go home.

But of course I couldn’t. I had a ferry to catch. Two hours later, on board the ferry to Bali, I checked my blood sugar again, and Hallelujah, Praise Every God in Heaven, it was fine. Totally fine. So now I’ve found a magic insulin pen that still works perfectly. I need to test all my others so that I don’t have another yesterday happening to me again in a hurry.

When we finally arrived after 11pm last night, I was completely exhausted and hollowed out. I can handle travelling with a bad cold and stuffy head. I can handle a 14 hour journey. I can handle high blood sugar for 8 or 9 hours (although I’d rather not have to ever again, thank you very much). But a 14 hour journey with a bad cold and high blood sugar is too much for me. Being that high is so awful. I couldn’t stop crying, my head felt full of clouds, my body felt weird and hot, and there was no sense of balance in me, no rational thought to cling to. I honestly haven’t felt scared of being diabetic since I got my eating plan and got it under control over two years ago. Yesterday was the first time that I really felt the weight of my condition.

Poor Mark was wonderful. Calm and soothing and practical, figuring out how we could get to a doctor or a hospital as soon as we arrived, and not getting freaked out by my constant tears.

And now, today, I feel shaky. My blood sugar is fine and I’m eating really normal food to keep it that way. I’m going to test the other insulin pens over the next two days and chuck out anything that doesn’t work, so I’m pretty sure this won’t happen again. Yesterday, of all the days of this wonderful trip, is one day I would not want to repeat. Not for anything.

I foolishly thought that because we were flying (from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh at 2pm and then from Ho Chi Minh to Jakarta at 8pm, arriving at 11.30pm) that it would be easier than a land border crossing. Well, no. Yes and no – the actual travel was easier, but finding real food (at a semi-reasonable price) in an international airport is a nightmare, and all the waiting around in queues is pretty exhausting.

And, of course, as is now common, my blood sugar was crazy all day. I think I might be allergic to border crossings.

Actually, I started a new insulin pen the night before, and realised when my sugar went through the roof at breakfast (17! One of the highest readings I’ve ever had!) that it wasn’t working. At all. Of course, seeing as I was high and not thinking straight I’d already given myself a come-down shot by the time I figured this out, and seeing as insulin on its own is usually pretty powerful (even if it’s not working 100%), I didn’t want to jab twice and risk going low on the plane.

Turns out the bad pen wasn’t working at all, so I stayed high for hours until I could test again after lunch. Bleerurgh. By now I was feeling truly rotten. Emotional, irrational, cotton wooly, hot and cold, all kinds of horrible.

I had taken a new pen from my luggage before we checked it in (thank goodness!) and the moment the insulin started to work I felt instantly better – like a fog lifting.

So we arrived in Jakarta at about half past midnight and woke up exhausted yesterday. Mark had a cold, I had a whole heap of tiredness, and we’ve spent the interleding day and a bit catching our breath and aiming for somewhere halfway human. We’re staying at the very comfortable, extremely stylish Alila Jakarta (a lovely business hotel) which is the perfect place to gather our energies. Feeling a LOT better today (both of us), and we’re off travelling and finally seeing a bit of Java in Indonesia tomorrow.

We’ve actually recorded a new video diary, too, but we still have to process it so it’ll be a tad delayed. I think we need a slight break from all the constant uploads too, so if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be taking it easy for the next couple of days!

In the meantime, any tips about Indonesia (on here, on Twitter, or on Facebook) are, as always, appreciated…