Four hours later, with my new geek crew of three, we track down a 3G wifi modem...

maybe it will work?.

How to "make" a microSIM Indonesia-style

Cash business: the roll needed to buy mobile phone data sim card...

Ocean and pool view Balikpapan-style

It only goes down hill from here... Surrender is gonna do me good and feel awesome in the end... :-)

Whatever that means, I'm in.

It means something like Secure Data, Balikpapan City of Faith, and the smaller print appears to be a fragment of a warning about health issues: '... to cause cancer, heart attacks, impotence ...'.   Hm.. sounds very much like the legal disclaimer for a western television ad for any of several widely used pharmaceuticals.

The city of Balikpapan has been an oil town since 1897 and is known for timber, mining and petroleum exports.  The region's soil composition is alluvial and sandy, making it highly susceptible to erosion.  The climate is tropical rainforest, with temperatures of around 29C, or 85F year round, and monthly average rainfall of about 250 millimeters, or just under 9 inches.

Balikpapan, Indonesian Borneo...

Not exactly tropical paradise. Next, track down a wifi-gprs gadget before I go vegan and meditate in preparation to tune into the Orangs.

Landfall over the Malaysian side of Borneo

Lots of haze in the air the camera can't cut through, and rivers all heavy with silt...

The Economic World is Flat: the numbers get larger for the feeling of "comfort", the closer u get to the edge.

Not in Kansas anymore. Time travel to Hong Kong.

 

Considering the distance in flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong is about 11,121 killometers, or roughly 6,910 miles it's challenging to fathom getting there via built-in human mobility: by walking.

Wikipedia  estimates the average walking speed of an individual human to be a little more than 5 kilometers per hour, or about 3.1 miles per hour. So although it's difficult to imagine walking to Hong Kong from San Francisco, putting all geographical challenges aside, it would take and average person about 225 days to walk there, if that person were to walk 10 hours each day.

The flight time from San Francisco to Hong Kong is about 14 hours. Is is possible we are overlooking the fact that we are already engaging in time travel as a species?

The next destination by air is Balikpapan, a city on the eastern coast of Borneo, Indonesia.