Indonesia : Hindus, Muslims, surfers and everything in between

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Hi people,
I am already back since quiet a while,
but I never really finished my blog. I hoped to do it faster, but it didn't work out all that well.
Anyway here is the first part (of two) about Indonesia. I don't think anybody is still reading this,
but maybe for myself it's psychologically ending my travels..

31 july-20 august

part one:

This would be the last part of my trip...I was glad and sad at the same time. I had enough of sun lotion, mosquito-repellent, heat, being the center of attention, inspecting the food before eating it, guessing who to trust and who not to trust,... but I knew I would miss the feeling of freedom when getting up in the morning, not knowing where you will be the next day, meeting new people and discovering strange things everyday, the beautiful nature and views, ...
So, from Saigon (Vietnam) I took my flight to Jakarta (Indonesia). A place that me and Bieke had chosen randomly, somewhere last year, not knowing where I would be in august the next year!
And after all, it turned out to be a good chose. Well Jakarta itself, wasn’t all that fun. As randomly we had chosen the place to meet, as bad we had planned how to find each other exactly. As I expected, when I arrived in the terminal, I couldn’t find Bieke. My phone didn’t want to cooperate. I stayed calm, and knew she would be somewhere. I remembered she flew with Lufthansa, and I informed about more terminals. And yes, at the other terminal I saw a bunch of blond wavy curls. There she was! Completely at ease and not worried about anything.
We had so many things to tell each other, while taking bus and taxi, that we didn’t realize how bad the taxi driver tried to rip us of. He asked us, 200 000 rupiah, we paid him 50 000 (as his meter was telling us). The next days, we realized that he had picked us up just around the corner of the hotel... And still we believed him when he said: “trust me, I am a good man” ...tssss.... you laugh, you learn.
The hotel I booked on the internet wasn’t super, but the man who ran it, was like a grandpa to us. He drove us by car to the center and explained us, how and where to get, the best way. That night we went to bed early, and I felt relaxed and safe, knowing that my roommate -for the first time- was someone I knew longer than a few weeks.
The next day, we visited Jakarta City. We tried to see everything through pink glasses and to focus on the beautiful things. But even then, Jakarta is just NOT nice. We visited old Batavia and the Harbour, and in the evening finding a restaurant wasn’t all that simple. Especially because I had some stomach problems, and my body refused almost everything.
The following day, we would take the bus to a ‘delightful place’ , Cipanas. But first we wanted to have breakfast, and went to Carrefour! I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen a ‘normal’ supermarket since Australia, and I was blown away. They sold everything you can imagine. To Bieke, I just seemed like a would-be-world-traveller who was acting hysterical. In Cambodja, Laos and Vietnam I only found little supermarkets where they sold shampoo in little bags, toothpaste if you were lucky, tobacco, candies and cookies, ... We found the right bus, and off we went (with me drooling above the bag with yoghurt and bread!! BREAD!!).
Cipanas was nothing like we expected. It was dirty, old, and nothing to see. This time our guide was the ‘Rough Guide’ instead of ‘Lonely Planet’ (which I didn’t find wonderful either) from the year 2003. We couldn’t find anybody in the whole of Cipanas who spoke English, so we just started wandering around in the rice paddies, instead of doing ‘tourist-activities’. Our little walk in the fields was beautiful and scattered with boys flying their kites. I felt a minute like being in the book from Kaled Housseini. We stayed in the rice paddies until sunset. The only nice thing about Cipanas was the hot water springs. In all the hotels there were swimming pools and bath tubs with hot water. So after dinner we put on our Bikinis and took a stinky bath in our personal hotpool. It wasn’t very delightful, but it was hot.
Because of all the delightfulness of Cipanas, we decided the next day to leave for Pangadaran. A little city near the beach, with surf opportunities and a National Park. Sounds perfect! After taking several buses with open doors, picking up people every 5 meters and spitting them out later, seeing 50 guitar players with awful songs and good songs, negotiating bus prices with bus drivers we arrived in the paradise called ‘Pangadaran’. Two cyclo’s were waiting for us when we arrived at the bus stop. They took us to 4 different hotels, before we decided which room we would take. We found a room really close to the sea and went immediately searching for fresh fish. After a while we found a strange German man, who would grill delicious fish for us. It was fabulous. The rest of the day we used for discovering the place. At night we ended up in a nice bar, and made some Indonesian ‘friends’.
The following day, we were ready for a jungle-tour with a guide in the National Park. There was another tour, but we opted for the more adventurous one...luckily. Our guide Iwan, showed us some bunkers (‘do you have bunkers in your country?’...), but they didn’t impress us very much. But then we entered more into the real nature and Iwan could show us some nice birds, animals and cliffs near to the sea. He told us how the cliffs saved his life, when a tsunami hit Pangadaran in 2006 (not The tsunami in 2004, but another one). After the tour, we went snorkelling on the beach, and met Tofu (yes, and he wasn’t the only one, with a strange name). He lost both of his parents in the Tsunami. More and more, we realised what an impact nature has on the lives in Indonesia. Later that day we went back to the ‘steakhouse’ where we had met Yoga and Fullmoon the day before (ow yes, the names!). We ate a banana pancake and had fun. In the end, we promised them to come back the next day, to surf with them and they promised us, to take us to the green canyon (another piece of beautiful nature).
In the evening we met the nicest guy of Java: ‘Tono’! He was a 40-year-old-looking Indo-Chinese guy, full of tattoos and a ring in his nose. Our mothers, would slightly have dis-encouraged us, to get to know him. But the mothers weren’t there. He was superfunny and made us laugh old night long. He knew one hundred riddles about pigs and crazy little games. When we left, we didn’t really know what to think about it all, but one thing was for sure: we had fun. As girls travelling in Asia, it’s sometimes hard to know, who is interested in what. Most locals (guys), are just interested in your money, or your legs... but with Tono our instinct told us, it would be different...
As we agreed, the next day, we went to the steakhouse and went surfing with Yoga and Fullmoon. It was nice, I hadn’t had a surfboard under my feet since New Zealand (about 5 months ago), and still I could enjoy it (with a little help from my friends). After the surf session, we were completely exhausted and were resting on the beach. Slowly we understood that this time ‘legs’ would be the target of the guys. We ignored their goal, and went with them to the green valley, by motorbike. Blue waters, green plants, caves, waterfalls,... beautiful. After that we had dinner, with fresh fish..hmmm. We made vague plans with them to go on a 4-day trip by motorbike to Yogjakarta. In the evening they dropped us off at our hotel. And suddenly, we had to pay the surf, the motorbike ride, the ‘guiding’, ....and well-behaved as we are, we paid. It wasn’t only legs, but also money....Slowly the plan of the motorbike-trip began to fade in our minds.
In the morning we checked out at the hotel and wanted to leave for the ‘Dieng Plateau’ in the middle of Java. We said goodbye to ‘the guys’, and when we were on the way, we crossed ‘Tono’! He helped us to get as fast as possible out of Pangadaran, out of the hands of Yoga and Fullmoon, he brought me to the post office with his 40-year-old Vespa, he ordered burgers while we were checking out in the hotel, he brought us one by one to the busstation and negotiated with the bus driver, so that he would take us exactly were we had to be and guide us on the point were we had to change buses! He was like a father to us, he was great!
And with pain in our hearts, and his address in our notebook, we said goodbye.
Again we encountered all the same concepts on the road, but in different appearances: the seducing guitar player, the angry salesman, the friendly bus driver, ... And then we arrived in Wonosobo. We tried to catch the latest bus into the ‘mountains’, but like usual, everybody we asked, sent us somewhere else, so in the end, we missed the bus and had to stay in Wonosobo. The next day we got up at six in the morning to catch the first bus. When we arrived on the Dieng plateau, we were dropped in front of a guesthouse. So we had a look inside: the rooms were very small and ancient, but we took a room anyway, because the man who showed us around seemed so nice! And the people who stayed there told us, that you could eat the best banana pancakes here. On the spot, we ordered two of them: mmm we didn’t know that one pancake was equal to one ‘quatre-quarts’-cake in Belgium. Anyway we tried our best, and finished one. The other one, we saved for later. After that, we were ready to explore some of the beautiful landscape that was surrounding us. We asked if we could hire a motorbike. We ended up touring around on one motorbike, followed by a ‘safeguard’, because the owner was afraid that it might have been stolen while we would visit a volcano crater... It was still cheaper and felt more free than renting two motorbikes and two guides, but it felt strange anyway. We saw a lot of volcano craters, muslims praying next to craters, beautiful terraced landscapes, a deserted mushroom plantation, women working on the field (laughing at us, because we were peeing in the field), a group of men wanting to be on the picture with white movie-star bieke, ... At night, we went to bed early because the next day, we would go for the sunrise trip with ‘Jimmy’ (the man from the hotel).
At 4 a.m. we woke up. We had a little breakfast and stepped each on a motorbike behind the back of a driver. We put on almost all the clothes we had, because it was freezing cold outside! We drove at least for 20 minutes. At the end - somewhere in the middle of nowhere- we stepped of the motorbike and started climbing a hill. It was quiet hard, so early in the morning, with so little breakfast and so low temperatures, ... But it was worth the effort. The view was amazing. We had a view on three peaks of volcanoes, and behind the sun was slowly rising. This is what you imagine when you think of Java, when sitting back in your sofa in cold Belgium, and then suddenly, it’s there, in front of yours eyes! Beautiful.
When we had enough of breathtaking views and pictures of our own taking by the guide, we were off for some more nature discoveries. We stop by a the colour lake (extremely blue lake due to sulphur in the lake), boiling craters, temples, ....After this, we were exhausted and went to bed for an afternoon nap. An hour or two later, Jimmy woke us up, and told that he found a little bus for us that could take us to Yogjakarta and on the way they would also take us to Borobudur (very famous Unesco-listed temple). He told us that we shouln’t talk about the price to the other passengers (a german couple), because they paid a lot more. When we came out of the house, we saw that a big jeep-like car with blinded windows and leather seats was waiting for us. We entered and couldn’t stop smiling and wondering how people could ever travel like this through Java! They didn’t feel half of the life that was happening on the streets. Until then, we always took local buses, that stopped everywhere on the bumpy roads, were cramped with people and passed different smells in every street, ... THIS was a big contrast, but for once quiet, fast and nice...
We visited Borobudur at sunset, which was very nice! Again a lot Indonesian families who wanted to have pictures of these very white girls, but still bearable...
After that our fancy car took us to the nice city of Yogjakarta!

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