The City of Culture

Water Castle

Other side of the castle viewed from the tower

Jogjakarta is well known as Indonesia’s cultural city. Indeed, there are many temples, mosques, local music, local art, and food for your enjoyment and consumption. On our first night in our hostel, we met a French couple who had also just arrived in Jogja. They were yet another couple on a long, somewhat endless, South East Asian vacation –but one of the first we were to meet. They had plans for the next day to rent a scooter and drive around the city just seeing what was around, heading in the direction of Prambanan, one of the two major temples of Jogja on every Top 10 list of the area.
We had organised precisely nothing so we decided to tag along.

Jak to Jog (Part three: Cianjur and Bandung)

View from the top of Puncak Pass

Jogjakarta is still some distance away from Bogor, but looking at a map there is a pretty obvious direction to go – east! East of Bogor are mountain ranges with a pass, followed by a few towns and the city Bandung. We were aiming for Bandung, but as we had heard that the pass over the mountains were quite scenic we weren’t too concerned if we didn’t make it all the way.

Jakarta to Jogjakarta (Part two: Mt Salak)

Arriving back at our new hostel after exploring waterfalls around Bogor, we found there were quite a number of local travellers who had checked in, as well as some other foreign tourists. One of the local travelers suggested to us foreign tourists that her friend would take us up to Mt Salak the next day, a nearby volcano, for just the cost of whatever a grab car would be. This sounded pretty good as we knew there was a shady guard post at the top that would charge foreigners whatever they felt like on the day, so local help would go a long way. The person offering this help wouldn’t be coming with us, as she had already booked the train for the next day for her and two other foreigners to another popular local destination. She offered for us to join her many times and kept telling us how surprising it was that she could book these train tickets for tomorrow, a public holiday. We declined however as we already had our minds set on seeing the volcano.

Making our way up the path to the crater

Jakarta to Jogjakarta to buy a fat hogjakarta (Part one)

I wrote this blog covering Jakarta and our trip to Jogjakarta and it was some seven thousand words long, so I broke it down into a few smaller pieces.

Overwhelmed by choice of food in a trendy shipping container street food court

Landing in Jakarta was pretty exciting and felt like a different world to what we had experienced over the last few weeks in the rest of Indonesia. Arriving at the airport we felt we had stepped into the future with modern, clean buildings, drinking fountains, and public transport with well advertised predetermined prices. We stuffed around a little at the airport trying to work out how to get into the city, and found that Jakarta suffers one of the many problems of Sydney – with two or more people, the train to the city is more expensive than a taxi. So we took a taxi to our hotel and checked in for the night.

All the way to LBJ

After arriving at Labuan Bajo late at night, we were glad we had the foresight to look for and book accommodation. As we walked to our hotel, the power on the whole town went out and we found ourselves walking a creepy backstreet in the dark.

The view from our second accomodation

We arrived at the hotel to find noone was around for check in. So we wandered back to the hostel we had seen earlier on the main street. The price we had seen of 70,000 rupiah per bed per night was for beds in a massive dorm room of 20 beds, but the room was relatively empty and we were pretty tired, so we crashed there.