The land of volcanoes... Indonesia

Our trip onto South East Asia didn’t get off to a great start when our flight from Melbourne was cancelled, though thankfully AirAsia did manage to get us on another flight and we touched down in Bali in the early afternoon of the 12th January. There are over 17,000 islands that make up the archipelago and if we managed to make 4 or 5 in the 3 weeks we had here, we would be doing well. Indonesia is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet - many o fthe islands practising very different religions, & also has one of the richest natural biodiversities anywhere in the world.

We had a couple of nights already pre-booked in a hostel/hotel in Kuta… that was the worst mistake we have made of entire the trip. Kuta is a truly awful place to go and one we will never repeat. Bali conjures up idyllic images of a truly tropical island with all the trimmings you could want for a relaxing beach holiday…. Well not quite. The beach was dirty and there is an American burger/coffee/ice cream chain on every corner. The Balinese themselves are lovely people however, they hold true to their beliefs and religion with daily offerings outside every shop & restaurant. They just about manage to separate what they believe in and what your average tourist wants. The locals tend to disassociate Kuta with the rest of Bali and take every opportunity to encourage you to travel elsewhere around the island and see the ‘real Bali’… so we did.

Before we could do this however we had to go to the British Embassy to get new passports (we had run out of pages in ours and each country seems hell bent on either stamping a new clean page or issuing a full page visa). As it turned out they were remarkably well organised and helpful and the process was completely pain free. Our new passports would be ready in 3 weeks time, and in the meantime we could travel through Indonesia freely, and pick them up on Jakarta on our way back. Our taxi driver to the Embassy also turned out to be a tour guide in his spare time (seems everyone is here!) and offered to take us around the island the following day for the relatively small cost of £30.

Up and out early, we toured the island, driving past huge expanses of rice paddies with locals out working the fields with their water buffalo, we stopped at a couple of craft making workshops, silver and gold jewellery, wood carvings and batik paintings, before having lunch in the north of the Island in a place called Kintamani, overlooking the Gunung Bator area. A fairly touristy day out but enough to give you a snippet of what the beautiful island has to offer outside the horrors of Kuta.

Deciding to get out of Kuta as soon as possible we arrange a shuttle bus and boat across to the largely Muslim island of Lombok. Each of the many islands that make up Indonesia not only have their own language but belief system & religion. They are linked in that they all also speak 'Bahasa Indonesian' so each island can understand one another, although in terms of appearance each island has a very different look about them - which becomes more and more evident the further east along the Nusa Tenggara Islands we travelled.

Once we arrive at the port of Padang Bai, it becomes apparent that we would not be going to Lombok that day as planned, and are told all ferries and boats were cancelled due to bad weather. We hang around this small quaint port town for a day of so before being told the 9am ferry the following morning ‘should’ be running. It is and after 5 long hours aboard, we arrive in Lombok.

We spend a few days in Senggigi, a coastal resort on the west coast before taking a boat up to the Gili Islands. There are 3 small islands on the North West tip of Lombok called the Gili’s and each one is very different depending on what you are looking for. We opt for Gili Air, the closest to the mainland and the most populous with locals. We have idyllic days wandering around the island, sitting by the pool and drinking beer, oh how stressful this travelling malarkey can be!

The plan at this stage was to take a boat from Lombok all the way along to the Island of Flores in the East of Nusa Tenggara for 4 days however, again due to bad weather and high waves, all boats were suspended. The second option was to take the bus overland across Sumbawa and take the ferry across to Flores… but the ferry from Sumbawa to Flores wasn’t running either and so the last option available was to fly but you can’t take a direct flight from Lombok, only Bali and so back to Bali we went, this time we opt to stay in a place called Ubud, the cultural centre of Bali.

Although awash with restaurants and guesthouses, Ubud was a lovely more relaxed side to Bali and the guesthouse we had was set out of the town in the middle of a rice paddy and run by a lovely man and his 3 daughters. We meander around the town taking in the many Hindu Temples and the Monkey Sanctuary where hundreds of long tailed Balinese Macaques keep the tourists entertained.

We fly to Maumere on the eastern side of Flores Island and take a ‘travel car’ (gone are the days of shoddy old American buses and in with new people carriers referred to as ‘travel cars’, to ferry people around the island) to the small village of Moni. Moni is a tiny village but made famous by the 3 multi coloured lakes known as Kelimutu. The people here are very different from the Islands of Bali and Lombok and have a very African look coupled with a very different range of beliefs and religion where here they are predominantly catholic.

Out of season the only way up to the lakes is by ‘ojek’, or motorbike and so after the handful or so other tourists had got up at dawn and were just arriving back, we embark on the back of 2 motorbikes up to the top of the mountain. You can drive all the way up aside from a short 20 minute walk at the top to a lookout point. The 3 lakes are usually 3 different colours however although one always remains a turquoise colour, the other 2 usually vary between red and black. Whilst we were there, 2 were turquoise and one was black. The colour changes with the chemical elements within the lake which vary depending on season and rainfall and these lakes are sacred to the villagers in the area. They believe that the souls of the dead go to each lake, the young to the turquoise lake, the old to the red lake and the wicked to the black lake.

We opt to walk the 13km back to Moni from the crater top with a shortcut through some local villages where we observe families drying macadamia nuts for sale at the market, working the fields by hand and older women chewing the nut of choice. Areca nut is wrapped in betel leaf with lime and chewed to release a mild stimulant not dissimilar to tobacco or caffeine but it leaves a disgusting blood red dye on the chewers teeth. This is considered ‘attractive’ in women by the men of these communities however there didn’t seem to be anything attractive about the red spit they keep lobbing out of car windows and at the floor as they pass by you chewing!

We spend the day in Moni, relaxing at a small guesthouse and get chatting to some of the locals who before you know it are having a party and people from all over the village start dropping in, including the local police who have flown in from Western Timor to assess the situation over a group of Iranians that have decided to make Moni their base for a week. They seemed perfectly nice people but spending a week in a village with no real facilities and nothing except Kelimutu to visit seemed suspicious. Whatever their reason for being there, if they thought they were there for a quiet discrete holiday, they didn’t realise they were being tracked and watched by the local police.

We get a lift in a travel car to a town called Bajawa and hook up with a local guy called Arnold that the owner of the hostel in Moni had recommended to us. We plan a day travelling around the local communities but when we try to get to an ATM to book it up and pay for the grotty hotel we had just spent the night in, we find out that there are only 3 ATM’s in the town… 1 is MasterCard only and does not accept 4 digit pin numbers, 1 is a local bank and does not accept foreign cards and the 3rd ATM is … out of order… oh and not one business in town has card facilities and to top it off, the bank does not have the ability to give cash out if we go into it with our passports and cards. In the proverbial ‘shit’ our only option it seems is to get a bus 5 hours to the next town, come back again and pay the hotel then head back again to that town the following day….. thankfully, Arnold came to the rescue and trusting us, took us to meet his family. His sister in law was the cashier for a business that loans money to farmers. She offers to loan us some of the farmers money if we get to the next town, take it out and put the cash back in her account before anything is noticed! She entrusts us what they consider to be a large sum of money …. £30 and off we go to try and get some cash out in the next town, abandoning the trip around the local traditional villages.

We take a travel car to Ruteng but are barely 10 minutes into it when it becomes apparent that the family in the seats in front of us are not used to travelling by car and one by one they all start to get travel sick…. Mother, father and 2 kids, all being sick in plastic bags and lobbing them out of the window when full… with the grandmother intermittently spitting red betel nut spit out of the window…. Nice. The final straw is the little boy missing the bag and throwing up all over the car whilst the grandmother spits, misses Paul by an inch and then laughs finding our look of complete distain amusing!

We get out of the car and refuse to go any further.

We flag down a bus a little later and get to Ruteng, eventually. Looking for somewhere to stay, our guidebook recommends a place and we end up wandering into a convent….and there we stay with the holy order of the sisters of sorrow. This was by far the best, cleanest and cheapest place we have stayed, albeit a little strange to be waking up saying hi to a group of nuns. We take the money out of the bank and bank it into Arnolds account the following day with a little extra for all his trouble and kindness and attempt to take in a small indigenous community 3 km’s out of Ruteng…. Not to be, no one even knew of the village or our pronunciation was too bad to understand and with that we opt to get a bus to the last place on our trip across Flores, Labuan Bajo on the coast.

One point to note is although only a small island, the whole of Flores island is one long length of twists and turns, up and down mountains and we emerged from the last 5 hours stint in a travel car, aching all over and somewhat bedraggled, hot and bothered so we opt for a spot of luxury and find an air conditioned room with sweeping views out over the port and across to the many islands that make up the Nusa Tenggara… at £20 a night this was a luxury but worth every penny as the temperatures during the day hit 35+ (its tough travelling... honest!).

Labuan Bajo is a beautiful port on the western tip of Flores and the starting point for any trip to the Islands of Komodo or Rinca to see the Komodo Dragons in their natural habitat so we get up early and head down the port to see if we can arrange a trip to the nearest island, Rinca, with a local captain. We find a boat with 2 others (an Austrian called Miriam and a Portugese guy called Jose) looking to do the same. We take a leisurely boat trip for 2 hours to the Island of Rinca and head off on land to find some of the dragons. We don’t have to look very far when we spot 5 or 6 of them relaxing under the kitchen hut of the park rangers, apparently not waiting for the food that the rangers don’t feed them….. not sure why else they would be hanging around there but anyway, we get to see some of these huge beasts, capable of killing you with one bite. These are the worlds largest lizards and can reach sizes of up to 3m in length and 100kg in weight. They kill their prey slowly by biting them and the poisons or bacteria in their saliva eventually paralyse and kill their prey.The boat trip includes a great lunch of fresh fish and some snorkelling off some of the smaller islands on the way back to the harbour.

We fly back to Bali for a night and catch an early morning flight to Yogykarta in Java the following day. We arrive early morning to an impressive site…. a long line of volcanoes stretching as far into the distance as you can see, all perfect cones and all seemingly floating on the early morning mist. We are not here to visit volcanoes this time having seeing and climbed a number of them in South America, but instead to visit the Buddhist and Islamic archeological sites of Borobudur and Prambanan respectively.

Both Borobudur and Prambanan were devastated by volcanic ash when Merapi errupted hundreds of years ago, both were re-discovered during the 1800’s, both were badly effected by the 2006 earthquake that devastated central Java and Borobudur has also managed to emerge relatively unscathed from a terrorist attack in the late 1980’s.

Borobudur was built in around 800ad and is one of the largest buddhist sites in the world. It was abandoned in the 14th century, covered in volcanic ash when Mount Merapi erupted and it lay undiscovered until the early 1800's. Borobudur is still used as a pilgrimage site once a year and as with all Buddhist temples, it must be climbed in a clockwise direction and those on pilgramage should read all the inscriptions around the stupa as they ascend the levels. The inscriptions are based on the Buddhist beliefs on how to reach nirvana which is found at the top of the structure.

Prambanan is the largest Hindu temple of ancient Java and one of the largest in the world. It was built around 850ad and was also abandoned and covered in ash when Merapi errupted and was not rediscovered until the early 1800's. Unlike Borobudur, it is not one large stupa but a series of over 224 temples all arranged in a symetrical design

The remaining couple of days in Yogyakarta were spent mirandering the many markets and batik stalls that line the road to the 'Kraton', the Sultans Palace where we also watched some traditional Javanese dancing. From here we take a train to Jakarta to pick up the passports, which despite reservations that they would be ready, they were and we flew directly to Kuala Lumpur that same day.