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Bali
Our five-day stay in Ubud saw us in one of Bali's tourist meccas. Almost every ten paces there was someone trying to offer us transport services, Balinese massage or inviting us to look at their handicrafts. In between cooling down in our guest house swimming pool, we visited temples, palaces, walked through paddy fields, marvelled at the 100+ monkeys around the Monkey Forest Temple and saw some great Balinese dancing.
Andy also managed to scout out some TV premiership football and Fran finally found a bookshop with second hand English books (as opposed to Dutch, German and Swedish). We also hired a scooter for one day from a shopkeeper near our hotel for the equivalent of $3 (can't find the pound symbol!) and visited the NE of the island. But we had to be back by 6pm as that was when he closed his shop and needed to get home.
We left Bali in the heat, dust and exhaust of an ancient bus for a seven hour journey, including a ferry, to SE Java.
East Java
We were expecting to have time to see some of Sumatra, but Java is a really big island when you're trying to travel overland! So we've decided to fly out of Yogyakarta in central Java to Jakarta and spend two days in Bogor, famed for its botanical gardens apparently, before flying out to Borneo via Singapore.
So far in Java we've spent time in the coffee plantation area around Kalibaru. We stayed in an old Dutch colonial place and had an intriguing tour of the spices growing around the plantation. From here it was a 6-hour journey by train and minibus to Cemoro Lawang. This was a village perched high on the lip of the huge volcanic Tengger crater. It was great to sleep with blankets on the bed, even if Andy did come away with an armful of bedbug bites. The sunrise views of the area were spectacular even with a 3.30am wake-up call.
From here together with a Dutch family and a British couple we hired a minibus which brought us a further 9 hours to Solo. Both here and at Yogyakarta (1 hour further south) there are some historically significant 'kraton' (palaces) to see and yet more temples to visit. So we'll spend the next week touring around these using a mix of bicycle, bus, feet, and possibly by hiring a car for a day or two. As we write this, it is bucketing down with rain (including quite a few drips on our bed) following a morning of hot sun and there are flash floods all over the place.
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