Bandung pt. 1

Well, the weekend was interesting anyway. Long and a lot of it was spent in traffic, but it was good to get out of the city!

Our plan was to head to a city called Bandung for the weekend, about 4hrs drive east(?) of Jakarta, and go the slightly longer route via Punchak and the mountains to get the view there (and so that Michal could take pictures of the tea plantations!). Unfortunately, it was a bank holiday weekend here, so to beat the traffic we had to leave slightly early in the morning - as in, get up at 5am and leave the hotel at 6am! That wasn't fun!

Was pretty crowded in the car, as we had Me, Anirudh and Michal (the guys I'm working with), Joey (Anirudh's friend), Nina (Joey's boss) and Fiona and Lauren (friends of Joey's). Joey has a big jeep, and Fiona and Lauren are wee little slips of things, but it was still quite "cozy". The first few hours were fairly quiet, mainly because everyone was still mostly asleep! Wasn't really much to do but stare at the scenery out the car window. there was something not right about what I was seeing, but it took me a good bit of time to realize what it was - the trees I was looking at were palm trees! Everything went quietly enough until we got near the top of Punchak Pass, where we discovered that we had a flat tyre. So, that had to be changed in a lay-by near the top of the pass - in the spitting rain! Once that excitement was over, we motored on a bit more until we came to a restaurant at the very top of the pass. Seeing as we'd been on the road for a good 2hrs at this stage, we decided now would be a good time for breakfast (and a few pictures). I decided to be a bit adventurous and, instead of coffee, try some local drink which was made from ginger, coconut and something else(?) Was a real acquired taste, and by the end of it I still wasn't sure whether or not I liked it!

On we travelled anyway, and nearly everyone in the car fell asleep bar me and Joey (the driver). This was about the first time that it hit me that I really was far away from home: up til then we'd been in jakarta, and sure a lot of ppl didn't speak english, and things were a bit different, but we were spending all our time in the CBD, and one city's CBD is much like another's. Now though we were passing by little ramshackle villages, and palm groves, and paddy fields - even saw one guy in a paddy field ploughing with a water buffalo. Was like being in a National Geographic episode! :-) Unfortunately we were going a bit fast for me to get any pics - I tried a few, but they came out blurry.

We were going to stop off on the way at a Safari park for a look, but unfortunately we got there at 9 and they didn't open til 11. So much for that plan - there goes my chance to play Steve Irwin: "By crikey, look at the size of that lion! I'm going to try to piss him off now, see what happens!" ;-) By about an hour out of Bandung though, we started to catch up with the traffic heading that direction from jakarta, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day - traffic jams! Was about 1 o'clock when we got into town, so we went for food in some random steak place. After we were fed and watered, it was time to head to the volcano, Tangkuban Perahu. Traffic wasn't too bad once we got out of town, but then we got to the foot of the mountain and had to pay some random guard-looking guys 300,000 to drive up the mountain. We decided "screw that" and went another road, where we only had to pay 80,000. Was some difference in the roads though - made the country roads at home look like super-highways! We were lucky Joey had a 4x4, and even then we were thrown out the bit while crawling along in 1st gear!

When we got up there, the view was less than awe-inspiring. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting (maybe I've seen too much footage of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with all the flowing lava etc) but it pretty much looked like a quarry with a small lake at the bottom, a bit of steam coming out at one end and a really really strong smell of sulphur. You're able to walk around the rim of the crater though, and we were just about to do that when the clods came down and it started pissing rain! Seeing as we weren't really expecting this it came as a bit of a shock - we had to "rent" an umbrella off a hawker for 5,000 to avoid getting soaked! Even when the rain stopped, visibility was down to a few dozen feet, so we decided that we'd seen all there was to see so we headed back to Bandung.

After that, we decided to go to get something to eat in a resort that one of the girls knew about - a place called Kampung Daun (or "leafy village"), which was on a hilltop just outside Bandung (and by "hill" I mean mountain - Bandung itself is about 700m above sea level!). The road up to it was only marginally better than the road up to the volcano, so I didn't really know what to expect when we get to the top. All I can say is "wow!" :-)

Instead of a "normal" restaurant, it's like a jungle path with little open-sided thatched huts every few meters where you sit in and eat there - with a stream and waterfalls going down the side. Really impressive! And the food was damn good, and dead cheap too. We chilled there for a few hours and then decided brave the traffic and to head into town.

Before we did though, Joey decided to ring the hotel to just confirm our booking. Unfortunately, he'd originally said we would be checking in about midday, so when we didn't show the hotel had given away our rooms. Homeless! Luckily Nina had an aunt in Bandung, so after a few phone calls we were able to stay in her place. One slight problem: Nina didn't know where she lived! So, we dropped Fiona and Lauren off in Lauren's place, and then the adventure began. In between the heavy traffic, the 3 wrong turns and Nina arguing down the phone with her cousin about the directions, we finally got there an hour and a half after we set off. Nina's aunt's house is apparently a typical middle-class indonesian home. A bit different from ours, especially in the bathroom! The toilet didn't have a flush, there was a bucket beside it to pour down the drain to flush with, and the same bucket was used for the "shower" - a tin tub beside the loo to stand in. If you wanted hot water, you put on the kettle!

The sleeping arrangements were fairly rushed-together - Nina was sleeping in with her cousin, the other 3 guys were sharing 2 mattresses in one room, and I got lucky and got a mattress to myself in a room that just about fit the mattress! And so ended day 1 in Bandung.