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Tom:
Greetings from Java! We arrived on the principal island/state of Indonesia yesterday (at 3am) during our most epic journey yet. It was a 26.5 hour belter starting on Saturday morning from Gili Meno at 8am, and arriving in Surabaya at 10:30 the following morning, taking 3 boats and 3 busses in the process. We were contemplating continuing the journey onward towards Yogyakarta (which would've taken 9 more hours), but there were no busses available so we settled in Surabaya for the night, taking in an interesting Arabic market and some good grub too. Surabaya is odd, extremely odd in fact, because walking down one street, you might feel it's an eerie ghost-town with the potential for being mugged, then you'll turn a corner and be pushing your way through crowds of people - some of whom thought that shouting "lover-lover man" at me would be a good idea (for reasons totally beyond my powers of comprehension). Anyway, this morning we found a bus to Yogyakarta and arrived at 6pm this evening.Over to Nil....
Nil:
That was a particularly gruelling journey, and by bottom is so sore from all those hours of sitting, but it was worth it as we managed to save ourselves a lot of money, and stopped off at the weird city of Surabaya, which we hadn't planned on doing. I digress, I wanted to begin filling you in on our last day on Gili Meno. Perhaps you remember reading from our last blog entry that we were planning to go snorkling, and I can pretty much guess that the entire Yardley family were thinking, Nil you're crazy to take Tom on a small boat to face the ocean as he'll be ridiculously seasick, and......they'd be right! Tom was horrendously seasick, all within 30mins, after which I decided to take lover-lover man back to dry land! It might sound like a complete disaster, but we did manage to see three turtles, just hanging out on the sea floor, looking up at us as if to say, "what're you freaks doing on my turf!?" before nose diving into the deep blue expanse of ocean with a trail of brightly yellow- and blue- coloured fish following their lead. We also saw bright-blue coral and christmas tree coral, which were amazing sights. After the snorkling fiasco and after desperatly craving some fresh water to wash in we decided to get off that beautiful island and head to the mainland. We got to Surabaya, and just as Tom puts it, that place is weird, but not as weird as our hotel! It wasn't weird as in a scary, dangerous kind of way, but it looked like an ex-hospital or mental ward (we couldn't tell which, the stains on the walls were indiscriminate)! We managed to check out the cool Arab quater and market, which greatly resembled the Egyptian Bazzar in Istanbul, although in this place no one is hassling you to buy things in all the different languages under the sun. In fact in this place we were the tourist attraction! It's a rewarding feeling to have left the well trodden and beaten tourist trail and be adventuring into the unknown with only the guide book's meagre amount of phrases in Bahasa and universal hand signs to get us through! We feel we have mastered the art of gesticulation by this point!
Anyway, just want to say that I'm missing everyone at home, lots of love to everyone, and thank you all for messaging us, we greatly enjoy receiving bits of news from you!
xxxxxxxxxxxx
P.S. On Gili Meno, the locals took to greeting Tom with a perculiar expression which we now quite like, "long hair, long life"! I thought you might like that back home.
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