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!

Sailor Moon Exhibition in Roppongi - Tokyo 2016

On this June 17^th I had the chance to go back in time and had a severe nostalgia time in the Sailor Moon Exhibition located in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo. This event was only celebrated for such a short time (for only 2 months I guess) so the hype was quite big.

To be honest I was ONCE a big fan of Sailor Moon however I grow up and blah blah so many things happened and suddenly it disappeared from my childhood without me knowing it. But then I went here.... The moment I saw all of the things shown on the exhibition there, it literally KICK MY HEAD OFF back to my childhood memories, damn, damn, hard.

“DAMN Yolanda, such a stupid of you for growing up...”

Said me to myself for the whole 3 hours there...

It was located on the 52^th floor of Mori Tower where they usually have art exhibition there. The entrance fee itself was not that cheap, 1800 yen for one adult.

I remember there are several sections for the exhibition:

• The main hall where they show the main artwork created by Naoko Takeuchi, the mangaka (“comic artist”) for the exhibition included several displayed knick-knacks from the past, and photo spot on the center for those who interested.
• The area that shows chronological story of Sailor Moon from the first publicity, short movie area.
• The display area for several manga sketches, toys and merchandise from the past and present, such as dolls, wands, action figures.
• Main Photo Spot.
• Artwork display plus a monitor that plays Sailor Moon songs from the past anime again and again (and I stunned there for more than 15 minutes just to hear the song and chill as in having goosebumps all over again)
• Another artwork display area that shows mostly the real artwork for this exhibition which is AWESOME.
• Shop area.

Unfortunately most of the area here were “no-photos area”, except the main hall and the photo spot area. Well, privilege for those who paid to get in!

However will keep to try my best to show you all what I see and what I managed to take.

The first thing were the main hall. The main hall was huge and the first thing I saw was all of the artwork hanged with Tokyo View seen from 52th floor as the background.

Even Usagi was like summoning the Tokyo Tower here.

Right in the middle of the main hall was the first photo spot,

and next to it was this SUUUPER BIG and PRETTY main artwork for this exhibition.

OMG. I want to take it home. Kill me.

Circling the main figures of the room were these glass-sealed knicks-knacks, several old comic books and everything else here.  

Really want the Luna and Artemis cushion so bad..

And what made me go super ga-ga was these several display of Sailor Moon merchandise scattered around the room such as this Cosmic Heart Brooch,

And this Spiral Heart Rod,

And this bad-ass Rainbow Moon Chalice.

And guess what??? I have those at my home back there in Jakarta!!! Directly contact my mom to not throw all my toys away back home as maybe someday I can auction it big on Yahoo and make a fortune out of it hehehe.

Continued from the main hall were the "no-photo" spots that I have mentioned above. It was amazing to see all the incredible sketches and artworks shown; how can one person can make such  pretty artwork by herself. Admire Naoko Takeuchi to the top. The only photo that I can take was this:

With Takeuchi's real autograph there. 

Besides the sketches and artwork (that I can never make even if I practice til I die) section, what excites me the most was the display of several toys and collectibles from the past. The funny thing is that on each every section of the exhibition I always found my toys here and there, literally everywhere! I’m going crazy as like “OMG I have this before wtf!” or “Oh gosh where did I put this card?!?! I used to have it I’m sure” or “OMG OMG I die I die I have this one played like crazy before” and so on and so on..

Such a tiring but exciting but sad but satisfying whole 3 hours of my life.

And the most satisfying photo spot was this 2 real-size figure of Usagi and Mamoru or known too as Princess Serenity and Prince Endymion here (full geek mode completely on here).

Gotta take selfies.

Scream. 

Too bad that my selfie was the last photo that I can post here as I don’t have any more photos to be posted related to the exhibition contents. Yes, the exhibition was quite strict about photo taking as they place several officers here and there to guard the visitor from recording or taking photos. 

Since I went there 2 days before the last day of the exhibition, most of the limited items that can be brought from the shop were completely sold out, I managed to buy only several post cards with the exhibition original artwork for quite a price. Japanese really know how to make me go bankrupt.

They have the Chibiusa Café too with super cute menus displayed however since the queue was very long, I didn’t went there. It was quite tempting you know. Who's not tempted with pink burgers wtf. Can see it slightly here.

Well, overall, it was such an enjoyable and memorable visit for me as all of the images and things displayed there still sit firmly on my head even until now.

I’m glad I went there as actually on the day before this visit, had quite a lot of overtime and kind of have to push myself to go here that day, but I’m so happy I can drag my ass off here and have a fantastic nostalgia time for a moment; reminding me of how blessed and happy I am as a kid years ago (and glad too that my mom bought me so much toys at that time.. seriously.)

Sailor Moon, thank you for making my childhood awesome and I promise I will make my adulthood even better. It’s time to take those moon power back to reality, and continuing my present life, more hopeful and powerful than before.

See you on my next post!

Kawagoe Strolling

Last time I had my company training in around Saitama area and right after completing our training, me and several of my friends decided to take a stroll around an area called Kawagoe, which is famous for its Edo style preserved buildings environment. During that Edo period, this town was an important commercial resource to Tokyo that it grew so wealthy more than the other town.

We stopped on a station called “Kawagoe” (川越) and then we walked around 15-20 minutes to the center of the old town of Kawagoe called the “Warehouse District” which apparently has the strongest Edo-style buildings environment.

My bad was, at that time, my friends lead us all the way so I kinda didn’t remember how we got there, but all I knew was that he took a map from the station and directly followed the instruction there based on my research on web, apparently it was much more closer to a station called “Kawagoeshi” (川越市) and its just a walk straight to the Warehouse District. However, since there are so many shops along the road to the warehouse district, we enjoyed the 20 minute walk a lot.

Even they have some branded shops there such as Zara, Starbucks etc. Wtf. Talking about building-style generation gap. Hahahah.

Walking the roads, we can see the building style changed from modern to Edo-style buildings slowly. Kinda have that feeling of creepiness (I know I played horror games too much).

Some shops were so old style we don’t even know whether it is operating or just standing there doing nothing...

Reaching the main spot, we slowly felt that the crowd were increasing, and we know we’re on the right track.

I think the Warehouse District starts from the famous bean shops here.

They sell all kind of Japanese style beans with several flavour such as Kinako which appears to be the most famous one, matcha, chocolate, and several more that I even can’t remember. We can bring around our toothpick gave by the shop assistant, walk around the store and try all the samples that were put on the trays. It’s like, bean buffet. Eat all the beaaaaansss.

Not just eating of course, I brought some beans back home and it cost around 500-700 yen per box. They sell other items too such as chips etc however their beans seems like the famous one, so I didn’t bother to look at the other stuff beside beans.

Continue.

We keep strolling around the area, found one cute Hello Kitty store. 

Since I went with 3 guys, my visit here was less than 10 minutes. I keep walking inside the store and they be like, already standing in front of the store waiting for me with their “C'mon we have to continue” face without mercy. Bah.

But it was quit reasonable. It was around 4 at that time and most of the stores there start closing around 5, so we kinda have to walk faster to explore all of the best spots.

From there, we just walk strolling around the road and visited several stores with less than 5 minutes each inside.

And we reached the candy alley (at least that’s what they called in the website) ! They sell all the very old style Japanese sweets, and, weird toys.

They have the weighed candy spot where I can put all the flavoured candy that I want in one bag. It cost around 200 yen for 100 gr. Quite exciting. But sorry I didn’t take any photos of it.

This is the continuance of the candy alley, marked with several stores selling the same style candies and Japanese traditional foods. And we found several coffee shops, bread store, and hotels.

My friends were fascinated by all the koi fishes inside the pond outside a random restaurant. They look at these boring things and won’t let me look at the Hello Kitty longer. Booo.

And here we are, reached the main spot, the landmark of Kawagoe, the Bell Tower! The tower was rebuilt in 1984 after a fire destroyed it on 1983.

And just beside the Bell Tower, there was a shop that sells best-ever taro flavour Ice cream that I ever taste in my life. At first I hesitated to buy but after I ate it, I swear it was the best thing ever.

And sadly to say, my taro-flavored ice cream marked the end of our journey. Since it was already 6 plus and most of the store were closing down, we decided to walk back to Kawagoe Station and take a train back home to Tokyo.

It was an exciting short trip after all! Escaping all the city lights and crowds from Tokyo. Enjoying a different environment once in a while is definitely my one way, or, our way to release the city stress a little bit. Maybe I won’t be back here again for a near time, or, maybe never again, since there were still so much of the cities in Tokyo that worth to be explored. However, this city didn’t fail to leave great memories I cannot forget and I will keep looking forward to be back here again someday.