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Wow, first musings in a while...
Arrived in Jakarta yesterday after 24 hours of airports and planes from Manchester to Dubai and then onwards to the capital of Indonesia. The most notable aspects were probably the excellent choice of Oriental Vegetarian plane meal and the queue of white-robed men waiting for a flight to Kabul who found Mullins and me completely fascinating. Think eyes popping out of heads and you'd have it about right. I blame Mullins' leggings.
On arrival in Jakarta we were accosted by the usual throng of taxi drivers wanting our attention, and somehow ended up in the taxi of a man called Richard, who told us that "if you can drive in Jakarta, you can drive anywhere in the world". This is most definitely true! After an hour of ridiculous weaving in and out of traffic, and some very near misses with motorbikes, we got to the station in one piece.
A friendly lady security guard helped us buy train tickets, and then we had our first taste of Indonesian food - fast food from restaurant at the station. I tried and failed to explain that I didn't want any meat, so ended up pushing the dried out pieces of battered fried chicken to the side of my plate, and concentrating on the rest of the food which was good, if a tad on the cold side.
The 3 of us (me, Mullins, Will) had no great expectations of the train, so were pleasantly surprised to say the least when the seats turned out to be recliners, with loads of legroom and blankets and pillows provided. After the initial excitement we all tried to doze off, and I was just about falling asleep when a plate was shoved into my face. Not really knowing what was going on, I took it and had a look at what was on it: a well-flattened steak, 3 chips, 3 carrots batons, 3 green beans, a slice of tomato and cucumber, and a fried egg. I looked around at the others and they looked as confused as I did, however we all tucked in as our stomachs had been rumbling for a while. Again, it was quite tasty, but lukewarm. We speculated that we had maybe bought the most expensive tickets, as other people didn't seem to be eating, but later on discovered that we had been billed for it, much to our dismay. 10 hours in a recliner seat is not the most comfortable way of travelling, but after the Indian Pacific experience in Australia it was definitely doable.
We arrived at Surabaya's (the capital of East Java - one of Java's 3 provinces) main railway station just after 0800 and were met by a guy from Kaliandra called Sis, who accompanied us back to Kaliandra - about 2 hours away from Surabaya, with stops to buy SIM cards and printing paper for my 150 questionnaires that I am yet to design...
We were all pretty dozy when we arrived at Kaliandra, which is situated halfway up a dormant volcano, so the 10 minute trek with our heavy backpacks (Will ended up carrying his 2 and one of Mullins') up to the accommodation wasn't the nicest welcome, but as soon as we saw our 'bungalow' we were speechless! I'll try and get some photos up somewhere, but in brief it is a two-storey wooden building with 3 beds downstairs, 2 upstairs, an enormous bathroom with shower, mandi, outside freestanding bathtub, flushing toilet, sink etc. (hot water, obviously), shutters that open out onto well-manicured gardens, water fountains and Buddha figurines...
We had showers and naps and then headed down for lunch, which was a buffet and... warm-ish. We met a few of the staff at lunch, including Rubby who we had had communicated with via email. Rubby, we learnt, is pronounced 'Ruby', and she is a he!
After lunch Sugi (one of the eco-tourism team members at Kaliandra) showed us around the organic demonstation gardens that they have here, and we even saw the rabbits that produce fertiliser and the cows whose 'produce' powers the gas cookers.
Dinner was just the 3 of us, in the company of a tailless cat who very much enjoyed a few of my incredibly potent small fried fish (I don't dislike many foods, but this is something I will be trying to avoid in future!).
End of day 1.
- comments
Omar I used your code (oAuth through lindekin) and i am getting an error when i am trying to redirect your code to localhost. The code works fine in case it is redirected to some other external website.I am getting an error while i am trying to redirect it to localhost.The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.webRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream().Close();Can you please help me to get out of this problem ???