Tour d'Borneo 11: Goint to Last Resorts

G'bye Singkawang. I enjoyed my stay.

So the journey around West Borneo continues. I was entering the home stretch of the holiday, vaguely regretful that this might be the last journey like this for me for some time.

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, the one thing that's been the best thing about my job here in Myanmar has been the time off. I've taught for 8 weeks, then I got a week off. Taught 8 more weeks, then got TWO weeks off. Another 8 weeks, then another week off. And so on.

Could the Samudera Indah Beach compare
to Pasar Pnajang? The video shows.

Talk about an ideal schedule to do what I love: travel around the most exotic region of the planet, southeast Asia.

Unfortunately, this schedule has proven to be not economically viable for my employer, and so it's been scrapped.

Just before the April break, we were told that the schedule was changing dramatically. All contracts that were going to be renewed would have our time off reduced from 10 weeks per year to 6 weeks. Gone were the weeks off between terms. Our business was going from being closed about 20% of the year to less than 10%. We won't be closed again until NEXT April.

Mind you, I have a contract under which I still am owed 6 weeks of vacation through next March. They have to honor that. What's going to happen is that I get to schedule my own time off  for 4 weeks (I'm thinking the entire month of December), and the other two weeks are going to just be paid out to me in cash.

Literally, at the end of the road.

Ultimately, the best part of my job has been eliminated.

It's kind of like what happened to me at Lowe's just before I decided to leave the country.

After some employee feedback (I think it was my argument that made the real impact on our CEO), new contracts are now going to include 8 weeks of annual leave, not 6. That's not as good as 10, but it's going to mean 3 weeks for the April Buddhist New Year, one week at Christmas, and 4 weeks flexible, to be scheduled by the teacher and the Director of Studies.

Oh, the horror. Only 8 weeks of paid leave. Americans usually get two weeks.

On to the video. This is the second-to-last installment in this series. I wander slowly down the coast of Western Borneo, checking out every so-called beach resort along the way.