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

Seminyak attack!

We had a plan: Arrive in Seminyak, find Monica, check into her luxury hotel, find Andreas and go partying! It didn't really happen like that.

After a full 12 hours of traveling (boat, bus, ferry, bus), we arrived in Kuta and checked our email, only to find out that Monica had already left town and would be returning the next day to celebrate Andreas's birthday. Damn. We were a bit deflated to say the least, since we were looking forward to a big reunion and a nice hotel, but resigned ourselves to an evening of looking for somewhere to stay and getting some food. No easy street for us tonight.

Kuta was a big shock! It's busy, and full of tourists, so we took a reliable Bluebird taxi outta there (cost Rp 13,000/ EUR 1, rather than the Rp 150,000/ EUR 11 quoted by the horse and cart guy!) to Seminyak where Andreas is staying and decided to find somewhere cheap to stay then find Andreas in the morning, and meet up with Monica.

We walked, and walked between nasty, cheap hotels, until we were too tired to care, and ended up staying in a horrible little hovel called Purnama Hotel (Rp 75,000/ EUR 5 a night) on Double Six. I was so exhausted, and so disappointed with the whole situation, that I started crying, so we cheered ourselves up with some food and beer in a local warung.

Anyway, things got better the next day. We woke up bright and early (thanks to our noisy neighbours - "Hemingway and Wilde") and ended up checking into the luxurious Green Room (Rp 235,000/ EUR 18 a night!), where we were delighted to discover Andreas was also staying. Talk about serendipity. Monica, who was back in town, hot footed it over for some morning bubbly, and we partied the night away in Seminyak. Love it!

All in all, we were super unimpressed with Kuta/ Seminyak. It has become one of those faceless, commercial beach towns which could be pretty much anywhere in the world. We headed off to Ubud to see a little bit of Balinese culture, glad to be leaving the grim-faced sex tourists behind in their seedy little world...

Debs and Ben

Barbershops of the world, part 13

Number 13... unlucky for some, but auspicious and delicious for me! In a world exclusive, never before in the history of mankind, super exciting one-off event, I met up with my friend Andreas on his birthday and got simultaneous haircuts! OMFGLOLz!

I had saved up a full 3 weeks worth of growth on my face plus 6 weeks of head fuzz. Andreas was rocking a tufty chin that had been left to grow wild since the end of 2007! Truly, a thicket of facial excitement for some lucky, lucky barbers to trim and prune.

Our fortunate cutters were the experienced gentlemen of Potong Rambut, which is in Seminyak, Bali.


I went for my standard number 3 on top, number 1 on the face, while Andreas, rigid with excitement, opted for smooth cheeks to complement a rather rakish goatee. Cut throat razors were expertly wielded, and - new technique! - a piece of sponge was put to good use picking up all the loose bits of hair that fly around your face. Impressive work!


Cost 15000 Rupiah for me, 7000 for Andreas (EUR 1.10 and 0.50 respectively)
Cut quality 9/10
Fear factor 0/10 for us, but I think the barbers were a bit confused by paparazzi Debs and Henrik

Definitely the best price/quality ratio so far. How can I top this one?

Ben

A week in Lombok

"Whatever you do," says the Lonely Planet's South East Asia on a Shoestring, "get the Perama boat to the Gili Islands to avoid running the gauntlet of menacing touts at Bangsal".

Except that this week, for some reason, all of Perama's boats are over on the other side of Lombok - no service running to the Gili Islands, sorry sir. Bugger! So we had to take the bus to Bangsal and face the fearsome mob of merchants... except there was no mob, no hassle - barely anyone there at all. We did have to wait 90 minutes before there were enough other people heading to Gili Air to fill the boat up, but for Rp 7000, (about EUR 50c), who cares? Not us.


The Gili Islands are three cute little blobs off the North West coast of Lombok. Not a lot goes on there, except for swimming, eating, and getting off your face on hallucinogens. We were offered a magic mushroom pizza within an hour of arriving, but politely declined... we're not hippies, thanks very much ;-)

We chose Gili Air cos it sounded like the nicest of the three. Gili Trawangan, the furthest west, is the most developed/touristy, and sounded to us like a sweaty disco nightmare. Gili Meno's in the middle and is full of mosquitoes. Our island was quiet. Almost too quiet, but it is low season here at the moment. This was the perfect place to start our Indonesian experience - totally relaxed, with plenty of time to learn about the food, the money, how much stuff costs and how bizarrely popular the "dark moon" psychedelic rave parties at Legend Bar are.

Favourite bits: Warung Munchies! The tastiest little spot for eating on Gili Air. Super nice food! Also the place where I discovered how much the price of beer has gone up here (from Rp 2500 to Rp 20000 - probably within a couple of years). Here's Debs noshing on the best tofu and vegetable soup ever:


Other good bits: we did a day trip on a little boat, snorkeling around the three islands. We saw turtles, Debs clung onto the outrigger and was sick 4 times, we fed bread to the cute little fish, we watched Dani (our guide) speargun an octopus to death, and we lamented the dreadful state of the coral, which has been dynamited/bleached to within an inch of its life. Shame.

Bad bits: showering in salty/brackish water for a week. Not nice, but it did provoke the best quote of the week from Debs: "I've got fat hair!"

All in all, a very relaxing week. Next stop, Bali!

Ben

Trust me, I'm your friend

We're in Indonesia! We entered the new and mysterious world of Asia at 17.30, with no Rupiah but luckily enough US Dollars to pay for our visas.

Challenge #1: Find an ATM.

This might seem a relatively easy task, in an airport, but we're not in Australia anymore, we're in Lombok. First off we tried to look like we knew what we were doing, traveler style, but it soon became apparent that there was no ATM in the arrivals lounge we were in, and no-where else to go except into the marauding masses of touts and taxi drivers awaiting our flights arrival. OK. Deep breath. This is why we're here, for the challenge. So, we asked the locals where the ATM machine is. Ans: "There isn't one at the airport, you have to go into Mataram by taxi" OK, this isn't really what we had in mind. Let's get a second opinion and ask the money changer (yep, pretty dumb, I know now). Ans: "No ATM here. You want to change money?" Mmh. OK, third option, go back into the airport and ask someone there. Bingo, there's an ATM about 100 yards away, in the other part of the airport.

Challenge #2: Get a taxi to Senggigi. Easy, non?

We wanted to be in Senggigi nice and early so we could get the ferry out to Gili Air first thing in the morning, where the ferry for the Gili islands leaves from (or so we thought). First off, the taxi driver tried to charge us 50,000 Rp then very generously offered to let us have it for 40,000 Rp after showing us printed 'proof' that the official cost, as dictated by the government should be 50,000 Rp. Luckily, I'm too tight to pay over the odds, which I knew was 30,000 Rp, thanks to some internet research, and Ben saw through the printed document ruse, after reading a book on how to negotiate at Deb's and Stu's house. We went into the street and got it for almost exactly 30,000 Rp on the meter. Bingo.

Lessons learned: Always come armed with as much info as possible, and get multiple opinions and try to extract the truth from a combination of answers. Lots of people here lie. Never trust something just because it's printed.

After a long day of traveling, we slept like logs, and were woken up at 5am by the magical sounds of the call to prayer from the local mosque. Here we go!

Debs