Hello everyone,
I don't know if anyone remembers my postings from early this year and before. My name is Camille and I am 22, from Guernsey in the Channel Islands in the UK.
I have just returned from a five month long backpacking trip around South East Asia. The last three months of my trip were spent in Indonesia, and I have to say that it was my favourite place of all. It is a spectacular country. I really had the time of my life there.
My trip was too long to write a detailed report. Still, here are a some highlights:
Bali:
I spent the majority of my three months here, inbetween trips to other parts of Indonesia. I had been to Bali several times before, and still love it. It is a beautiful island.
I travelled with various friends during my time away, and when we were in Kuta we always stayed at La Walon Bungalows on Poppies 1. I can definitely recommend this hotel as one of the best in the area in terms of facilities and value for money. It was more expensive than our usual choice of backpackers accommodation (we paid 130,000 a night for a fan room including breakfast) but it was a real treat to have a pool, and a lovely spacious room that was cleaned every day. There are a range of people staying here from all over the world, from young travellers and surfers to older people and families with children. My dad came out to Bali to see me in August and stayed here for the first time too. He also really liked the hotel.
For the first time on this trip I visited Lovina. I had heard mixed reports about the area but enjoyed it here a lot. There are lots of nice restaurants and cafes here and it is a nice quieter change from Kuta. We stayed at the Puri Bali Hotel, which is set in a lovely garden just a minute away from the beach. The rooms are large and clean, reasonable at only 80,000 (fan including breakfast), and the massive freestyle shaped pool is beautiful. In Lovina, I would definitely recommend getting up early to see the dolphins at sunrise. A few people had told us this trip was not worth it, but we saw hundreds of dolphins.
Another sunrise that will always stay with me was the one we saw from the top of Mount Batur. My friend and I stayed the night at a hotel near the base of the volcano and started the climb at 4am, in the pitch black. I won't pretend it is an easy climb. I suppose it is easy if you are fit, but I'm not, and I struggled. It is steep, and gets steeper as you get closer to the crater. I almost had to come down half way, but eventually made it to the top. I'm so glad that I did. The view was breathtaking. We went right inside the crater and ate steamed eggs and bananas from breakfast.
The day before, we spent the day in a small village at the bottom of Mount Batur. The man that took us to climb the volcano was from this village, and invited us to attend a wedding and tooth filing ceremony that was happening that day. The people in the village welcomed us warmly and invited us to share all of the food that they had prepared. We sat on the floor and ate with our hands like everyone else, and it was wonderful just to watch all the men and women as they went about preparing for their day of celebrations.
My final highlight of Bali is Suyit's Bar outside the Inna Kuta Hotel on Kuta beach. I know that everyone has their favourite bar to watch the sunset, and Suyit's is mine. When Suyit is with his family in Java, Rudy runs the bar, and I have been good friends with both of them (and all of the other sellers and boys around there) for many years now. On this trip, like always, I spent many a happy hour there having a chat and a Bintang. When I'm in Indonesia, it is this place that feels like home.
Java:
I really didn't know what to expect out of Java. Some people told me they loved it. Some people told me that it was a dangerous place full of crime and dirty cities. I spent only five days there, flying from Denpasar to Yogyakarta then travelling overland to Bandung and then Jakarta, from where we flew to Malaysia for a visa run.
I found Yogakarta to be a really interesting place. We did a rickshaw tour of the city for an entire afternoon and it cost only 15,000. It definitely saved our legs, and we saw the main sights of the city (water palace, bird market, silver factory, batik making etc) but the main highlight was just being able to see the everyday goings on of the Javanese people as we slowly made our way through the main and back streets.
We visited Borobodur and Prambanan temples in one day. They are both huge temples that you have to see to believe. The views of Borobodur at sunrise (yeah, we had a lot of early mornings on this trip!) were amazing.
My first impressions of Bandung were not good. We traipsed the hot, busy, polluted roads looking for a hotel for a long time, and finished up in a stinking mood. But luckily, the next day we stumbled across a tourist office which put us in touch with two Javanese boys who were students in the city and willing to take us on a trip the next day to see some nearby volcanoes. The boys were not tour guides, but had a bit of time off university, spoke reasonably good English, and were pleased to make a bit of extra cash. The next morning at 7am, they picked us up on their motorbikes and took us to some volcano craters about an hour away from Bandung. This was a really great day - we all walked down and went right inside one crater, where we could boil eggs in the natural bubbling spas there. The smell of sulphur was really pungent, and the water was cool enough in one pool so that we could bathe our feet. After the volcano, they drove us to see a massive waterfall, which was beautiful (although there were hundreds of steps to get down, and I fell and almost broke my ankle. It still hurts!). It was all in all a really fun day (apart from two punctures on my bike!) and when we paid the boys (75,000 each for the day) they were so pleased that we all went out for dinner at a warung they knew of, then out for a beer and a game of pool. We didn't get back to the hotel until midnight and I was so glad that we met them, as this was probably our best day in Java.
Overall, I found Java to be a very different experience. We didn't see many tourists and we had to eat at warungs a lot of the time. We really felt ‘thrown in at the deep end' in terms of culture, coming from Kuta, which for us, was good. We had to speak Bahasa Indonesia quite a lot as many people did not speak English. The cities themselves did not particularly endear me, but the temples and volcanoes were certainly stunning and definitely worth visiting as they were really quite unlike anything else we saw in Indonesia.
Lombok and the Gilis:
We spent three days in Sengiggi, and I can recommend the bungalows that we stayed in there as the nicest accommodation that I experienced in the whole of my five months in Asia. The bungalows are called Raja's, and they are set a little way back from the main road on a track. There are just four bungalows in total, which makes the place intimate and friendly. The rooms are really tastefully decorated with big clay vases, traditional furniture, and paintings in the bedroom and bathroom, which is open-air and has its very own ‘garden' next to the sink and shower. Three of us stayed in one bungalow (they provided an extra bed) for 80,000 including breakfast. If I went to Sengiggi again, I wouldn't stay anywhere else.
The most memorable experience I have of Lombok was the Stick Fight that we attended late one afternoon. We had been on a tour of the island with a guy that we met on the beach the day before, and he asked us if we would like to see the stick fighting. Intrigued, we said yes. Well, I cannot even explain the atmosphere. There were hundreds of locals watching around a massive clearing, where two fighters were dressed in sarongs and dancing strange dances around each other, preparing for battle. Each held a large stick and a shield, and as they started hitting each other, the crowd cheered them on. Even we were shouting as our guide, the guy from the beach, got up to fight the next fight. He told us later that he stick fights quite often. Unfortunately, he lost his battle, but still earned 10,000 (and quite a few bruises) for taking part.
We stayed on Gili Trawangan for five days in August, and went back in October for ten days to do some diving. Most of the visitors to this island are European, not Australian like in Bali. I really don't know why more Australians don't venture as far as the Gilis, as they are fantastic little islands. We relaxed on the white sand, swam in the turquoise sea, lazed around on cushions, met some great local people, partied at night and lazed around some more. I had never dived before but completed my PADI Open Water course on our second visit. I admit that I was scared but it was a great experience; on my third and fourth dives at Manta Point and Shark Point I saw around eight white tipped reef sharks (some pregnant) and five turtles. The pace of life is so slow in the Gilis, we really did not want to leave at all.
Boat Trip from Lombok to Flores:
This was a real experience. We chose to take the Perama boat for two nights and three days from the eastern coast of Lombok to Labuanbajo in Flores. Well, what can I say? We saw so much. On the first night we stopped at a small island just off Lombok for a barbeque of tuna (served with a side dish of plenty of Bintang) and a bit of a sing song around the camp fire. The crew were fantastic and really got in the swing of things - we had so much fun with them. When we got back on board and set sail for the night most people went to bed, but my friend and I stayed up for one more bottle of vodka and a bit of a party with the crew. They had to help us up the stairs to our cabin, half because the sea had got so rough, and half because of the amount of alcohol we (and they!) had consumed. The next morning we were all up at 7 to swim in a huge lake on another small island off the coast of Sumbawa: so refreshing. Unfortunately, the whole of this day and the following night were very rough sailing; most of the time we were banging round our cabin or trying to find somewhere to lay flat on our backs. I was sick. My friend was scared. We stopped at a couple of islands during the day which was a nice respite. During the night it felt like we would go over, and it was impossible to make it downstairs to the toilet. If you needed to go, you had no choice but to go over the side. The next day though, we woke up to calm waters, which was a relief. We arrived at Komodo Island, and trekked for a couple of hours. We spotted four Komodo dragons amongst the dry undergrowth, which was great. After breakfast back on board, we sailed to Labuanbajo, which was exciting as I had looked forward to seeing Flores for a long time, but also a bit sad because it meant leaving the boat and wonderful crew behind.
Flores:
Flores is a beautiful, beautiful island. I never expected it to be so stunning. It is just so green, and mountainous, and around every single corner that you turn is another fantasitic view. We spent a total of around 8 days here. It was meant to be only five, but we extended our stay because there was so much to see. We hired a car and driver to take us from Labuanbajo on the east cost to Maumere in the west over four days and nights. We stopped overnight in Rueteng, Bajawa, and Moni on our way. Near Bajawa, we visited some very natural hot springs, where we bathed in our clothes with the locals. We also visited the village of Bena, which is a very traditional village that is still quite untouched, despite its small but constant stream of visitors. The whole village were putting a new roof on one of the buildings when we arrived at 8am that day, and it really was a sight to see. Every person in the village was helping in some way, making twine or cutting bamboos or weaving the thatch together or tying it to the roof. Someone, maybe the head of the village, was organising the whole project on a loud speaker. We didn't want to leave; watching the whole village work together like that was really amazing.
Moni was a lovely little village. When we arrived, a local lady from a neighbouring hotel asked if we would like to go with her to a nearby hot spring and waterfall where she was going for a mandi (shower, as you'll know if you've been to Indonesia). It was pretty there and we bathed our feet while she washed herself and her young nephew in the hot spring. That night, we intended to go to bed early, but ended up drinking Angur (local black liquorice tasting wine) with the local boys in the village at a restaurant called Bintang. We learnt a lot of tricks with match sticks that night. At 4am, we had to get up to meet our driver, who drove us up to the top of the volcano to see the lakes of Kelimutu. These three coloured lakes are the subject of local legend, said to be where souls go to when people die. We walked for around half an hour in the dark to the summit of the three craters, and as the sun rose and we shivered in the wind we saw the colours of the three lakes emerge. One was a deep black, one a piercing turquoise blue, and the other a dark chocolate brown. This really was a breathtaking sight, even with a bit of a hangover.
In Maumere we met Dino Lopez at the Gardena Hotel. Dino is a really knowledgeable man who helped us see so much more of Flores than we expected. We were going to leave the next day after arriving in Maumere, but we wanted to stay longer and Dino managed to change our flight tickets to a few days later. The next day, he rented a motorbike and took me to a village 50km away from Maumere at the top of a mountain. This village is only accessible by bike as most of the track is thin and steep, and some of it has broken away. Only a handful of tourists are brought here every year, and it shows. Every child in the village followed me around, and each time I took a photo of something they all fought to be in the picture. The village has a tradition of burying their dead in stone tombs in an upright position, and these tombs are found scattered everywhere throughout the village.
Another village Dino took us to see was the Gypsy Village. It is on the coast, and all of the huts are built on stilts above the sea. It is a very poor village; the children are dressed in very old worn clothes, most of the huts are falling apart and there is no toilet in the village - everyone just goes through holes in the floor into the sea. Again, all the children crowded us wanting photos, shouting ‘hello mister!' and following us everywhere. To get around the village, you must walk across fragile, often half broken, thin bamboo ‘bridges': not too good if you don't have much balance like me. In one house in the corner of the village, people called to us as we went by; as we looked through the doorway, we saw that the hut was full of ladyboys. One thing that we did notice was that one shabby hut was full of people playing PlayStation and watching TVs. How can they afford these things? we asked, quite surprised. Dino laughed and said that they would prefer to spend their money on things like that rather than trying to improve the housing in the village.
The last really memorable experience in Maumere was when Dino invited us to spend the night at his mother's house in their village. We bought some fish at the market to take with us. What a feast the family prepared. We had tuna and reef fish, and soup, and sambal, and grilled bananas, and special steamed rice parcels that were flavoured with ginger and garlic and coconut and are apparently unique to that part of Flores. They were certainly scrumptious. All of it was. And afterwards we drank Arak with the local boys from the village and tried to speak a bit of Bahasa Indonesia (we picked up quite a bit over the course of the trip) to Dino's sister and the other neighbours, who spoke no English. After the boys went to bed, we watched some TV and helped Dino's mother and sister fold all of the laundry that they had done that day. Then we slept in a room that they had put aside for us, inside woken Ikat tubes of fabric they gave us, a bit like sleeping bags but with no bottom. We woke to the sound of the cockerels outside in the morning, and had tea and banana fritters for breakfast as we watched the pig and her piglets wander around the garden.
These are some of the more memorable moments of my trip to Indonesia. I'm sorry that this report is so long; it was a long trip. There are so many other fascinating things that we saw. I just can't fit them all in. But the one thing that stuck with me more than anything else though throughout the entire journey was the people. The Indonesians, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or anything else, are inherently friendly, beautiful people. We met so many and learnt so much from them all. Did you know that it isn't rude in Indonesia to just come right out and tell somebody that they are fat, or ugly? We laughed so much in Moni trying to explain to the local boys that this is considered impolite in the West. They just couldn't understand. Then what is the polite word to call ‘big people'? they asked, puzzled. Oh, we laughed. During the end of the trip, Ramadan started, and it was really interesting to speak to the local people about what it is like to be Muslim and have to fast and not drink anything all day in that scorching heat. It was also funny to watch some of them sneak around the back to eat some fish and have a cigarette, then emerge ten minutes later complaining about their hunger. But most of all, we just had a great time with them all. Sure, we met quite a lot of western travellers, but most of our time was spent talking with locals, drinking arak or some other concoction that they claimed was good (the worst was a mix of guinness, vodka, redbull and arak) and inevitably turned out to be disgusting. I will remember all of those times always.
As a final note, we were still in Indonesia when the bombs happened. Luckily for us, we had left Kuta a few days previously to go diving in the Gilis. I know that many others were not so lucky and my heart goes out to them and all of their families. We heard on the Saturday night that it happened and it was shocking. The local people there, like many places in Indonesia I expect, are frightened of what is going to happen to them in terms of tourism. Bali, of course, is the same. The people are afraid not only of the actual bombs but also of the effect this will have on their country. I feel for them. It is inevitable that the people and country will suffer as a result of this. We spent our final week in Kuta, and it was so quiet in comparison to the bustling town that it had been for the months before. What could we say to our friends in Bali but tell them that we will still come back to Indonesia nonetheless. As we have seen following the bombs in London and the earthquake in India, nowhere is really safe anymore, and we cannot let this danger stop us from enjoying other parts of the world. We just need to do it with caution. I just hope that many more people feel the same and continue to enjoy this beautiful country.
Just a few pictures of some of this trip are on the internet. A friend that I travelled with for six weeks is a photographer and has put some of her pictures on the website www.timfeak.com. Just click on Lucy Curle Travel Images at the bottom of the page if you would like to see them.
If you have any comments or questions about my trip, I'll be pleased to help. Just leave them on the forum or email me at cammy1982@hotmail.com.
Camille