The captain from the KL 809 cockpit in Kuala Lumpur: “There is an earth quake in Jakarta now. We don’t know yet if we can depart from KL.” Ten minutes later he said that the Jakarta’s airport was open, so we took off. Twenty minutes later the captain came back: the quake was 180 kilometres south of Jakarta, force 7.1 on Richter’s scale. We did not notice anything after landing. Traffic jams into town as always.

Later in the Manhattan hotel we had dinner with some of Monica’s relatives. Her nephew said that the quake in Jakarta lasted 10 minutes and was pretty scary. He was at a ninth floor which was swaying heavily. Elevators stopped and people had to run down using emergency stairs, women fainted. Only just now I have access to internet in the hotel and I see that the quake was in the Java sea, at a depth of 30 kilometres beneath the sea level, killing 35 people, see Alertnet.