Breathtaking landscapes and crushing slums, firey pits, tremendous warmth and a huge cultural gap.

Indonesia is country of 17,000 islands, over 700 languages and more than 300 distinct ethnic groups, they come together into the Indinesian state, under a unifying language, and with the island of Java at it’s centre. Home to Indonesia’s biggest cities, including the world’s second most populous metropolis, Java was to be a big change for us. Ness and I went into it with contrasting expectations.

I had read guides telling tales of Indonesia as a mecca for adventure and the outdoors. Jungles meet volcanoes in a place which hasn’t fallen to the pull of Westernisation and tourism, a place rich in its own identity.

Ness: I had built my expectations mainly on a conversation we had with 2 Brits we met when in Vietnam. They had really not enjoyed their time in Java, they didn’t feel comfortable with the staring and hoards of people taking their photo, they said they didn’t feel welcome at all and found even eating a meal hard as there is nothing in English and it seemed no one wanted to help them at all. I had this image of a dirty, rude country where my skin would attract a lot of undesired attention, if I’m honest I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Java at all… But my expectations couldn’t have been more wrong!

The universal message was to expect chaos and what a child of the West would consider underdevelopment. We landed in the capital of Jakarta in a clean and ‘easy’ airport. Going through immigration was straightforward, then we hopped onto a shuttle monorail to a very nice train for the ride into the city. There will be a little more about trains later, but we arrived at our hostel very easily!

We were welcomed to our hostel by a receptionist who gave us our first taste of the warmth of the Javanese people. Everywhere we went, we were greeted with smiles and kindness, and a sincerity behind that kindness which had been absent in some other places.

Going out for dinner gave us a gentle introduction to Indonesian cuisine. The English language is not widely spoken here, Java has tourism but it isn’t such a fundamental part of the economy as in other places we’d been, so it did feel more natural. There aren’t English menus, and restaurant staff often can’t translate, so Google translate plays a big part.

Javanese food is based either on fried noodles or fried rice, with the addition of vegetables or meat (chopped then cooked on the bone). Everything was then topped with a fried egg. Thankfully this meant that after working out the key words for fried, steamed, chicken, vegetables etc, you could get a handle on most menus, but also meant that after a few days you were repeating the same meals. Eating was cheap and easy but became a real chore with variations on the same food all the time.

The next day we went to explore the city a little. Everything we had read and been told said it was dirty, polluted and overrun with traffic. This may be true, but we found it ok actually, Ness commented that she felt as if she was back in London. No doubt the slums sprawling around the city appeared very rough and basic as we passed them, but the centre seemed quite developed… It even had pavements (rare in the developing world) and drivers seemed to obey traffic rules (even stranger).

Taking in the impressively huge national monument, a beautiful cathedral and the biggest mosque in East Asia were worthwhile, but there was little to see other than constant diplomatic motorcades driving past, and what we considered an insufficient array of coffee shops. The political and commercial centre of Indonesia lacked the character we saw elsewhere in this otherwise refreshingly sincere nation.

The next stop was to be the cultural epicentre of Java, the historical city of Yogyakarta (the letters ‘y’ are pronounced as a ‘j’ and it is known casually as Jogja). This was a long day’s train ride away, and Ness had struggled with a mild stomach bug, so we’d decided to fly instead. The trip to the airport though was a bit of a farce.

To get to the city from the airport had been remarkably easy, a free airport monorail to a luxurious airport train, then one stop on a local train. The local train tickets here are bought on a reloadable card, which requires a deposit for the card itself. All simple. We found it slightly odd that crossing through a railway station involved just walking over the tracks themselves, but once past that concept it was fine.

Of note for this story, we’d been told that the refundable cards had to be refunded at a manned ticket office.

We went to the local station and tried to load our cards for the single journey. We were told that at this station you couldn’t buy a single journey, only a multi-trip. This seemed ridiculous and we argued, but bought the multi-trip. We were told that we could get a refund on unused journeys. We got to the central station and left the platform to get our tickets refunded. Firstly, of course, the ticket office explained that they wouldn’t refund the multi-trip ticket. Fine. I gave our tickets to some locals who were very grateful.

We got our deposit back for the reloadable card and went to buy a ticket to the airport. We were told that the ticket office for the airport train was inside the platform area, so we would have to buy a train ticket for a local route to get into the airport ticket office. We couldm have used our multi-trip tickets, but these were now off in the hands of the grateful locals. Ok…..

New deposit placed for reloadable card, and bought the cheapest tickets we could to get into the station. Went to the airport office, right next to where we’d disembarked the last train, and once there were told that there was, of course, an entrance from the street without buying the extra tickets. Having been told that the reloadable cards could only be refunded at an office, outside of the station, we were resigned to losing the deposit, but then found machine which would do it for us, back where we started. A whole lot of faff in searing heat with our backpacks!

We landed in Jogja and settled into our room. The next day we set out to explore the city, finding it to be a welcoming place but not as culturally fascinating as we’d been led to believe. It wasn’t until the last day that we went to visit the Sultan’s palace, but arrived too late to see it properly. We were just wandering around the edge when a man told us that we couldn’t walk that way as it was closed. We thanked him and turned around to go the other way, and he asked us (as many people did) where we were from. Answering that we were from the UK, he answered with beaming pride that he lives in the palace and is a musician.

Yogyakarta is designated as a special region, with partial autonomy under it’s own government and Sultan. The Sultan’s palace is actually a city, with a considerable population in this walled area. The population have special privileges by birth (including not paying tax!) and members of these families staff the palace. Suji told us all about his life in the palace as he walked us through the grounds, and was especially proud at having played for Prince Charles of the UK.

Suji took us to the home of his friend Arya who made us some of the famous Luwak coffee. Slightly unusual, this coffee is made from coffee beans which have been eaten then excreted from the civet, a small mammal. The beans remain in-tact but the process makes it naturally decaf and quite tasty. Suji then showed us out to the Southern square, where two huge Bodhi trees stand about 20m apart. It is said that if you can walk between the two with your eyes closed then your wish will be granted…. The trees were so huge that this turns out to be pretty easy if you’re sober, so we both have high expectations of our dreams coming true.

We spent the evening in this corner of the city, which was a lovely area with a cool vibe, and we wished we’d discovered it sooner.

Indonesia hasn’t been influenced by tourism and western culture to the same extent as other SE Asian countries, and white Westerners are seen as an attraction to the locals, especially as younger generations find that speaking English gives them a big head start in the world. We are about as white as you can get, and so got a lot of attention. On rare occasions this was unwanted or too much, and the repeated invites into art galleries for the pressure sale got a bit much, but the enthusiasm to talk to us was generally a wonderful experience. People showed a genuine interest in us and just wanted to chat. University students would approach us having been set an assignment of talking English to foreigners, and we would talk at length, we are now friends on social media with many of these lovely people. Interestingly throughout our travels we have found that people find our English difficult to understand. We are told that we speak very fast, which I guess makes sense as it is our native language compared to other travellers for whom English is a second or third language.

We also paid a visit to Borobudur, which is the world’s largest Buddhist temple. Everywhere we travel things are listed as the biggest of this or oldest if that, all if which are rich with caveats. In this case, Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple of a single structure which remains a solely Buddhist temple today. Statistics aside, it is a remarkable monument and our guide fascinated us with its history.

Amongst the history of Borobudur was the history of Indonesia. We learned about it’s rule by Dutch and British empires before independence. Interestingly our guide explained how the nation shows more signs of it’s influence from 3 years of British rule than over 300 under the Dutch.

Aside from a huge number of Buddha statues, the temples walls show the mythological history of Buddhism. Included in this, the lowest level features the lustful lives of people before Buddha, and it is described as being like a Karma Sutra in stone. Clearly we had to check this out, but were distraught to find that the Indonesian authorities have kept it covered to avoid offending cultural sensitivities. Indonesia is a devoutly Muslim country where holding hands in public isn’t really acceptable, certainly not sex guides in stone.

The temple was full of school groups being brought here to explore their national history, and these young people were fascinated to meet us, all of them wanting photos with us.

The exit to the temple was a commercial marvel, you had to follow a literal maze through a market to escape, hundreds of stalls selling the standard tourist souvenirs, before we could break out to the road and back to our bus.

After our few days in Jogja, we went to get our train to Probolinggo, our next stop. We’d booked tickets online, and the tickets weren’t in English, but we knew the time so went to the station. Or we thought we went to the station…. Not realising that there are sperate stations for economy and business class. They aren’t far apart but when you’re at the business class station with 10 minutes until your train leaves the economy station, it’s far enough to cause a mild panic. A helpfully speedy taxi driver got us there in the nick of time, and we were on our way for the 8 hour train ride. Thankfully the train was very comfortable, since the train ran 4 hours slow making it a 12 hour ride, but not an unpleasent one.

It wasn’t until after we’d settled into our hotel in Probolinggo that we saw it was described in Lonely Planet as the only decent place to stay in town, and when we asked the wonderful staff what there was to do in town, they replied that there was literally nothing other than the single reason people come here…. To go to Mount Bromo.

Most people visit Bromo by a pricey private tour, collection from your hotel in Probolinggo (I struggle to spell it every time!) Just after midnight, back by lunch. Some include an overnight stay arranged by the tour company. Of course we were going to do it independently and on the cheap.

We found our way to what is described as a bus station for our trip to Cemoro Lawang near Bromo. The bus stop is actually a cafe where a guy with a beat up van occasionally takes people onwards. The cost of the ‘bus’ was fixed for the journey and split between the number of passengers (of course rounded up in favour of the driver), so the more people arrive the cheaper it gets.

We had met a few Germans on the train the day before, so had arranged to meet them at the bus stop, but we sat and waited for more passengers. We’d arrived at around 9am, by 1pm we finally had enough to make the journey affordable, so set off!

The journey was pretty comfortable compared to what we’d become used to in Nepal, and we soon arrived in Cemoro Lawang. We met up with Johannes (German), Gus (British) and Joon (South Korean) and decided to set off to Bromo that afternoon.

We found photos and descriptions of trips to Bromo a little misleading. Most photos of Bromo feature what looks like a stereotypical volcano, with smaller craters around it. That volcano is Batok and is inactive.. Bromo is a low and wide feature beside it, which from a distance looks like a smouldering crater rather than a typical volcano. We found that the most impressive feature in the environment wasn’t any particular part such as Bromo, rather the Tengger Caldera as a whole.

Tengger is an ancient stratovolcano, a giant rim 5km across, within which are a number of smaller volcanoes including Bromo and Batok. Between the rim and the smaller volcanoes is the ‘sand sea’, an enormous plain of fine grey ash. We stood at our hotel looking across the sand sea to Bromo and Batok, thinking that they seemed so far away.

We walked down the road from the rim to the ‘sea’, and pointed ourselves across the featureless expanse of ash towards the bottom of Bromo. We were surprised when after only 25 minutes or so, we had arrived. It was another 20 minutes up a well made track to the rim of Mount Bromo.

For the first time, we peered over the barrier and down into the crater. A huge incline descended towards the centre, at which a dark pit sat, smoke billowing out and the sounds of volcanic rumblings echoing out. Unable to see any bottom to this pit, it was impossible not to feel like it was a hole into the depths of hell.

There was a small area at the top of the steps which had a wide path and a rail, and then a narrow path extended around the rim. We’d read many accounts that this path was dangerously narrow, that only ‘insane’ people would walk around it. We thought that it looked like quite a good, well made path. Admittedly, falling to the right would mean an unstoppable tumble into the firey pit of hell, but we are pretty comfortable with situations where falling means a very long fall…the solution is to not fall over!

We walked around the rim, followed by Johannes, Gus and Joon. On our way around we passed a couple, a Swedish girl and a Brazilian man, who were just unnecessarily beautiful and dressed to impress for their Instagram feed. She was made up, in nice shoes, jeans and a posh top….all very out of sync with this ominous environment….but made for good photos and they were very friendly (if damaging for our self-esteem).

As the sun began to set we walked back around the rim, took in the beautiful sky then set off back across the sea of ash. The scene became even more impactive as the light faded casting an eerie aura across the huge crater, until ultimately the light was gone and we were struggling to find out way out of the barren expanse and onto the road.

The group of five who had formed was an interesting mix. As well as the two of us, was Johannes an IT security consultant from Germany who was travelling for only a month but had already travelled extensively; Joon a very quiet South Korean who when he opened up seemed to have basically been everywhere; and Gus a recent graduate from the UK who was having his first wide eyed experience of travelling, and was like a spaniel on cocaine.

After a wonderful dinner we were early to bed and early to rise, as we were to walk up to Mount Penanjakan, the highest point in the area at 2,770m, offering a beautiful sunrise view. We set off under an indescribably starry sky and weaved our way up the path, eventually meeting the crowds at the top, who had taken a jeep up from their hotels in Probolinggo that morning.

We found the quietest spot we could and sat to watch the natural theatre. A thick fog sat in the giant caldera below us, while the stars gave way to a deep red glow, turning the volcanoes and their smoke orange as the sun rose. With Java’s highest point as a backdrop just the other side of this caldera, the view was breathtaking. Gus described it as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and while we may not have had quite as much wonder as him, we were in awe at the spectacle.

As the light illuminated the slope, we climbed up higher to an empty spot on the ridge, and just hung around taking in the amazing scene for as long as we could.

We eventually descended back down to the village. Our plan had been to stay for the day and leave later (in hindsight we should have booked another night to enjoy the scene), but we realised that with limited people leaving by bus, and the economics of bus fare splitting, we had to change plans very rapidly and make a run for the bus to join the others.

We parted ways with our friends in Probolinggo, as they were heading to Ijen to do the tour there that night, while we had booked to stay in Probolinggo. We tried exploring the town to find that there was indeed nothing to do (barely even any coffee!!). We relaxed and were ready for our train the next morning to Banyuwangi, the staging area for Ijen.

You can read a separate post about our fantastic time with the Ijen Miner Tour here.

At the end of that tour we were dropped at the ferry port for our trip to Bali. The journey was sold as 1 hour but after 20 minutes we were metres from the Balinese coast wondering why it had been so advertised as an hour, until we sat for 40 minutes waiting to dock. This gave us plenty of time to reflect on our two weeks in Java.

It hadn’t been the highlight of our travels, but it had been a rich experience with some wonderful moments – moments of deep human warmth and welcome, moments of enormous natural beauty, and moments of resignation to more Nasi Goreng (fried rice). This was the first time we had spent a significant amount of time in a Muslim country, Ness was very much looking forward to Bali to be able to get her shoulders and knees out! While Java has a lot to offer and we could easily fill more time there with adventures, we probably won’t return, though we will treasure our memories from two weeks there.

We were excited for our trip to Bali, which had universally been described as paradise….it wasn’t going to disappoint us!