So, in a matter of hours, we're leaving Singapore for an extended weekend in Cambodia. Munir is sick, so he's staying home, and we're just trying to change the booking so that Thorsten can come along.
The plan is to fly to Phnom Penh, spend a day or so there, then go to Siem Reap, the city near Angkor (maybe by boat?), and fly back from there early next week.
Also, I got new lenses for my glasses yesterday, so now I can finally see clearly again! Yay! I look forward to endless nights of stargazing.
So long!
PS: Hope you like the new header of this blog. Yeah, I was bored.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Indonesia trip, part two
Now that I'm back in Singapore, I can finally upload all my photos - and videos! Yes, you heard correctly.
We did go to Borobudur that next day, and we saw the sunset. I put all my Borobudur photos in a seperate gallery on Flickr, accessible behind this link.
Anyways, on to the story.
We hired a horse carriage in Yogya to get us to the bus terminal, and it was kind of funny to go by horse on Indonesia's busy streets. Turned out the bus terminal wasn't the bus terminal - as usual, Indonesians like giving each other good business, like a few days before on our way from Pangandaran to the train station, when the bus dropped us off not at the train station, but 2km from it, in front of a couple of Becak-drivers. Yay, thank you very much, Mr tourist exploiter!
Anyways. We started negotiating with the driver (and seemingly, 5 of his friends) for a good price from Yogya to the temple, and suddenly all of the other passengers who had been waiting in the bus left/were told to leave - apparently we had just hired that bus for ourselves. Oops! Oh well :)
Borobudur is a big buddhist temple that is said to have been built in the 8th century. It consists of 10 levels, each representing a level of existance, and decorated with fitting reliefs. They are grouped in sets of three, with the levels 7-9 representing "heaven", and level 10 the nirvana. Of course, the 10th level is completely unaccessible to anyone, because all it is is an empty room without doors or windows or any means of access in the big stupa on top of the temple, go figure.
We had a very nice guide who explained all that and told us lots of funny stories about the relief pictures... most of them depicting various reincarnations of Buddha, before his final one as Siddharta.
Like the one story where he was born as a very naive Buffalo (I think), who was friends with a very clever and cunning monkey. They stumbled across a man in the forest who was very hungry, and decided to eat the monkey. But the monkey said "No sir, please don't! Eat the buffalo instead, he will certainly satisfy your hunger much better!". The man contemplated and agreed, and the buddha-buffalo also didn't mind. He said to the monkey "I'm sorry for everything that I may have done wrong" or something like that, and the hungry man overheard their conversation... it struck his heart, and he decided to become a vegetarian instead!
Or the one where he was born as a goat with 8 legs, 4 on top and 4 below.
Anyways, here's what the view from the top of the temple looked like:
We stayed until sunset, only to realize that the last bus home had already left... So we had to hire a local driver, who of course knew that the last bus had already left, and thus charged us twice what we had paid to get there in the first place...
When we got back, we had dinner in a very artsy restaurant called "Bedhot Resto". Many of the others even got a t-shirt there! But the food wasn't that hot, to be honest... I tried their pizza, and it tasted pretty dull. Well, maybe I should have tried their Indonesian stuff, I know...
Katja left for Singapore that evening because she had to meet someone or other, so for the rest of the trip, it was down to the six of us. I stayed up until about 5am and chatted with two germans who were also staying at our hostel about all kinds of political stuff, was pretty nice. I think I also finished the book "Dschungelkind" in about one day while we were staying there.
The next day, we all went and had a massage, which as bloody neccessary - the hostel only had really crappy foam mattresses... We took the public bus to the bus terminal, and had people with a guitar enter twice, I think, play a song and ask for donations - funny stuff. Then we took the bus to Surabaya, where we had our most intensive fight with two taxi drivers who demanded a crapload of money for their services. They didn't get it. We just stayed until early that morning (in a hostel where Munir's and my room had neither working light nor water) to take the first bus to the Mt. Bromo area. Again, the bus didn't drop us off at the terminal, but at a travel agency. Well, handy for us, they really could help us with our trip to the crater, and to Bali the next day. We chartered a Minibus to a village on the edge of the crater called Cemoro Lawang. It was a pretty impressive scenery, and here's a little video from the place where we had dinner that day:
And later, when the sun went down:
The tour we had booked was to start at 3:30am, so we kinda hit the sack early on. Our driver showed up in a jeep on time, and we headed off. First down into the crater (the big one, not the small active one), and then up again onto one of the mountains on the crater rim. There, we were joined by a bunch of other tourists, about 50, from all over the place, to watch the sunset... they even had a tribune there. Which Youssef dropped his camera from - thankfully it sustained no damage.
Ah well.. it was still kind of nice, and I took another bunch of nice photos, until my battery almost died. Intelligently, I left my charger at home, thinking it would last... well, it would have, had I not taken about 500 photos yet.
The last one taken down in the crater plateau. Afterwards, we went to climb the actual crater of Mt. Bromo, the active volcano you can see spewing fumes in the video above. People were trying to rent us horses, but we insisted on walking. Walking is healthy! And with this kind of short distance height increase, very tiring, too. At last, we got to the set of stairs that would take us the last meters up to the rim of the crater. About halfway through, it started smelling really bad - sulphur. Like rotten eggs! The sight was impressive though, even though the bad smell was pretty irritating.
(ninja style!)
After this, we went straight back to our hostel, aptly named "Café Lava", to have a shower and breakfast. Took the bus down to Probolinggo again and waited for the travel bus to take us to Bali.
(More photos from Bromo can be seen in another seperate Flickr gallery here.)
The bus ride was supposed to take 7 hours, and 12 hours later we actually arrived in Denpasar, Bali. Too bad that wasn't our final destination! We had decided to go to Seminyak, a "village" (more like a part of a larger urban area) north of Kuta, Bali's Ballermann. Yeah, you've got to know, Bali is to Australians what Mallorca is to Germans, and Kuta equals Ballermann. No kidding. So we tried to avoid it a little bit... we just wanted a hostel to check out where to go the next day, since by the time we arrived it was already close to 2 am.
Of course, the hostel we had picked was full already, and our poor drivers had to take us to Kuta, where we reluctantly stayed in a very competetively priced hostel. 120,000 rupia per night for a double room with shower/toilet, including breakfast - that's about 10€. And the rooms were alright actually.
Youssef, Jannika and me decided we weren't tired enough yet and tried to find some place in town to go have a drink or something, but most of it was just horrible pop disco junk... though we stumbled across a very funny reggae bar that looked just like you would imagine someone with hardly any clue to decorate a room they are supposed to turn into a reggae bar: colorful Ikea chairs, hundreds of Bob Marley photos on all walls, and horrible pop techno music playing (wtf?). Thankfully they closed just as we arrived, so we went to a 24h sports bistro instead, watched some Wrestling (lol) and Rugby, had a bite and a drink.
The next day, we hired another driver (sigh) to the south of Bukit Peninsula, the little dongle dingling from Bali's south end. It wasn't far, and we actually found a nice, quiet hostel place just at Bali's premier surf spot, Uluwatu beach! The village of Uluwatu is located on top of a cliff, the beach is basically in a grotto that gets flooded at high tide, and the waves are up to 8m high. Yeah well, I didn't surf anyway - gotta learn to walk before you run, right? But the view was damn nice. Unfortunately my battery crapped out and I forgot the charger, *cough* so I only have a handful of photos from Bali. Here's some of our place:
Our rooms from the outside, and...
...from the inside.
So the last days of our trip were spent on various beaches, just relaxing and enjoying the good food :-) Yes, we had dinner at the same restaurant every evening. It was a family-run gig, and the cook was a really nice guy and he made awesome food :)
On Monday, we went to Dreamland beach, and I hit my head on the beach floor, twice, while trying to bodyboard. My neck still hurts... The waves there were pretty damn strong! Here's me, right after the injury:
But Dreamland beach wasn't so dreamy after all... the place where we had lunch served watermelon juice with dirt in it, and when asked to make us new ones without, served us the same drinks with more water in it. When we complained, they took them away again, and one of the waiters put three bottles of water on our table, with the words "Here, easy, clean." How very friendly! ;-) Well, the best part was that they wanted us to pay for 2 watermelon juice each, instead of just one water. They almost beat up Youssef because of it... one guy already had a chair raised above his head, the other two had bottles... yeah, what a lovely place.
Tuesday morning had me and Carla visiting the Uluwatu temple, and I've never seen so many monkeys in one place. They told us to be careful with our glasses and hats and whatnot, and of course, right at the entrance, one of them stole Carla's hat *snickers* The temple is built on top of a cliff, and the view was really damn nice!
Later that day, we went to the airport and flew home. "Welcome to Singapore International Airport. The temperature is 28°C." - at 1 am in the night. Yay how I missed it! (Not.)
So now I'm back. And that's that! Hope you liked the report and photos! Till next time!
We did go to Borobudur that next day, and we saw the sunset. I put all my Borobudur photos in a seperate gallery on Flickr, accessible behind this link.
Anyways, on to the story.
We hired a horse carriage in Yogya to get us to the bus terminal, and it was kind of funny to go by horse on Indonesia's busy streets. Turned out the bus terminal wasn't the bus terminal - as usual, Indonesians like giving each other good business, like a few days before on our way from Pangandaran to the train station, when the bus dropped us off not at the train station, but 2km from it, in front of a couple of Becak-drivers. Yay, thank you very much, Mr tourist exploiter!
Anyways. We started negotiating with the driver (and seemingly, 5 of his friends) for a good price from Yogya to the temple, and suddenly all of the other passengers who had been waiting in the bus left/were told to leave - apparently we had just hired that bus for ourselves. Oops! Oh well :)
Borobudur is a big buddhist temple that is said to have been built in the 8th century. It consists of 10 levels, each representing a level of existance, and decorated with fitting reliefs. They are grouped in sets of three, with the levels 7-9 representing "heaven", and level 10 the nirvana. Of course, the 10th level is completely unaccessible to anyone, because all it is is an empty room without doors or windows or any means of access in the big stupa on top of the temple, go figure.
We had a very nice guide who explained all that and told us lots of funny stories about the relief pictures... most of them depicting various reincarnations of Buddha, before his final one as Siddharta.
Like the one story where he was born as a very naive Buffalo (I think), who was friends with a very clever and cunning monkey. They stumbled across a man in the forest who was very hungry, and decided to eat the monkey. But the monkey said "No sir, please don't! Eat the buffalo instead, he will certainly satisfy your hunger much better!". The man contemplated and agreed, and the buddha-buffalo also didn't mind. He said to the monkey "I'm sorry for everything that I may have done wrong" or something like that, and the hungry man overheard their conversation... it struck his heart, and he decided to become a vegetarian instead!
Or the one where he was born as a goat with 8 legs, 4 on top and 4 below.
Anyways, here's what the view from the top of the temple looked like:
We stayed until sunset, only to realize that the last bus home had already left... So we had to hire a local driver, who of course knew that the last bus had already left, and thus charged us twice what we had paid to get there in the first place...
When we got back, we had dinner in a very artsy restaurant called "Bedhot Resto". Many of the others even got a t-shirt there! But the food wasn't that hot, to be honest... I tried their pizza, and it tasted pretty dull. Well, maybe I should have tried their Indonesian stuff, I know...
Katja left for Singapore that evening because she had to meet someone or other, so for the rest of the trip, it was down to the six of us. I stayed up until about 5am and chatted with two germans who were also staying at our hostel about all kinds of political stuff, was pretty nice. I think I also finished the book "Dschungelkind" in about one day while we were staying there.
The next day, we all went and had a massage, which as bloody neccessary - the hostel only had really crappy foam mattresses... We took the public bus to the bus terminal, and had people with a guitar enter twice, I think, play a song and ask for donations - funny stuff. Then we took the bus to Surabaya, where we had our most intensive fight with two taxi drivers who demanded a crapload of money for their services. They didn't get it. We just stayed until early that morning (in a hostel where Munir's and my room had neither working light nor water) to take the first bus to the Mt. Bromo area. Again, the bus didn't drop us off at the terminal, but at a travel agency. Well, handy for us, they really could help us with our trip to the crater, and to Bali the next day. We chartered a Minibus to a village on the edge of the crater called Cemoro Lawang. It was a pretty impressive scenery, and here's a little video from the place where we had dinner that day:
And later, when the sun went down:
The tour we had booked was to start at 3:30am, so we kinda hit the sack early on. Our driver showed up in a jeep on time, and we headed off. First down into the crater (the big one, not the small active one), and then up again onto one of the mountains on the crater rim. There, we were joined by a bunch of other tourists, about 50, from all over the place, to watch the sunset... they even had a tribune there. Which Youssef dropped his camera from - thankfully it sustained no damage.
Ah well.. it was still kind of nice, and I took another bunch of nice photos, until my battery almost died. Intelligently, I left my charger at home, thinking it would last... well, it would have, had I not taken about 500 photos yet.
The last one taken down in the crater plateau. Afterwards, we went to climb the actual crater of Mt. Bromo, the active volcano you can see spewing fumes in the video above. People were trying to rent us horses, but we insisted on walking. Walking is healthy! And with this kind of short distance height increase, very tiring, too. At last, we got to the set of stairs that would take us the last meters up to the rim of the crater. About halfway through, it started smelling really bad - sulphur. Like rotten eggs! The sight was impressive though, even though the bad smell was pretty irritating.
(ninja style!)
After this, we went straight back to our hostel, aptly named "Café Lava", to have a shower and breakfast. Took the bus down to Probolinggo again and waited for the travel bus to take us to Bali.
(More photos from Bromo can be seen in another seperate Flickr gallery here.)
The bus ride was supposed to take 7 hours, and 12 hours later we actually arrived in Denpasar, Bali. Too bad that wasn't our final destination! We had decided to go to Seminyak, a "village" (more like a part of a larger urban area) north of Kuta, Bali's Ballermann. Yeah, you've got to know, Bali is to Australians what Mallorca is to Germans, and Kuta equals Ballermann. No kidding. So we tried to avoid it a little bit... we just wanted a hostel to check out where to go the next day, since by the time we arrived it was already close to 2 am.
Of course, the hostel we had picked was full already, and our poor drivers had to take us to Kuta, where we reluctantly stayed in a very competetively priced hostel. 120,000 rupia per night for a double room with shower/toilet, including breakfast - that's about 10€. And the rooms were alright actually.
Youssef, Jannika and me decided we weren't tired enough yet and tried to find some place in town to go have a drink or something, but most of it was just horrible pop disco junk... though we stumbled across a very funny reggae bar that looked just like you would imagine someone with hardly any clue to decorate a room they are supposed to turn into a reggae bar: colorful Ikea chairs, hundreds of Bob Marley photos on all walls, and horrible pop techno music playing (wtf?). Thankfully they closed just as we arrived, so we went to a 24h sports bistro instead, watched some Wrestling (lol) and Rugby, had a bite and a drink.
The next day, we hired another driver (sigh) to the south of Bukit Peninsula, the little dongle dingling from Bali's south end. It wasn't far, and we actually found a nice, quiet hostel place just at Bali's premier surf spot, Uluwatu beach! The village of Uluwatu is located on top of a cliff, the beach is basically in a grotto that gets flooded at high tide, and the waves are up to 8m high. Yeah well, I didn't surf anyway - gotta learn to walk before you run, right? But the view was damn nice. Unfortunately my battery crapped out and I forgot the charger, *cough* so I only have a handful of photos from Bali. Here's some of our place:
Our rooms from the outside, and...
...from the inside.
So the last days of our trip were spent on various beaches, just relaxing and enjoying the good food :-) Yes, we had dinner at the same restaurant every evening. It was a family-run gig, and the cook was a really nice guy and he made awesome food :)
On Monday, we went to Dreamland beach, and I hit my head on the beach floor, twice, while trying to bodyboard. My neck still hurts... The waves there were pretty damn strong! Here's me, right after the injury:
But Dreamland beach wasn't so dreamy after all... the place where we had lunch served watermelon juice with dirt in it, and when asked to make us new ones without, served us the same drinks with more water in it. When we complained, they took them away again, and one of the waiters put three bottles of water on our table, with the words "Here, easy, clean." How very friendly! ;-) Well, the best part was that they wanted us to pay for 2 watermelon juice each, instead of just one water. They almost beat up Youssef because of it... one guy already had a chair raised above his head, the other two had bottles... yeah, what a lovely place.
Tuesday morning had me and Carla visiting the Uluwatu temple, and I've never seen so many monkeys in one place. They told us to be careful with our glasses and hats and whatnot, and of course, right at the entrance, one of them stole Carla's hat *snickers* The temple is built on top of a cliff, and the view was really damn nice!
Later that day, we went to the airport and flew home. "Welcome to Singapore International Airport. The temperature is 28°C." - at 1 am in the night. Yay how I missed it! (Not.)
So now I'm back. And that's that! Hope you liked the report and photos! Till next time!
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