INDONESIA (Java)

DAY 1

After a good 20 hours of travel, we arrived in Jakarta (Java). The unbearably hot, humid weather was there to greet us. After escaping all the mobbing taxi drivers (which would turn out to be a recurring theme), we got to a local bus... which promptly broke down about 10 minutes out. After a half hour of tinkering under the hood, with all of us waiting all sticky and sweaty, we finally got going again. At the train station we squished into a tuk-tuk (a very small enclosed three-wheeled motorized bike). The guy drove like a bat out of hell, not to mention the left drive traffic made it even more confusing. There were rarely any traffic signals and everyone just fought their way through.

The hotel was another adventure. The cubicle of a room contained only two beds with no sheets, a table with a fan, and about 100 mosquitoes. The bathroom down the hall was a big departure from what we had been brought up with. In most cases, it was just a pit toilet. There was never any toilet paper and soap was unheard of (this is not just at the hotels, but also how the people lived). The shower was actually just a showerhead on the wall... nothing more. This, of course, tended to flood everywhere and everything... including the pit toilet.

The local food was great, however. Out on the street there were always several guys pushing little covered carts offering a variety of stuff (if you speak Indonesian that is. We got plenty of stuff we didn’t really ask for). They prepare it right there in front of you, a big wok heated by some propane flame. Everything is drowned in oil, but was quite good anyway... and very cheap.

DAY 2

We were told the train ride to Bandung was one of the most beautiful in the world. Of course they didn’t tell us that there were two different train routes. Naturally we got the one through the city slums instead of through palm forest covered volcanoes. Fortunately there were patches of rice fields to break up the monotony of the trash.

Upon arrival at the train station, we were once again mobbed by people asking if we needed a place to stay. We randomly chose one and he led us to a much cleaner place than the night before, with breakfast and tea included. We then headed out to see the sights, but after a couple hours of not being able to find a single thing on the map, we gave up. We went to the night market to drown our sorrows in exotic fruit (such as mangos and salak or snake fruit). The constant price haggling tends to be a bit much at times.

DAY 3

The train ride to Yogykarta was fortunately much prettier. After checking into a hotel, we were led by one of the hotel employees to a batik 'gallery' (really just a fancy name for 'store'). Afterwards we went to see a dance which was an excerpt from the Ramayana, the longest poem ever written.

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