What to Eat in Disneysea (or What WE Eat in Disneysea)

Just so you know that last month I have this amazing chance to go to Disneysea again!! It’s not a big surprise really, as maybe this was already my 5^th or 6^th trip there however this is kinda more special as it was the first time I went there with my brother! It was quite an achievement at least for me, as this year, I managed to bring one family member to my most favorite place on earth (currently) and hopefully I can bring my mom and dad too. Hopefully next year?

However! This time I would like to focus on what kind of stuffs we ate there. Disneysea is quite famous for their food, either heavy foods or finger foods, and bringing my brother definitely gave me chances to try them all especially some of the famous one, as we can share some of the foods together (and a growing lil boy’s stomach is bigger means more variety of food that we can try).

So here we go!

The 1^st food that we tried is this 3 Little Green Men Mochi from Toy Story.

Price: 380 yen
Location: not fixed, around Toy Story area until Barnacle Bill’s (still inside American Waterfront Area)

*At the same time, introducing my lil bro, which will be the model for some of the photos.

You know that usually cute stuff didn’t follow with good taste; however this is the best dessert mocha that I have ever had in Japan! 3 pieces of soft and cute green mochi with generous vanilla, strawberry and chocolate filling. The trickiest part of this cute mocha is that the wagon location is somewhat keep changing. I usually found it in front of Toy Story area (around  2 times), and most of the times I didn’t find it at all (maybe sold out), but this time we found it in the front of Barnacle Bill’s wagon, it was right before the big bridge to Port Discovery area. We were lucky enough to notice a long queue in front of a wagon and bam! We saw that the green men was being sold was and directly queuing for it. Yumyum.

Finished with The Green Man, we went for a wagon called Seaside Snack to hunt for our 2^nd food called Ukiwah Bun.

Price: 500 yen

Location: Seaside Snack Wagon in Port Discovery

This is a swim-ring shaped shrimp filling bun that wrapped in a cute swimming Donald wrapper. The filling is quite a lot, and the bun is very soft. I read good reviews about this, and we can't deny it. It was pleasant and fulfilling. However me and my bro agreed that this was not the best food that we had here. There are some seats available around the wagon, allowing you to enjoy the bun and the pleasant view from this area.

After this, we didn’t find so much good stuffs around Lost River Delta, so we just continued our way for lunch in Arabian Coast, as we were quite starving at that time.

Our 3^rd food is our lunch, which is Curry Sets. If I remember correctly, it was available in Chicken, Fish, Beef and Combination of those 3.

Price: varies from 600-800 yen.

Location: Casbah Food Court in Arabian Coast

We ordered 2 Chicken Curry Sets (780 yen each), Salad (350 yen) and Original Lassi (350 yen), totaling 2,260 yen. We notice that the chicken cut was quite big, and the curry was delicious. What we curious about is the double carbs in one set as it have both rice and roti prata altogether (What’s wrong with Japanese and double carb, they eat ramen with rice too...).  Apologize for not taking proper photos, as we were both ravenous at that time we just remembered to take photos when our food was already damaged haha.

That lunch last for a good 2 hours more or less, and we continued to our 4^th food, which is Potato Churros, since my bro asked for one.

Price: 380 yen

Location: Churros Wagon in Mysterious Island

The least food that we liked here. As it was potato churros, the taste resembles French fries however this is like the big version of it, and the texture is softer than regular churros. However since it was quite a unique kind of churros, this is worth to try too. Maybe some of you will like it?

Since my and my bro were not satisfied enough with this churros, we went straight for our 5^th food, which is Cotton Candy Churros.

*Last photo so blur, forgive me

Price: 380 yen

Location: Open Sesame Wagon, in front of Sindbad’s Storybook Voyage attraction.

This churros is better than the potato version, and it was saluted with purplish sugar which taste like cotton candy (they said). This version of Churros is limited as it was part of the 35^th year celebration of Disneysea at that time. I assume that the wagon will be selling original churros when there’s no event of it. This was nice and we liked it!

Nearby the wagon is the Sultan Oasis area, which is like a small cafeteria that sells some snack. That’s where we buy our 6^th and 7^th food at the same time:

Easter 2018 version of Chandu’s Tail

Price: 500 yen

Location: Sultan Oasis Cafeteria

Chandu’s tail is one of the infamous foods in Disneysea, and this time they serve it Easter Special with pink ribbons (I can’t figure out what’s the form actually, rabbit?) and curry fillings. The normal version one has chicken cream fillings and orange in color with black stripes, but I liked the curry version as well. Should be considered one of the best food in Disneysea.

Vanilla Smoothie and Coffee Jelly Drink

Price: 500 yen

Location: Sultan Oasis Cafeteria

The vanilla smoothie taste like regular milk shake with coffee jelly toppings and choco powder. What I like is that it was not as sweet as I expected, and it balances well with the Chandu’s Tail. Perfect for hot summer weather. Oh, and this is the specials for 35^th Celebration Food too!

Not stopping there, before we went for our final show in Mediterranian Harbor, we went for snacks that will accompany us to watch the show:

8^th food: Garlic Shrimp Popcorn

Oh helloooo, Nemo!

Price: 350 yen

Location: Mermaid Lagoon

We are tempted to buy this because of the MSG aroma that lingers around Mermaid Lagoon, which area we have to pass in order to go to the Mediterranian Harbor. Couldn’t complain anything about the taste as it was good! Just FYI, the Curry Popcorn in Arabian Coast is much more famous compared to this one, however this time I’d prefer this one to try.

9^th Food: Gyoza Dog

Price: 500 yen

Location: Nautillus Galley

This one, I think, was the best bun that Disneysea’s have. It was a looong bun with lotsa gyoza filling, and most of the people hunted this bun a lot that they decided to move the selling place to a bigger area which is the Nautillus Galley. Since it IS big, I think this should be enough for dinner for most of the people.They have a lot of signage of this Gyoza Dog around Mysterious Island so I think it will be hardly missed. Nautillus Galley itself are quite hidden, as you need to go downstairs to get to the café.

Aaaaand that Gyoza Dog became our closing food that we ate in Disneysea. Since we are NOT like most people, in the end we went to convenience store around our hotel too to grab a very proper late dinner which was around 23.30.

Like I said before, I never had the chance to eat THIS MUCH before as usually I went there with my girl friends, which usually were not a good foodies. However, with my brother and his deep stomach pit, it was glorious! We got the chance to eat most of it and realize we spent 6,130 yen or around IDR 800.000 for all of this. Expensive, indeed, but all in all it was worth the experience! And taste, of course.

I can proudly say that most of the stuff that we ate here are some of the top items that people usually hunting for, so feel free to note them, hunt them on your next trip to Disneysea and share your thoughts!

Tips: don’t forget to take Entertainment & Information called “Today” Brochure when you take the Guide Map in front of the gate, as it has all of the information especially limited edition goods, foods, and special parade according to the event during your visit.

See you on the next post!

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 2) - Ijen

Sorry for a little bit of postponement from the last post however here I am! As promised, I'll be continuing my post especially for the main part here; which is the climb of Mount Ijen.

On the last post, I left with the trip from Baluran National Park straight to the lodge that I'm sleeping in. It took us around 2 hours (or 1? kinda forgot) to our lodge; which was only 30 minutes away from the start gate of Ijen's climbing point. 

We're staying only for 1 day, as we slept mostly on daylight instead at night, and at midnight we go straight for Ijen climbing. We arrived around 10.00 am at the lodge, bathe and slept, and play around until it reached 01.00 am where we finally took off for the climb.

We were told that it was "only" 3-3.5 kms of trip to the top of the mountain from the starting gate, and we thought that it should be not that hard for us beginners to climb, but HELL I WAS SO WRONG. 

Yes, the distance were not as frightening as it sounds but the degree of the steepness in each hill were so excruciating. It took us several times stopping on the edge of the road just to catch our breath. Just after the climb we just knew that Ijen were quite famous for its 45 degrees hill steepness, which even quite challenging for experienced climbers. Not to mention that the texture of the road were mostly sand, making it twice more slippery than average wet soil.

It was a definitely a heaven-or-hell moment during the climb, but guess what? The view is so worth the pain. By the way it took us 3 hours plus hiking from the bottom to the top of Mount Ijen.

Below were a little glimpse of the sunrise we took before it was fully morning.

The gradation of the sky were so perfect. One thing which was unfortunate was that when we were there it was a little bit cloudy thus we can't see and catch the sunrise very clear; we only managed to take several photos and in no time it was suddenly bright morning. 

Actually, as most of you already know too (maybe), that in Ijen it was not only the mountain that's incredible in sight, however there are 2 more spots: the Blue Fire, which is a crate that fumes eternal blue-colored fire as a reaction from the sulphur combustion reacting with oxygen; and another one is the Ijen Lake, which is its famous acidic lake.

However since it took another 45 minutes to hike down the crate to see the Blue Fire and I kinda can't stand the sulphuric smell, I gave up on that one and decided to just wait on the top of the mountain waiting for the sunrise.

Below were the photo of the blue fire which I got from my friends who went there.

Can't see much since it was very foggy that day, and WORST we can't even see Ijen Lake just behind. Oh well.

From there me and one of my friends took several more photos while we wait for the rest to come back from the blue fire. It was quite freezing at the top (around 7-8 degree-ish celsius feeling) but hell yeah anything for the photo, we will endure!

The crowd within the road to and from Ijen:

Since the sun were fully risen and it was getting hot (and I heard that it was more dangerous to stay for long during the day due to the sulphuric smell), we decided to went back to the hotel (with another 1 hour plus for the hiking-down trip). Our guide took us several more photos for us before we go back to the gate and finish our Ijen round-trip hike.

The main gate at morning, as a closing for our trip:

Now, for overall impression on Ijen: it was VERY VERY SATISFYING, even for a beginner like me. The pain during the climb were totally incomparable with the satisfaction for reaching the top, rewarded with breath-taking scenery and vast skies inviting to be captured. It was even still very memorable until the point when I write this blog post. It was challenging, yet super rewarding.

The only thing that annoyed us very much were the way the sand and the sulfuric smell stuck in our clothes; it took us forever to clean those shitty little pieces. After finish cleaning up, we slept like a dead meat for a while and continued our trip (as in sleeping in the car) to the next lodge where we will stay for our next climb to Mt Bromo.

I think that's all for the Ijen's climb (before it gets too long), and I'll see you again on the final post of my mountain climbing trip which is about Mt Bromo!

Thank you for reading and see you on the 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!