Bring Me Java, Bring Me Joy
Having been to South-East Asia most of the last years, there are thankfully plenty of new places to explore. A day trip from Singapore where we stayed at a resort the whole day in Bintan is my only visit to Indonesia, so even if my passport holds the visa - it barely counts as having visited the country.
Booking "best of Java" with G adventures was about to change that, but with the size of this country, there's still so much diversity to see, so I can easily go back another time and get a new experience.
Meeting up in Jakarta with my friend worked out fine, a long haul over where 4,5 hours was spent in Dubai where I met a young South African farmer who was on his first vacation ever. First time out of the country, first time on a flight etc. And his destination was Taiwan. Really impressed by his guts for really going all-out.
Jakarta Airport was in short a mess, horrible queues without any real system to get through immigration. Took about an hour, and still none of the bags from my flight was ready. Mine was thankfully one of the first when they finally arrived, so I headed for the taxis. There were two exits which meant that I had no idea where my car was waiting, but after messing about for some time I found my name, got my taxi and headed for the traffic jam.
Took me between 3 and 4 hours from landing till I was at my hotel, but there wasn't much planned for that day anyway.
My friend arrived in the middle of the night, I headed over to greet him as I obviously wasn't adapted to the timezone.
On our first day we took a trip to the old town, then what looked like a short walk to the harbour area. As the city is so huge, the short walk was still about 40mins, but there was water to buy enroute, so it works out.
The maritime museum was probably the highlight of the day. Huge museum with plenty of boats and also a rather strange exhibition of how naval warfare has been done throughout the ages - this included both a model of Davy Jones from Pirates of the Carribean, as well as the theme music in the background.
Jakarta has a reputation of just being a huge city, but not the most interesting one. I was however determined to find something, and China town is usually either a hit or (complete) miss. This time it was clearly a hit as we both got to wander the streets for some time before a huge wholesale market opened up infront of us. Roaming through the narrow corridors and also picking up an all too high quanta of random stuff for low, low prices was really great. And then it was of course the long drive home through traffic. There's no subway, skytrain or other functioning public transport in Jakarta, meaning everyone drives either a car, bus or scooter, and that means there will be jams all the time - so if you go, make sure you stay close to where you want to go so you don't spend too much time just waiting in traffic.
On our third day in Jakarta we met up with the group we were to travel through Java with. We found our new hotel, walked down to the antique market which wasn't very interesting. Think they both of us would rather recommend china town to the antique market even if none of the guides I'd read before we came here did so.
We met the group at night and went out for an opening dinner. Next morning was a surprisingly early rise, but we soon figured out that almost all days would be like that. A quick drive through old town were we'd already been, and through the old harbour area in Jakarata before we headed out for our first new city - Bandung.
Bandung kind of felt like just a stopover as we didn't really do much there, but the next morning we again got up early to take the morning train to Yogyakarta. 8 hours ride through nice scenery and we arrived in
Yogyakarta which possibly was the nicest city we stayed in. Partly becuse of the nearby temples, but the city itself was also quite nice and we were able to wander a bit around to get a feeling of the city.
Borobudur was one of the expected highlights, and - yet another early rise - took us there for sunrise. Felt the sun had risen more than I'd like when we came there, but instead of waiting for the group I decided to run up to the temple and get photos while the rest made up the back-troops. After going through the pictures later, I really feel like I made the right choice of getting up there as quick as possible. A very nice and knowledgeable guide with equally crooked teeth showed us around before we got some time to explore for ourselves. The temple was great, and getting there for sunrise both to avoid the worst heat and to get the sunlight was worth it.
After the temple, we were taken on a village-tour with horsecart. Went to see some locals, how they made their coconut-crackers, tried some instruments, before ending up at a very off the normal path place to eat lunch.
This lunch was one of the things that we really couldn't have found our way to ourself, and it was quite tasty. All made in a small kitchen behind a larger patio with room for about 30 people. We were there by ourselves, so there was plenty of room.
This being one of the main days of the trip meant that we also opted to join the bicycle tour just outside of Jogjakarta when we got back.
Nice trip with bad bikes made most of the groups asses feel sore for a few days, and the payment the guide made was rather ridiculous when comparing with the normal income level in Java. Rp150.000 (USD 12) per person gave him an income closer to USD 200 for the trip, and when thinking of our driver in Bali made something like 10-15 for driving us for more hours, it feels a bit weird.
The next day was the only day we were actually able to sleep a bit longer, but routines being what they are, we didnt really fill up the depleted batteries, and thus we took for the streets in search for massage. It however turned out to be to early for massage, and the only we were able to talk to was clearly high on something from last night. I instead opted to go to one of the local markets, and got a hoodie for Rp70.000 which really was needed before going to Mt Bromo some days later.
