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Writing this from the airport lounge in Jakarta.. Quite nice in here, free food, free drinks, free computers, much nicer than sitting with the riff raff outside.

So.. what’s been happening over the last 2 weeks? The most interesting thing I’ve done is visit Mt Bromo, an active Volcano 4 hours drive from Surabaya. The thing to do here is to watch the sunrise over Mt Bromo (at 5am..). So on Saturday night at around midnight, off we went to drive to Bromo. We got 1/2 way up, and then you have to rent a 4×4 and a guy drives you up the rest of the way. It’s very high up, air was thin & hard to breath. We got up to the top in time to see the sunrise over the crator and the view was fantastic. Its a big tourist attraction to watch the sunrise - there were about 200 people gathered around watching it. After the sunrise we braved some breakfast from a street vendor - a bowl of what tasted like chicken soup, with noodles and strange meat.. tasted good, and didn’t make me sick. We then travelled back down the mountian into the crator to walk up the main crator part… if that makes any sense.

I swore I’d never ride another horse again after Chile, but once again I found myself on a horse going up the volcano. The horse won’t take you all the way up though. You have to climb this large 250 stair staircase to get to the very top. Up the top you can bearly breath because of all the sulphur. They say you can sometimes see lava in the volcano, but all we saw was a massive amount of sulpher/steam coming out.

Next it was back into our car and off to do some more brown-water-rafting. It was around 9-10am by this time and everyone was very very tired. We stopped for roadside coconuts and some roasted soybeans, yum. Arrived at the rafting place and got straight into it. This woke us all up.

Last time rafting was good, but this time it was even better. For one thing the water wasn’t brown this time, it was actually white-water-rafting like it should be. This one went for longer too, 2.5-3 hours, and included water, a mid-way coconut and roasted bananas, and dinner afterwards. And best of all we had our own ’safety team’ paddling in another raft near us. I must say i did worry a little when we had to do a prayer just before we hopped into the raft… They had a bridge which you had to jump off into the river too from about 5 meters up - ouch! Dinner was average, but edible. After the rafting we drove home. Didnt’ have any trouble getting to sleep that night.

Been eating at some good, and not-so good places. The other day we ate at a dodgy roadside restaurant (a meal is about 1000 rupiah, or 13 aussie cents) when I asked what kind of fish we were eating. They told me it was the kind of fish that killed Steve Martin.. Puzzled, I said, you mean Steve Erwin? So I was eating stingray. Didn’t even know you could eat that. Another roadside adventure saw us eating duck for about 2000 rupiah (26 cents). The duck was actually damn good. You’d pay big $$$ back home for duck. Had various noodle and rice dishes from many places. Generally you can’t go wrong with Nasi Gerong or Mie Gerong, it always tastes good. Have to watch out for the warm drinks though.. Seriously, who drinks coke warm?

Came back to Jakarta yesterday and went out to a wine bar. Hadn’t seen any wine, spirits or mixed drinks while I was here until yesterday. Muslims arn’t big drinkers, so the only alcoholic drink you usually get at restaurants is beer. Anyway, we hit this wine bar where you could buy your wine from the shop-part, then take it to the restaurant and drink it. The restaurant was all western food - quite a change from what I’d been eating for the last 3 and a half weeks. I had a NZ steak sandwich, and damn it was good. Forgotten how good western food tasted. Tried a nice French red, and some Aussie wine too. I’ve said it already, but i’ll mention it again. The brekkie at the Gran Mahakam hotel in Jakarta is damn good

So, it’s off to Phuket now for a holiday

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under work trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.