A warm welcome to Java

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After a marathon 24 hours train journey to Guangzhou and a very luxurious bus to the Macau-China border (3 hours) we arrived at what must be the strangest border crossing we have ever went through. It was basically a large shopping centre and when we asked which way to Macau the Information lady replied '3rd floor'...we thought it was a mistake on her part, how could Macau possibly be located on the 3rd floor of this massive shopping complex? After going up two sets of escaltors, it seemed that Macau was indeed on the 3rd floor and after a long drawn out 2 hours (!) going through Immigration we got to the airport for our flight to Jakarta. Just a quick note here that Macau airport is shit...only high end shops, expensive internet and super rude security staff. However our very reasonably priced $150 for two flight to Jakarta on a slightly ageing 737 got us to Indonesia safe and sound.

Arriving at midnight we decided that we would hang around the airport until 6am when the cheap buses (Damri) to Jakarta downtown started running as we weren't going to pay the £6 taxi fare and a full night's rate accommodation for half a night' use! So we slept on a hard wooden bench with the occasional cockroach crawling over our faces during our restless sleep. The Damri bus dropped us off near a backpacker haunt of Jakarta called Jalan Jaksa. With the help of some very friendly locals we soon found the area (as we had long since thrown out our Lonely Planet - along with the maps - in disgust because of it's inaccuracies). The hotels in Jakarta are not great value but for 160,000 rupiah (£6) we got an 'ok' room with air con, hot-ish water and cable tv.

We had read many bad things about Jakarta - about it's ugliness and other travellers saying it is the worst city in SE Asia, but actually we didn't think it was too bad at all. Maybe this was because we tend to have more affection for cities which are a little rough around the edges compared to squeaky clean cities.

At first we thought Jakarta was hard to get around because it doesn't have a metro system or light railway but they have a great system called the Trans Jakarta bus which is a network of stops that slices right through Jakarta's main highlights and as the buses have their own lanes it skips all the horrendous traffic whilst you travel in air con comfort. But we only found this out after walking for 3 hours trying to find a big shopping centre. Note to everyone visitin Jakarta...take the bus!

We certainly noticed a huge divide between the wealthy and the poor but despite this everyone seems to get on with each other well and people were particularly friendly and helpful with us, often stopping us to chat about where we were from and what we were doing in Indonesia. We were particularly surpised at this friendliness but maybe it was the fact that we had just come from China where people didn't often take an interest in foreigners. The street vendors in Jakarta are great with fresh fruit juices and food to buy cheaply and although there is not many tourist sites per se to visit it is still an interesting city if you like to observe street life in an untouristy way.

Sorry there aren't any pictures but we only spent two days here and we were a bit absent minded with the camera! We hope to do much better in our next destination of Yogyakarta...but first we had to get there by an 8 hours train journey.

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