Java & Bali, Indonesia

Last week was recess week in NTU. The purpose of that week is to recess the lecture contents and to finish some assignments... But for exchange students this means just a week off where you can travel to the neighbouring countries! So we (the usual group of eight exchange students) decided to pass our week on Java and Bali.
We planned our trip not as beach holidays and amusement in Bali but rather as a challenging backpacker trip. Our schedule was quite tight and sometimes it resembled rather a race than vacation... but we experienced a lot! I think our experiences would be sufficient for a 2 or 3 week trip. :-) That's why I don't write the whole report in one posting (too tedious for me), but I will split it up in several postings with many pictures. ;-) Together we took about 2000 pictures (4GB) - so the whole trip is almost completely documented. In the first posting I will write an outline of the whole trip - where we have been and how we got there. I attatched a map where I marked all the places we have been. The red lines mean travelling by bus/minbus/bemo, yellow lines travelling by plane and the green lines travelling by boat/ferry. In the whole we travelled 4,250 km in this week, which is an average of 700km per day... ;-) Okay most of it accounts to the flights to and from Singapore but the rest was quite a big distance as well.


We arrived on Saturday afternoon in Surabaya, Java from there we wanted to take a private cab (9 seater) to Yogyakarta (~8 hours). On the half way we decided to go directly to Borobodur and to skip the night in the hostel - the night would have been very short anyway. So we visited Borobudur (ancient Buddhist temple) in the early morning and Prambanan (ancient Hindu/Bhuddist temple) in the late morning. Then we went to Yogyakarta and in the evening we took a domestic flight to Denpassar, Bali.
We stayed one night in Denpassar and travelled further to Ubud the next morning. We did a small round trip around Ubud and stayed there for one night. The next day we left Ubud in the late morning a made our way via Gilimanuk to Banjuwangi, Java (Sounds complicated but a bus trip from Yogyakartar to Banjuwangi would be longer and much more exhausting).
We stayed there for one night in a hostel and climbed up the active volcano Kawah Ijen the early morning. In the afternoon we made all the way back to Denpassar by bus and took a bemo (kind of big cab) to Kuta. Since all of us considered Kuta as awful we went on to Sanur after half an hour.
Finally we stayed two days in Sanur and had a bit of relaxing at the beach as well as a snorcheling trip to Pulau Lembongan. On Friday evening we had to catch the plan from Denpassar back to Singapore.

As I already mentioned, the trip was not really relaxing - all the traveling could get very tiring sometimes. But no matter how sleepy and exhausted we were, we always had a lot of fun together. Adding this to the unique experiences especially on Java made this trip really great and very impressive. My conclusion is that Indonesia is a great country and I don't mind that I will come back to Bali again in December.