Bandung, Java

We left Jakarta early in the morning, while waiting for our train some local trains, like the tube in London i think, came past, there were people spilling out the doorways and sitting on top of the electric train, not such a great photo but they were going really fast, you can get the idea though!

We made it easily to Bandung,the train was a joy to travel on, no more buses for us!  We found a hotel and thought we would walk into town to see the information centre (at this point we should know better than to trust the b**** lonely planet!)  After 1 hour of walking we found the famous ‘Jean Street’ not just known for jeans but for the lifelike statues…..

                              

Eventually after 2 hours of walking and entering a local district of town that looked slightly dodgy, we opted for a cab.  The city is once again busy, dirty, confusing and tiring so after another hour of walking around we eventually found the tourist information centre under the mosque!  We booked a tour to the volcano and decided to get a very late lunch!

                    

We got a cab back to the hotel (no way we were walking!) lazed around and went out to the coolest bamboo restaurant for dinner,cheap as and amazing corn patties! The way food is served here is a bit weird, the whole menu (cooked before hand) is put out on your table and you get charged for what you eat. The rest is saved for next time…….

We had an early night ready for our tour the next day to Tangkuban Perahu Area, which means 'overturned boat' it is a huge crater of 2076m.  legend says a god was challenged to build a huge boat in a single night, his opponent saw that he would probably complete this impossible task, so he brought the sun up early, and the boat builder in his anger overturned the nearly completed boat!

The Ratu crater (Queen crater) 1830m high

     

Sheila please note the t-shirt hehehe

     

We found a track to a sacred spring, however we are obviously not sacred as we couldn’t find it!  We found a tiny concrete tunnel but after 20m in Andre was bent double and even the torch couldn’t cut through the darkness so i decided to take a photo to pretend it was the spring, notice the tubing to ciphon the water…

We had been offered to hire a tour guide to see the other active volcano, Upa but decided not to, however we were able to find it for ourselves!

                              

                                                

We are now half way round the crater, so we took some more shots of Ratu crater.

                             

                                               

                                                          

The trees seem to grow above the ground! Instead of walking around the crater, you can do it by horse!

Next we went to what we thought were natural hot springs, which they were, but had been landscaped and were part of an amusement park/hotel etc.  20 mins into it the rain started pouring down, it must happen often as guys came out of nowhere with heaps of umbrellas you could hire to get you back to the exit, clever people! (last photo is while raining)

                             

We were meant to go and see a tea plantation, but our guide who spoke absolutely no English had no idea about it, we complained to the information office guy, who told us tough luck, that’s the chance you take with guides that don’t speak English, even though he had hired him! 

 As Andre said Java 1, tourists 0

Still it was a good day, but we have booked a train for 8am tomorrow to go to Yogyakarta, should arrive around 4pm.

Jakarta

Well we have spent 5 days in the massive city of Jakarta.The first night we found a place to stay, dumped our bags and went for a wander down the street of Jalan Jaksa, a very popular street!  We went past a supermarket with seating outside and i heard my name called.  I turned to Andre to laugh and saw the dutch couple we hung out with in Bukit Lawang (orangutans) sitting outside the supermarket calling to us!  Only in a city of 12 million could we actually know someone aye!!!!  so they serve beer at the supermarket, so was lots of fun catching up with them!!!

 In Jakarta there are super malls and nightclubs.  We went to quite a few supermalls, but didn't buy anything!  They were massive, busy and confusing, but fun.

We went to the biggest club in Indonesia called the Stadium!  It was really cool, with dragons hanging off the walls etc!

We watched a guy hanging a new power cord onto the power lines on a bamboo ladder, with the steps way too big for little legs...

outside every place you eat, comes street entertainment

We went and saw the famous monument 137 metres high, but impossible to find the way in, even the locals seemed to have trouble so we just walked around it!

After that we wondered through a random market and found 'puppets'

Now leaving tomorrow morning for Bandung via train in executive class..........no idea what that means here!

Banda Aceh Public Library

We went to tourist information, so they could tell the becak (tuktuk) driver where to go to get to the public library.  Once we got there after a few phonecalls by guys at the entrance the head of the library comes out, overjoyed to meet me!  All the staff were told to come and have a photo.  Guy on the left of me is the boss librarian, the Indonesian Ian!

He was so enthusiastic about the library, and getting adults to read.  He gained a scholarship in Jakarta from the German embassy, and trained as a librarian in Germany, so he speaks the local language, Aceh, Indonesian, German and English!  His big boss (state library at Jakata) is in Holland at the moment studying library techniques to introduce back to Indonesia. 
Of course Banda Aceh was ground zero for the earthquake, and was smashed in the Tsunami (as in other blog entry) so he has done amazing things getting this library up and moving!  He is proud of the 200 000 books they have (mostly Australia and various embassies) but has no English books at all, neither adult or children’s.  I am hoping that Nelson Library may be able to help me source and donate some books for this library.  This is the photos i took of the library, only 8 years on from devastation!  These are 3 different parts of the library.  The library is almost exclusively used by students (hence the need for English books).

The local Aceh history area (heavily used for school projects) where books can not be issued, local papers and student thesis are archived here as well.

This is there reference only floor, along with a photo of the reference librarians!

Every day they have the kindergarten come to the library, the children’s library is out of the main building in it’s own building with foam mats covering the concrete floor.  The kids watch dvd’s as well as being read books etc

It really was an amazing experience.  The head librarian has so much excitement for his library and his community.  He is on tv a lot apparently trying to get adults to get literate.  He has set up a type of mobile library for the rural children and trys all sorts of gimmicks to get the adult readers to come to their public library including an annual book fair with heavily discounted books (which he has set up with another aid group) and staying open nights hoping to get adult readers in.  We finished the tour and sat in his office talking for ages, he showed me many letters from embassies and aid groups giving support and donations after the tsunami.  He also makes sure each librarian gets proper training (‘otherwise how do we keep up with library services’) there are about 35 librarians working there and they were so amazingly friendly!!!!

Goodbye Paulu Weh, Hello Banda Aceh

This was the view from our restaurant on our last night

And this is me at 6.30am waiting for our ride from the place we were staying to the harbour to catch the ferry to Banda Aceh (about a 45 minute ride) and it was raining!

Well, this is the epicentre of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake (8.9) and Tsunami, 61 000 died.  Our Becak (tuk tuk) driver, Little John, lost 5 brothers in the Tsunami, and had a steel girder fall on his arm, so his left hand/arm doesn’t work properly, but what a wonderful happy positive man!  We decided to hire him for the day, taking us round the sights (first of course was the public library, then the Tsunami museum, a shopping mall, and coffee that’s made from animal droppings!)

The Tsunami Museum

You walk into the tsunami museum through a tunnel with water pouring against a wall either side.  It was quite eerie, a very evocative entrance to a tsunami museum!

These are the before and after photos of the city…

A couple of the famous photos…

         

some more before and after photos showing the shore line completely changed, you will need to click on the photos to get a full screen to really see the difference.

   

They did 3-d models to show before and after

     

and they did a model of the tsunami coming

There are stones in a circle around the bottom level with country names that helped with the clean-up, Andre is sitting on it, but I couldn’t get a photo that showed the name…

                       

Banda Aceh is a pretty ULTRA-FRIENDLY city, very hard to tell what happened 8 years ago.
After the museum, it was time to change the pace, so we went for the most expensive coffee in the world.

Kopi Luwak gourmet coffee actually passes completely through the digestive tract of the exotic Indonesian Palm Civet (Luwak) without being digested by the animal.  The Palm Civet, long seen as a pest on coffee plantations, eats and eventually passes the undigested coffee cherries in it’s waste. The beans are then patiently harvested from the forest floor near coffee plantations and carefully roasted. The digestive juices of the animal are said to very slightly ferment the beans without harming them, adding a gentle nutty flavor to the roasted beans that is highly prized by the discriminating coffee gourmet.

It is supposed to be the worlds most rare coffee and it has quite a mild taste, another tick in the box.
The animals eat the red berry of the coffee bean (which is all glucose) but they will only eat it when it’s perfectly ripe.  apparently us humans still can’t get it quite right, we pick pretty close, but the animals won’t eat it unless it is exactly right, clever animals!

And now for some views of the city from our hostel