Monday 18 February 2008

My wife's gone on holiday...

- Jakarta?
- No, she went by plane!

SuperLOLz! But seriously folks, Jakarta's no joke. My God, what a hellhole! Thankfully we only stayed for one night, which was 1 night more than originally intended, but we had a 4 hour flight delay to contend with. Air Asia - the only airline which flies between Bali and Jakarta with an impeccable safety record; bit shit at timekeeping.

Having narrowly avoided being knifed/molested by some heavy looking "ladies" and pimps in Memories bar on Jalan Jaksa, we high tailed it to Gambir station and hopped on an eksekutif train to Yogyakarta, 7 hours to the East. Air conditioning! TV! Hot food! Sweet tea! All very nice, and a vista of mile after mile of rice fields, valleys and mountains to soothe our sore eyes.

Thankfully, Yogyakarta is much nicer than the big J. Despite saying goodbye to Monica in Bali, we've bumped into her and Ricky about 4 times in the past week, and made friends again after last week's weirdness. We bonded while shooting the rapids on the Elo river yesterday morning.

Other Yogya highlights have been the excellent ViaVia cafe, who organised the aforementioned rafting and a Saturday morning bike tour round a local village - they got rice! - Milas vegetarian/organic place, visiting the Sultan's palace and water palace, and this morning's dawn visit to Borobudur, a 9th century Buddhist temple about an hour out of town.

Borobudur is home to hundreds of sitting buddhas, thousands of relief sculptures, and dozens of students from East Java who had driven through the night to meet foreigners and practice their english. We got there at 6 in the morning, and they were already there! We felt like celebrities as we were accosted every few steps by another little detachment, waving cameras in our face and asking us about Harry Potter. Eventually we gave them the slip, but we spotted one poor lone traveller being trailed by half a dozen of them all over the temple. Ho!


Tomorrow we're back to Jakarta for another quick stopover then leaving straight away for the gogo bars and teak houses of Bangkok.

Ben

2 comments:

Bali Hotel said...
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Ben and Debs said...

Hey "Bali Hotel" people. Stop leaving thinly veiled adverts as comments on our blog - it's rude.

If you want to advertise on our site, contact us!

Else: stop.

Cheers,

Ben