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After a great month in Australia it was time to get back on the road. We started our Indonesian adventure with a week in Java, with our first stop in Jakarta. Jakarta has a bit of a bad reputation, which on initial impressions seemed a little unfair. On the first day we just wandered around the area of our hotel, which seemed pretty nice, and had a couple of tasty and super-cheap meals (although probably not a very good place to eat if you're veggie - Tania ordered tofu and found a chicken bone in it...). By the end of the day, we thought Jakarta seemed like a city we were probably going to like. Sadly that was the high point of Jakarta, and it all went a bit downhill from there. We went into the city to do the touristy bits the next day, and found that Jakarta is both entirely bereft of interesting things to see and a complete cesspool. The main canal in the city centre was just raw sewage slowly seeping out to sea, there was filth throughout the streets, and huge piles of burning rubbish everywhere. We could manage all that and still love a place
- we loved everywhere in India, and Mumbai was probably even dirtier - but while the Indian cities are filthy, they are all also incredibly vibrant and charming. Jakarta has the filth but none of the charm. By the time we'd found that we'd also already hit the high point of the food, and nothing much different or tastier was on the horizon, we started to come round to the conclusion that Jakarta isn't that great a place...
Time to move on. We went to the train station to buy tickets to Yogyakarta, and had our first of many run-ins with our unfortunate Javanese timing, arriving there just before a national holiday four day weekend. All the trains to everywhere on the island were almost entirely booked up - we were lucky to manage to get two of the last seats on a train leaving that night and arriving at stupid o' clock the next morning. We had higher hopes for Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Java and home to Borobudur, one of the most famous temple sites in SE Asia, and supposedly a rival to Angkor Wat and Bagan. And it was pretty nice - a huge ancient
monument covered in intricate carvings dominating a hill, surrounded by lush jungle. But - and maybe we're just out-templed - it was definitely no rival to Angkor Wat or Bagan; really, it only equaled Angkor Wat in the extortionate entry fee. We were also hit by the holiday again - huge numbers of people climbing all over the monument, and a horrendous three hour journey back through the traffic, crammed like sardines into an oven masquerading as a bus.
Yogyakarta in general was much nicer than Jakarta was though - still busy and dirty, but with some charm to it, and better food. Our hotel was run by a lovely bloke from Borneo - really friendly, he gave us loads of useful information and talked away to us whenever we were sat outside, topping it off when he walked us all the way to the train station when we left at 1 am and then wouldn't even accept a tip. A less enjoyable episode in our hotel was our first experience with a whip scorpion. If you've never seen a whip scorpion before, they look like the unholy offspring you'd get if you bred a big tarantula with a
venomous scorpion - eight big, hairy, scuttling legs with pincers on the front and a stinger on the back. We had a look online and saw whip scorpions in two articles - one titled 'The Scariest Looking Things That Won't Hurt You In Indonesia' and one titled 'The 10 Most Dangerous Creatures In Indonesia'. Unsure which to believe, we stuck a bucket over it and left it there for the duration of our stay, just in case...
Hit once again by the holiday rush, we scraped the last seats on the train and took more journeys at horrible times of day and night to get to our next stop, Banyuwangi (en route while in Surabaya we discovered that it's not possible to sleep in the early morning in Indonesian train stations, because at 6:15 am a live rock band will start playing a gig inside the station...). We were in Banyuwangi for one reason - to climb the Ijen volcano. We arrived at our hotel about 4 pm and went straight to bed, ready to start our climb at midnight.
Ijen is a pretty unusual place - open vents in the crater constantly emit sulphur gas, which ignites
on contact with the air and burns with an eerie blue flame, while the bright turquoise lake within the crater at times of high volcanic activity can get down to a pH of 0.5 (that's quite a lot more acidic than the kind of sulphuric acid you'd have used in Chemistry classes). It was a pretty amazing experience, climbing the volcano in the dark then clambering down into the crater to watch the ethereal blue flames burning in the vents, and also to watch the sulphur miners, who climb right into the active areas to chop off lumps of sulphur, before carrying 20-30 kg of the stuff over the shoulders down the precipitous paths back to the valley floor. The only thing that spoiled it - yep, you guessed it - was the holiday crowds. Instead of sharing the volcano with the couple of hundred people you might have on a normal night, we were climbing it with quite literally thousands of other people, making for very slow and dangerous clambering on the steep paths. After seeing the vents burning, we tried to escape the crowds a bit by climbing higher, right up to the highest point of the crater.
That turned out to be a great decision - there were barely any other people around, and we had a perfect half hour or so as we sat and watched the sunrise over the sulphur lake below. Not an experience you have every day!
It was nice to end Java on a high note like that, because the rest of it was pretty disappointing - partially spoilt by the bad timing, and partially just not that wonderful a place. Not somewhere we'd go back to, anyway. But it's all getting better from here on in; next to Bali, The Gilis, Lombok and Komodo to start exploring Indonesia where it's at its best - under the waves.
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