Author: tompepinsky

Another short post–we still don’t trust Typepad.

Our past few days have been largely spent getting from Jogjakarta to Denpasar, the capital of the province of Bali.  But we had to make it fun, so we stopped at Mt. Bromo in East Java on the way.  It was a nine hour minibus ride from Jogja to Probolinggo, then we changed for another minibus ride up to what we thought was the town of Cemoro Lawang.  Turns out we were a couple kilometers short, but that’s OK.  We stayed in a very nice hotel, so it was cool.  The weather was amazing, so comfortable, at night it was about 60 degrees.  For the first time since May, we didn’t need a fan or an air conditioner, and we actually needed blankets to sleep.

We left at 4:00 AM to catch the sunrise at the summit of the volcano, but to make a long story short, we had another one of our misunderstandings/miscommunications, and didn’t make it to the peak until 5:40 or so.  It was other-wordly up there.  First off, it was downright chilly.  Our long-sleeved shirts finally came in handy.  Plus, the landscape looked like something resembling Mt. Mordor in the Lord of the Rings.  You’ll have to check out our pictures when we put them online. 

After that, we had breakfast, descended back to Probolinggo, sweated in the heat for two hours, and then hopped onto a direct bus that put us in Denpasar only 8.5 hours later.  On the way, we took a ferry, which the bus drove straight on to.  The last 128 kilometers from the harbor in West Bali to Denpasar took 3 hours–we’ll let you work out the average speed in miles per hours.  But when you’re on a two-lane road and you’re stuck behind a slow-moving dump truck full of coconuts, there’s not much we can do about it.

So we made it to Denpasar, split a cab to the tourist resort of Kuta, and found a cheap room.  This place reminds us of South Beach…aside from the Indonesian faces on shop owners, you wouldn’t know that this isn’t some other beach town in the West.  Loud Australians in loud surfer wear with sunburned faces and Bintang Beer tanktops.  We don’t particularly like it here too much, and are looking forward to our transfer to Candi Dasa later today.

That’s all for now, we’ll be in touch again later.

This will just be a quick update as Typepad has been problematic as of late.  We are still in Jogjakarta for the time being, but we leave tomorrow morning on a two-day excursion to Mt. Bromo in East Java and then on to Bali.  We expect to arrive in Denpasar, the capital of Bali, late on Friday night.

On Monday we toured Jogja.  We saw the Kraton, the palace where the sultan, Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X, lives.  It is full of artifacts from his father, SSHB IX.  Then we saw the Taman Sari, or water palace, which was amazing and beautiful.

On Tuesday we saw Borobudur, the giant Buddhist stupa near town, and Prambanan, the giant Hindu temple complex near town.  These two sights are ancient and unbelievable, and were well worth waking up at 4:30 AM to see.  Apparently we were a bigger attraction than the temples for many Indonesians, since they insisted on taking pictures with us all day long.

Today we took a trip to Surakarta, known here as Solo.  It’s another big city about an hour by train from Jogja.  In Solo, we saw the Puri Mangkunegaran, the second biggest palace in Solo, where the Prince Sri Mangkunegoro IX lives.  We skipped the big Kraton in Solo because we’ve heard it’s a let-down.  We finished off the day with a trip through the Pasar Klewer, or batik market, which is a steamy and crowded maze of small vendors selling everything imaginable.

We promise that we will blog more detailed descriptions in the future, when we can count on regular internet access and a quiescent Typepad.  We also have 72 digital pictures from the past 3 days which will make it online in due time.  Tomorrow we will be overnighting in the mountain town of Cemoro Lawang, a town on the slopes of Mt. Bromo which will probably be closed off from communications.  We will probably spend the rest of Friday after our planned ascent to the summit on buses and minibuses, so we don’t expect to be email-capable then either.  Perhaps Saturday, before TP’s parents arrive in Bali, we will find time to update more fully.