Traveling For Work

Thanks to a very fortunate series of events, I have the opportunity to travel for work this summer. I’ve wanted to leave the country and experience another culture for a long time, but things keep happening. Either someone else gets picked to go or something happens to project funding and I’m stuck out here in the good ol’ midwestern US of A like I have been for the past twenty nine years.

Well, somehow I managed to luck out and I’m off to Indonesia for three months this summer. I’ve been there for twelve weeks, but I’ll really only be working for about three. We are opening a new regional office in Bali and I just have to be there to oversee a few things. I basically have to work when no one else is working, which means I work weekends but throughout the week I am completely free.

I plan on using this time to travel to as many different places as I can. Indonesia has hundreds (if not thousands, I’m not really sure) of islands, most of which all have unique things to do such as resorts, nightclubs, restaurants, golf clubs, etc. How can I afford this? Well, my company pays for room & board + food and that works out to around $100 a day. I’ll have to pay for travel expenses but for the most part, everything should be covered.

Speaking of travel expenses, I didn’t realize that the islands are far enough I’ll really need to fly from island to island. I guess the fact that Indonesia stretches across more than 3,000 miles of ocean didn’t really register. I talked to my boss, who was over there for a month while the building was under construction, and he told me about an airline there called Citilink that he used to travel. I checked it out, and it actually looks like a pretty good deal.

Citilink is an airline that operates within Indonesia and specializes in island to island flights. He told me that their planes are pretty nice, and that the prices were very reasonable. I did a little research and it looks like they have terminals at fifteen different airports throughout Indonesia and very soon they’ll actually have three more destinations on their flight paths. They have flights going to most of the major tourist islands in Indonesia, and from what I’ve read and heard from my boss, it will be my best bet for travel in Indonesia.