Sugeng Rawuh Ing Ngayogyokarto

November last year, or, 2 months ago to be exact - (am still refusing it to become “last year”), I’ve had the chance to explore more of Java which is Yogyakarta, to be specific. 

Went there with my buddies, it was such a nice trip. What excites me the most was my visit to Borobudur Temple, which is one of the 7 wonders of the world.

Finally here!!

The sun was BRUTALLY shining and It was quite a stupid of us as well, visiting this temple in the middle of the afternoon, like around 13.00ish, which successfully burned our skin off. My makeup’s melting as well. But it was all worth it.

Utterly satisfied with this! We hired a tour guide to walk us through the temple to hear some of the temple's history and fun-facts; and it is a must do, actually, rather than just strolling around and taking photos like most of them tourists do.

Our guide became our cameraman too! Since he knows some perfect spot and angles for the best pictures, we gave quite a generous tip afterwards to him.

Melting afterwards.

Aside from Borobudur Temple, for another museum and cultural trip, we went for a museum called Museum Ullen Sentalu, which told us stories related to the history of Yogyakarta and its monarchy. What surprised us was that this museum’s was not governments’, but private’s owned. No wonder it was so well maintained.

We couldn’t take much photos because it was prohibited in the most areas, however the museum have prepared one photo spot for all the visitors to get. 

This was one of my most memorable museum visits all the time, since the tour guide (included in the ticket fee) explains everything so well and detailed you’ll be longing for more at the end of the trip. This is one of the must visit place, I believe, and If you interested, please do your homework here!

Aside from those 2 main places, we’ve enjoyed ourselves well too from culinary trip, cute hotels, and beautiful natures.

Dangerously beautiful Jogan Beach.

Dinner at Jejamuran, where all the foods here are made from mushrooms!. "Jamur" means mushroom, fyi.

The legendary Sate Ratu, best for their spicy chicken satay. Super yum omagah. The place were famous between foreign tourists as well they have a wall full of photos of people from around the world.

Yogya's must eat: Ice Rojak.

And not to forget our cute and comfy hotel as well!

It was called Oemah Njonya Bed & Brasserie.

Delish Indonesian breakfast included!

It was a short 4 days 3 nights trip, however all in all, it was so fun and am glad to have this chance of holiday to be the closing of my 2018 trip, especially with these guys here since most of our holiday plans usually were not executed and ended up in another café-visit only, somewhere in Jakarta.

Hey, you two.

Hope we can explore other places as well in Indonesia soon!

Climbing Mount Ijen and Bromo (part 3) - The Road to Bromo

After long waiting for updates (6 month of postponement again, Yolanda) I'll go through my 3rd and final day of trip, which is the main trip, which is to Bromo.

Yes, Bromo is the star of the trip however sad to say it was not as enjoyable and satisfying as Mount Ijen, the one that I went to the previous day. Maybe mainly because we feel that the path to Bromo were made easy because of the amount of tourist that went there; thus that "sense of achievement" of climbing is lost. Not to mention the sickening crowd of the whole area.

Just to make it short, as usual we start the trip around 4 at dawn, and we rode the Jeep to the first area to see the sunrise. We were brought to a hill called Love Hill, which were quite recommended to see the sunrise on. There's a little climb here, not a climb actually, more of passing about 50-70 stairs and that's it. After that anticlimax moment, we just took space for waiting and we wait around 1 hour until the sun came.

It's not the best photo, I told you, where most of them were taken with a mind to avoid people in the picture as best as we can.

The twilight were pretty awesome even though it's quite foggy that day. After a while the Bromo can be seen clearly once the fog cleared a bit and the day is getting brighter.

The down-climbing were a lot of homework, passing through the crowd like this..

However we managed to snap picture together on the other side of the hill before we climb down.

Satisfied and done with the Sunrise and Love Hill, we went straight to the next main attraction which is visiting the active volcano of Bromo. Its around 30 minutes by the same jeep, which brought us to nearest spot of Bromo's bottom parking area. 

From there it's another 30 minutes until 1 hour of walk to the infamous "Stairway to Hell".

Even though its was not that hilly, what makes the walk difficult is that the ground were mostly sand; thus make it harder to walk, not to mention the sand dust always catch our eyes, and the more we go near the feet of the volcano, the more rocky it is.

Soo, locals gave us solution!! Why not use horse to go to the bottom of the stairs??

It was quite expensive actually; unfortunately I kinda forgot how much that was but I think it's around IDR 50k-150k round trip depends on wheres your checkpoint when picking the horse). We're quite hesitant at first however since there's quite a lot of horse-user making crazy sand dust with their horse, rather be a victim of the sand-dust itself; we decide why bother walking and inhale all of the dust and just use horse instead, for health reasons..

So here my and my friends, taking horse..

Moreover, save time! 15 minutes only for maybe an hour trip.

And once we reached the stairway, we just patiently queue..

Managed to took several good photos too while queuing.

Once we reached the top, we saw the hole immediately. The volcanic hole were amazing and both quite scary. Not only emits sulphuric smoke yet the sound of whatever inside is very loud. 

After we're satisfied taking photos and awe-ing the volcano, we went down asap since there's still a lot of people queuing for the view. We use the horse again to go down the rocky hill and straight to the jeep parking area, which took us to the other two additional spots, which is Teletubbies Hill and Whispering Sand area.

Teletubbies Hill were actually quite ordinary. It was named that way as it consists of several sized hill that formed in a way that resembles the hill on Teletubbies movie. It was not that obvious but recognizable. We took several group photo as well since there's space to it.

As the day is getting brighter, hotter, and sandier, we just take off to the final location which is Whispering Sand area.

We didn't find any extraordinary thing on this area that day, where we think it was just a big flat plain sand area. However this area were famous since the release of Indonesian movie called "Pasir Berbisik" "Whispering Sands" (literally) which tells story about refugees making their ways across sand dunes, and there's this moment where the protagonist have a habit to "hear the sound of sands" in this ares.  And its is true since the locals say that during calmer days, you can hear the sound of the sand's friction that resembles 'whispers', which explain its name. Unlucky for us that it was quite windy that day we can't hear a thing.. 

Since this is our final spot and maybe marked as the end of our trip in Bromo, me and my other 2 friends took one last photo before we went back to our hotel and get cleaned.

All in all, it was such a mind blowing trip!!

Outside of how pain-in-the-ass hard cleaning all the sands from our clothes and shoes, this is just a perfect trip to stay away from the busy days of Jakarta even though it was only for several days. It is our reminder to keep exploring nature in some ways, as there are a lot more to be seen outside, aside from what we're doing on daily basis in Jakarta.

That's all guys for the consecutive posts about Bromo (which took me half of a year to finish it off, ffs) and see you on my next post!

Climbing Mount Ijen and Bromo (part 1) - Baluran National Park

This time I'll be talking about the trip that I had several times ago with my friends, which was a trip of climbing Mount Ijen and Mount Bromo, to be exact. Yes, this was my first mount-climbing experience and hell-yeah it was THAT fulfilling.

Before we proceed, I want to truly apologize for the lack of updates, as I think I didn't have much interesting updates after all from April (besides numerous business trips that I didn't wanna discuss in here, not that interesting anyway) and the most exciting trip that I have during that long period were only this trip; that's worth to be written on the blog. Blame the corporate jobs; or me, for postponing the posts for so long.

Anyway, back to the topic.

This time the trip were quite short and cheap, surprisingly. It took me (us) only 3 days and 2 nights to go to Baluran Park as a side trip, Mount Ijen and Mount Bromo as the main trip. The total cost were roughly IDR 4 million, including round-trip plane from Jakarta-Surabaya, and accommodation: hostel, jeep, climbing guide, driver, everything! FYI we book the tour from the internet; there were so much Bromo-slash-Ijen tour like this available on the net, you can search for it and pick it up based on your needs. Usually it was all in and fuss-free. Please try and happy hunting!

Continue to the post; for the first spot, we went for a night departure from Jakarta, arriving around 12.00 am morning in Surabaya and we took around 6 hours trip via Pantura Line until we arrived at a National Park called Baluran.

Baluran is a quite famous Indonesia's savanna, which park area covers around 25,000 hectares of North Coast of East Java; or so Wikipedia says. And it was very true, as whenever we look on each corner of the park, it was.. savanna. A beautiful one, of course.

Below were the photo I managed to catch just after the dawn, the sky gradation were so pretty.

After the sun were fully rise, it was blazing hot and the sunlight were insanely blinding! The photo didn't do justice on how crazy the sunlight were.

We played around near one landmark around the area and took several photos too.

See? We struggled to keep our eyes open even during one quick shoot! 2 of us brought sunglasses though. Good strategy.

Unfortunately we didn't managed to catch lots of animals there (as what our guide told us it should be). We only catch a herd of deer that moved together from one spot to another, and we couldn't take a good photo of it as it was quite far away from allowable entrance spots.

We only found several wild monkeys playing around, especially on the beach area.

The beach were not quite done yet; it was still under construction by the time we was there. Wish it was done sooner before we reached; too bad that maybe we wouldn't come here again for quite a long time.

Overall, it was a very satisfying view, although as a side note, I feel that this park could have much better maintenance as one of the main attraction around this area. We found that the road to the main spot of the savanna were heavily damaged and not smooth at all, and the rest of the facilities were not as clean as it can be. I hope that they will somewhat improve the condition in the future so that it can attract more both local and international visitors. Finger crossed!

Finish with Baluran, we continue our trip to our hotel to take some rest after a very long and sleepy journey...

The next trip will be directly into the climb of Ijen and Bromo. We do all the climbing around dawn, to catch the sunset around 4-6ish in the morning. It was always quite cloudy at that time we were there, so we couldn't catch a very clear sunset. However it was a beautiful scenery nevertheless. 

As I will definitely post more photos for Ijen/Bromo trip, I need to cut the post here so that It wont get too long and will update the next post very soon, and hopefully no more postponing!

Thank you for reading this one and see you again on the next post!

Welcoming Back Jakarta!

It's another 2 months plus passed without me realizing I haven't had any time at all to update my blog!

It's kinda confusing what to write for around 2 months update (and for every post I make; it's somewhat always the same feelings all over again tho). So, to make complicated things easier, I will start from the reason why I haven't managed to upload so many updates all this time.

For this two months actually have been very busy with all the preparation that I have to do regarding my holiday back home to Indonesia for only 10 days. yeah. 10 FRICKIN DAYS and it passed so fast. The preparation was so longgg ugh. 

But I kinda glad it passed so fast as the one thing that did all the time there was eat. EAT and EAT and EAT. Until the state that I've just finished my lunch and then my mom said, "ok. what's for dinner?". 

PUKE ALL OVER LOL

However thank to my mom's enthusiasm this time I managed to get almost all the food that I really craving for (which is mostly Indonesian food of course!) compared to my holiday last year which only for 7 days. Its not enough.

And I will share it a little bit!! It's like, "fotd" as in "food of the day". hahaha.

Some of the best that I had this time was:

Several menus from Remboelan Resto that I visited in Senayan City.

Grilled Gourami with Peanut Sauce, or "kemiri" in Bahasa Indonesia. Dunno what's that called in English. Despite the color of the sauce, the taste is not as thick as I expected it will be! Dang good!

The usual Lontong Cap Go Meh; not as kickass as the gourami but because I craved for it's coconut milk soup...

and their famous Nasi Bakar or Grilled Rice. They mix boneless fishes with several seasoning that makes this super flavory yet FRICKIN bombastic spicy for my own tongue sake.

Blame the no-chilli tongue for more than 2 years I'm in Japan... I'm getting weaker for all chilli-thingy for sure.

It's daaaaammnn nice but too bad I cannot finish this as it is too spicy for me at that state which I'm scared I'll hurt my throat.

And the sweet closing is granted for their Remboelan's Es Campur (mix ice). What's Indonesian dessert without coconut milk!

HEAVEN. ON EARTH.

move on to the next visited restaurant was the famous Java Kitchen!

Ordered their Nasi Langgi.. I have no idea how to translate this. Langgi Rice?? Sounds so stupid hahahaha better spelled them with their original name..

It's like mixed rice with several toppings which rich on flavoring and seasoning such as omelette, dried shrimp, sauteed potato and chicken etc. My all time favorite!

and SATAAAYYY.

Look at the meat, peanut sauce and the red onion. How fantastic are they. YUMS.

Why the Japanese don't make their satay like this ah BIG FRUSTRATION.

And last but not least,

ordered their Nasi Gudeg.

I don't know how to describe this either. It's damn good. That's it. Sorry, for non Indonesian reader :(

Java Kitchen will always be my favorite place to go if I long for Javanese food.. their quality and taste never change upon times. YES they better keep their taste as good as it is!!

And the final (for this post) restaurant that I had was named Lembur Kuring.

Finally had a flying gourami (deep fried gourami) that i've been wanted all this time!! Taste incredibly crunchy and nice.. ate all it's fin part too as it was THAT crispy. Munch crunch.

Had this vegetable stuffed toufu too..

and their signature shrimp dish. Deep Fried Shrimp with Special Lembur Kuring Sauce which is a mixture of onion, green chilli, and cornflakes (what!).

The spiciness kicked me on the throat though. It's NOT that spicy but it's just that I'm not used to this kind of spiciness anymore so I didn't binge this much. But it was hell nice, can eat the whole pasrt of the shrimp as it was super crispy.

Based only on this post, It seems that my Indonesian food journey is this short, but its not!! Its actually, much much longer than this post. hahahah.

On the other day, I also had some martabak telur and martabak manis..

 

and just now I've just realized I forget to take photos of the sweet martabak one.. It was all swiped clean as soon as we open the box. And now, no photos :(

Oh well.

And on the other day craved and ate this Makassar's signature ice too..called Es Palu Butung.

It's like soft cake-rolled banana with coconut milk soft pudding and sauced with condensed vanilla milk. OH GOD. I wouldn't mind eating this everyday. It's damn niiiiiiceeeee.

And now i've just realized one thing.

Why Indonesian food is not as famous as other country's food.

My theory was concluded from writing this blog in around 30 minutes; 

It's very hard for us Indonesian to describe what's the real taste of Indonesian food as it was too complex to be explained.

Compared to Thai foods, fpr example. All spicy, sour, coconut milk. That's it.

Indonesia? Spicy sour sweet, some bitter yet nice, some smell so strong yet it sweet. and dozens of textures to complete all of that. How can you describe that? Words are not enough. Have to taste it ourselves.

Then how can we force all foreigner to try Indonesian food if we can't describe it very well?? BIG PROBLEM.

Oh well, It's only my theory though. I'm hoping that all the people in this world can taste how AMAZING Indonesian food was. (And that's the reason I kept bringing Indomie to all my Japanese friends here!)

Aaaaaaaandddd.... I think that's the closing for this post. Will post again about several foods that I had during my holiday on the next post as I suppose it will be too long for them to be tightened to only one post.

Thanks for reading!