First Post in nearly 2 months.

My Recent Adventures

My first few months in Indonesia was filled with relatively little traveling. I left Surabaya all of one time from my arrival in late September until Christmas break. however, since Christmas I have really started to scratch the itch from the travel bug. Over Christmas I spent a week in Bali and since then have seen Probolinggo, Bromo, and Tretes. Most recently I traveled to Tretes for a weekend with two friends, Zac and Allan. Tretes is a beautiful mountain town about 2.5 hours from Surabaya. We decided to take our motorbikes up there for a weekend, leaving late Friday night and coming home Sunday mid afternoon. Tretes was absolutely beautiful. It was a bit cooler and the scenery was amazing. We couldn’t see much on the drive up as it was already dark, but regardless the drive up there was amazing. There is a sense of freedom that one feels while driving a bike “cross-country” that you miss while driving a car. Once up there we stopped into a hostel called Villa Putih that was very nice and costs the equivalent of $3.00 a night. During our days we wandered around the town and down some hiking trails that led to beautiful waterfalls. We stood at the top of the waterfall looking down into an amazing valley below us. During the nights we met a few local guys who took us out for a drink. It was a nice chance to practice and learn a bit more Javanese as they spoke no English. The drive back may have been my favorite part though. Since we left while the sun was still up we got to see the awe inspiring scenery as we drove down the mountain. Absolutely breath taking mountain-side terraced rice paddies with streams running through the middle. Tiny towns filled with nothing but rice farmers and colorful houses. It was one of my favorite experiences so far.

A few days before Tretes we took advantage of having a Thursday off for Chinese New Year and about 10 of us hired a car and driver to take us to Probolinggo and Bromo. In Probolinggo we hired a little john boat to take us out to sea where we chased after Whale Sharks in an effort to be able to swim with them. This tiny boat with no life-jackets and enough floatation rings for about 3 of us puttered along at the pace of a snail way out to sea. We saw beautiful, colorful fishing boats from Madura; one of which pointed us towards where they had seen some Whale Sharks. As we were chugging along towards the supposed Whale Shark spotting the boat needed more gasoline and a man poured more in while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. (if you haven’t figured it out by now, safety concerns are not of the upmost importance here). Once we saw the whale sharks everyone stripped down to their swimsuits and dove in after them. They are huge, amazing animals. Blue and what and grey and covered in spots as if wearing polka-dots. The mouth is shaped like the head of a vacuum cleaner and I believe it works in the fashion as the vacuum, sucking up plankton as if it were dust bunnies hiding under the couch. We swam right up next to them and they would slip underwater and pop back up 15 feet away. Some were more curious and swam directly towards us getting with arms reach. We noted how strange it is that we were swimming AFTER sharks and not the other way around. After splashing around for awhile, we all hopped back into the boat and began the slow chug back towards land. During this return trip one of the sharks actually ran head first into the boat, killing the motor temporarily.

After arriving back on shore, we loaded back into the rental cars and headed towards Mt. Bromo on our way home. Bromo is an active volcano that is currently erupting. Its eruptions are very rare, allowing people to live and farm on the mountain. It is a very popular tourist destination because of its amazing beauty. Bromo is one of the few places, outside of Bali, that has a majority Hindu population. There were beautiful statues of the Hindu deities dotting the road and villages as we made our way up the lush, green base of the mountain. As we made out way up, we noticed some majestic terraced rice paddies. Bromo’s volcanic soil causes it to be a great farming area. However, as we slowly ascended the winding roads the scene began to become more bleak. We began to notice ash on the side of the road piled up like gray snow on the side of the ride after the plows come down the streets. Also the fog covering the top of the mountain began to dissipate giving us a view of the massive black cloud spewing from the top of Bromo. When we reached as high up as were safely allowed to visit the scene became post-apocalyptic. Trees and plants were dead, covered in ash. Houses and whole neighborhoods were deserted and blanketed in ash. It looked like Mordor from Lord of the Rings. After seeing a place entirely devoid of life, we decided to go back down the mountain and return home. However, night fell as we were driving down and it began to rain ash. The windshield became impossible to see out of and the curves of the roads that hugged massive dropoffs down the side of cliffs became nearly impossible to navigate. We were stopping, getting out, and using our water bottles to clean the windshields in order to make it far enough until visibility was gone again, only to start the process over. Finally we made it past the range of ash-rain and all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Before these two brief trips however, I took my first extended vacation over Christmas break to Bali with my roommate Paul and our friend Allan. I was a bit nervous about the trip as they are both a little more wild than I am (or at least more wild than I am trying to be). Also, Paul is in his early 50s. I have never travelled with someone my parents’ age unless it was, of course, my parents. Paul also is a unique character. He looks well over his age because of his previous rock-star lifestyle and lack of about half of his teeth. He recently travelled to Thailand and while there had fake teeth made and fitted, but refuses to wear them because they feel funny now that he is used to having no teeth. Someone asked him about if he were excited to be able to eat an apple again with this fake teeth and he responded “I haven’t eaten an apple in 30 years, why the hell would I start now.”

We decided to take the train to Bali; it was about a 10 hour train ride. We departed around 10pm on a Friday night and a few hours into the ride decided to head to the food car to buy some beers. Unfortunately the people there looked at us as if we were crazy and offered some noodles or fried rice. Totally defeated and sober, we headed back to our seats to try and get some sleep. We were in “business class” which is actually bucket seats with no A/C and some interesting smells. Executive class is nice on Indonesian trains, but business class was just a slight upgrade over the train scene in Slumdog Millionaire. While my two travel companions laid out newspaper on the dirt covered metal floors and began to sleep the sleep that only prescription pain killers can induce, I was left to try and sleep without the aid of pills. Needless to say, I slept a total of maybe 45 minutes over the 10 hour trip. So after sleeping for 10-15 minutes at a time throughout the first few hours of the train, I decided to head to the space between cars. As I was walking towards the area between cars, I passed Paul sleeping on the floor and realized he was covered in ash. We had driven past Bromo as it was erupting and the cars had filled with ash (I soon realized that was why I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face about an hour earlier and explained the sulfur smell...I had assumed something caught fire and that caused the smoke, again safety not a big issue here). I was amused at how much he looked like a relic from Vesuvius, covered in ash, sleeping peacefully on his Christmas themed pillow. As I said before, safety is not the biggest concern here, so I joined a fellow sleepless traveler in opening one of the doors to the outside, catching some fresh air and watching the sun come up over the beautiful scenery.

After arriving at the end of Java, we unloaded the train and piled onto a bus that drove directly onto a ferry. We floated across the Bali Strait onto Bali island where the bus pulled out of the ferry and began a windy 3 or 4 hour trip to Kuta. Upon arrival to Kuta around 1pm we decided to first and foremost grab a beer and then find a hostel. After one beer turned into 3, we finally made our way to a little alley that Paul had stayed on before. We found a little hostel with yellow foam constituting a bed and an outdoor bathroom with no hot water. However, for $3.00 a night when the next cheapest thing in Bali costs $15.00 it seemed like a great find. It actually was a nice hostel and the staff was very nice. The biggest downside was the lady-boys who circled the area constantly trying to pick up us nice looking white boys. I believe my favorite part of the trip was one of them cornering Allan and grabbing his ass as she/he gave him a big ole kiss right on the kisser. I have never seen a look of fear like I saw at that moment. I nearly wet myself I was laughing so hard as we sprinted the last few meters back to the hostel. The next night Paul, our elderly companion, was stopped by the same lady-boy and he took off in a dead sprint (for about 5 meters, which he is convinced is the first time he has run in decades). The weather in Bali wasn’t great so we spent more time bar hopping than surfing or laying out, but it was still a great trip. Paul was a champ on this trip, by about day 4 he was still going out harder than any of us and smoking about 4 packs of cigarettes a day. His stomach started to get to him, so instead of taking it easy he just would sip from a Pepto bottle between beers and cigarettes.

While I really enjoyed the trip, Kuta beach was full of Aussies. Aussies are the Jersey Shore cast of the rest of the world. They apparently have a huge aversion to shirts that have sleeves on them. I have never seen so many sleeveless shirts. We stayed out of any and all night clubs because they steroid ridden monsters just wanted to drink and fight anything that moved (I think that included women as well). I honestly don’t know how American’s got the “ugly American” stereotype when compared to these guys (well actually I do, but if you put an American and an Aussie together on travels and didn’t tell people who was who, I think most people would pick the Aussie to be the “ugly American”). Kuta was very touristy though. It was what I imagine Cancun to be. Next time I go to Bali I think I will just rent a motorbike and see the rest of the island, some of the other beaches, Ubud, and some of the mountains and temples.

Anyway, that is all for my travels so far. Hopefully I will have more to write about soon as I have a trip to Jakarta planned in March and a week in India in April.