We're Not On Bali Anymore!

It’s been a while. The town we’ve been in for the past 4 days did not have internet connection. We are currently in the town of Malang, Java. A “small” town of 700,000 people or so in the Eastern reginon Java. It actually isn’t that bad for how many people are here.

Our crossing from Bali to Java was uneventful, but it was a long day, and landing on Java we immediately knew we weren’t on Bali anymore (duh, that’s cause we just left Bali…). What I mean, is, Java, being the island that holds over 60% of the population of Indonesia, is not dependent on tourism. What this means is that they don’t all speak English! Can you believe the nerve! Just kidding. Glad we bought a phrasebook. Now we can ask questions and not understand the answers. So getting to our main destination brought some frustrations, and a good schooling in how the public bus transportation works and how to not have to pay more than the locals (which we did of course…arghhh).

The main destination being Cemeru Lawang (or Bromo as they all call it), which is a cute little mountain village located right on the edge of a HUGE caldera. Inside the crater of this volcano, is several other mountains…all of which are pretty active, and the smallest of which is Mt Bromo. Argh. This is so hard to explain. It is such a weird setting. Flat, flat sea of sand inside the crater with 3-4 mountains poking out of it. The locals drive you all over the sand sea to the base of Bromo, which you “climb” up (walk up stairs), and stare down into a sulfur inferno. You need to see the pictures to understand, but this connection is terrible, and I’ll be lucky to get these words posted. The main tourist activity is to hire a jeep and get driven to a viewpoint overlooking the whole wasteland to watch the sunrise. We walked up to the viewpoint the first day (starting the walk at 3:00 AM!), but were covered in clouds, so hired a jeep the next day and got some nice views.

It was a lovely village to relax in, and take the occasional walk. Very mountainous, with farming everywhere. Every hillside is covered in either potato, onion, or cabbage fields. And some of these fields are STEEP. These people work so hard. Carrying everything on their backs - even the grass to feed the cows and horses. We've got some great pics we'll post one of these days. And being up high, it was cool (as in lower temps)! We were actually a touch cold at night. Ahhhhh.

Now we are a bit further west in a town called Malang . From here we'll go to some more small mountain side towns, and in between the rain showers try to get some walks/hikes in. It's not likely we'll have loads of internet connection options, so don't worry if you don't hear from us for a while.

Does everyone know that in less than two weeks, we'll be traveling with BOTH of my parents through Thailand?? Yes, my dad is going too. Hooray! I'll let them do the blog postings for that month. :)

Merry Christmas! They set up the funniest looking Christmas tree at the last place we were staying. It looked like a bunch of droopy tropical branches in a bucket with lights on it. Not a lot of talk about Christmas here obviously, but most of the hotels try to do some kind of decorating for the "Westerners".

All right, signing off for now....