Java, Indonesia: The temples

As promised, here is the first part of the more detailed travel report. After arriving in Surabaya, Java we wanted to get somehow to Yogyakarta where the two famous temples Borobudur and Prambanan (both UNESCO world heritage) are. The problem is that public transport in Indonesia is not as comfortable and reliable as in Singapore. So we had to skip the initial plan (taking a train) and took a minibus. After bargaining, eating and exchanging money it was at least 6pm when we left Surabaya. The traffic was quite dense and we advanced much slower than we expected, so we had to change our plans once more. This time we skipped the night in Yogyakarta and we got directly to Borobudur. We arrived there at around 2am and it was completely dark and deserted there. So we lay down on the sidewalk and tried to get at least 1 or 2 hours of sleep...

The advantage of arriving so early was that we were the first to enter the temple area at that day. We decided to book a guide who could explain us some things about the temple - and he was really great. He told us a lot about the history of the temple and the meaning of the different parts in Buddhism. The temple was built in the 9th century (so it's more than thousand years old) as a shrine for Buddha and a pilgrimage site. It consits of 6 square platforms (representing the earthly life with desire), 3 round platforms (representing the 3 stages of heaven) and a big central stupa on top (representing the nirvana). The base of the monument is about 120x120m and it is about 35m high. On each level there a numerous carving mostly telling stories of the life of Buddha. The whole building is very impressive and it is stunning how well preserved most of the carvings are. But I think you can see the dimesions of the building yourself on the pictures.

After Borobudur we went to the other temple, Prambanan. So we took a bemo to get there. A bemo is something like a cab but in the size of a minibus. It was perfect for us because we could just fit into it with eigth persons. That's why it shouldn't be the last bemo ride of our trip...

The temple Prambanan is equally impressive as Borobudur. Prambanan was built in the 9th century as well but it is a Hindu temple. The shape is very different from Borobudur and there are numerous small temples which haven't been reconstructed yet. Actually the whole temple was a giant jigsaw puzzle when it was rediscovered. Most of the buildings were collapsed and all the stone blocks had to be put together in the right order again... Unfortunately the monument suffered severe damage in the earthquake of 2006 - that's why the direct surroundings of the large temples are still closed off. Each of the three buildings is a shrine dedicated to one of the three Hindu gods: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Keeper, and Shiva the Destroyer. I have to admit that I don't remember many of the details the guide told us. It was very hot in the high noon sun and we all could feel the lack of sleep.

We stayed there for around an hour, then we had to hurry a bit to get to Yogyakarta. The rest of the day was consumed by finding a money changer, finding a place to eat and getting to the airport. But finally we managed and we could catch our plane to Denpassar, Bali.

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.

Chinese dairy products

Probably you remember my breakfast habits and you got to know the recent food scandal in China about contaminated dairy products. Actually so far four babies in China died and many more have severe health problems. Since I read about it even in the German media I decided to check the milk I drink every day.

These are the results:
- the milk is from China
- the dairy company is Yili, which has been mentioned in some news articles as well
- the product "Yili pure milk (250ml)" is actually contaminated with traces of melamin
- the level is about 2.2ppm
- I would have to drink 77l of milk per day to reach the tolerable daily intake (TDI)

Conclusion:
I'm not in immediate danger of getting kidney problems, but I will probably change the brand of milk I am drinking. The problem will be to find milk in Singapore which is not made in China. I will have to hang around the milk department of the super market for quite a while next time...

[Update:]
Since all Chinese milk products have now been banned in Singapore I decided to switch the milk brand immediately. I hope that the milk from a Singaporean dairy company is not tainted... (I never saw any cows in Singapore...)

P.S.: I will be in Java and Bali for the next week. So you can look forward to nice pictures on my blog...

Mid Autumn Festival

The Mid Autumn Festival is a traditional Chinese festival which takes place in autumn. (Since the date is calculated due to the moon calendar it varies from year to year). A Chinese friend here told me that you traditionally eat Moon Cake (special pastry), light lanterns and get together with friends and family. So we decided to get to know some local traditions and go to the Lantern Festival (the Singaporean term for it) in Chinese Garden.

The festival there was a bit bigger than expected. The first thing we had to do was to queue for some tickets. But eventually we got in and could admire the place. The main attraction were all the illuminated figures and statues. The motto this year was "F8 Hello Kitty Go Races" - so you can imagine which figures you could see. Apart from that there were many little attractions for children, food stalls and different craftsmen. We could as well watch a group of Chinese artists performing a kind of dragon dance.

But except for the dragon dance we couldn't find anything like traditional customs, the festival resambled rather a fair. We agreed that the whole thing is exaggeratedly colourful - sometimes the colours really hurt in your eyes. But we really missed the traditional flavour. It seemed all very commercial and plastic-like. So my conclusion is: Interesting to see but you don't really miss much if you don't. But anyway I could take some nice pictures. (Okay the HDR isn't really nice - I try to do it better when I have time)

MRT Pub Crawl

On Wednesday was the first big and organized event for exchange students in Singapore. I think compared to other exchange destinations here is a lack of those events. So I didn't hesitate for a long time and took - together with ~510 other exchange students - part in the MRT Pub Crawl. The aim was to meet at the most Western MRT Station (Boon Lay) and than take the MRT (that's the name of the underground trains here) together to the city centre. Okay that sounds pretty boring up to now.

But it gets very funny, when you do the following:
- everybody wears the same (bright orange) T-shirt.
- you get off at several stops in between and go to a coffee shop to drink some beer (it's strictly prohibited to drink in the MRT trains here)
- meet exchange students of all the different universities of S'pore
- flood some super markets with an orange crowd
- write funny messages on the T-shirts of the others

While riding the trains we split up into groups of around 50 people so that the public transport didn't collapse. At the last stop we finally all met in a club and partied until it closed. We drank a lot and had a lot of fun - the whole event was really a big success. Please don't ask me about the girl standing in front of me on the last pictures. I really don't remember if I talked to her or if the picture is just coincidence. (I assume the latter)

Bintan, Indonesia

Last Weekend it was about time to visit another island and in fact another country. This time the destination of our journey was Bintan, Indonesia. Bintan is an island nearly twice as big as Singapore and reachable within an hour's ferry ride. However the population is with about 120,000 slightly lower compared to S'pore... Even if the island belongs politically to Indonesia the culture and the language there is mainly Malay.

We started the trip Friday morning (no courses on Friday :-) in a group of four exchange students. The weather wasn't very promising - it was very cloudy and slightly raining. We didn't let us bother by it and took a cab to Tanah Merah (not to confuse with Guantanamera) ferry terminal. From there left our ferry to Bintan Resort, that is a privately owned tourist resort on Bintan. At the boarder we got our first real visa - looks very nice and costs 10US$ (!). But of course we didn't stay in that kind of resort - we wanted to see the "real" island. So we took a cab and within another hour ride we arrived at Mutiara Beach Guesthouse, which is situated on the famous Trikora Beach (well at least famous in Idonesia).

The first impression was really amazing - there were only few little wooden houses in the midst of hundreds of palm trees. We were welcomed very friendly by the staff and each of us got a freshly opened coconut as welcome drink. We liked the place at once! Our bedok (chalet) was simple but very nice. It was basicaly a little wooden house on poles with a straw roof and the walls were made of a kind of reed. The bathroom was in another little house and there was electricity only from 6pm to 10pm. It was not very comfortable but we liked it very much because it had a very original atmosphere. After moving into our new home we had a look at the beach and it was even better - kilometres of lonely, white sandy beach in front of a light blue sea. In fact there were only two other bedoks and one kelong (a floating house) belonging to this guesthouse - so the place was really solitary. We mainly passed the day with eating, lying on the beach and swimming in the sea. The weather wasn't exactly sunny but nice enough to enjoy all that. We could only find on bad thing: mosquitos and sand flies. The mosquitos were only active in the evening but the sand flies (very tiny flies living in the sand) bit you at every time of day. So we had to use plenty of mosquito repellent...

The next day the rest of our group arrived (they had some classes on Friday they couldn't skip). They stayed of course at the beach, but we four wanted to go to Tanjung Pinang, the biggest town on Bintan - I think most of the population is living there. A friend of our host brought us there and explained us quite a lot about the place. After an hour ride in the car (everything seems to take one hour) we reached the centre of Tanjung Pinang. We took a walk trough the streets which seemed to be a single huge market. They were selling everything there - from clothes (faked brands of course) via fuel in bottles (!) to all kinds of food. It was very crowed with pedestrians, cyclists and motor scooter riders. The atmosphere was really very different from Singapore and we felt like animals in a zoo because everybody was gazing at us. Apart from the exhaust fumes of the motor bikes there were power generators running in front of every shop - so the air was kind of dirty. Apparently the power grid is not very reliable there... When we had enough of the city our "driver" took us to a nice seafood restaurant. We wanted to invite him to join us but he had to fast because of Ramadan. The food there was really excellent - we ordered prawns, scallops and a two crabs. It wasn't exactly cheap but I think in S'pore you had to pay much more. The payment got a bit embarrasing because we counted the money wrongly - the many zeros are very confusing... After that we headed back for our guesthouse to enjoy the rest of the day at the sea.

In the evening there was another highlight: Barbeque at the beach. All the guest, our group and 4 other people, gathered near the beach and the staff prepeared a nice barbeque with chicken and fish for us. We sat there for a long time, chatting (the others were very nice) and drink beer and wodka (duty free). Since the generator broke down the only light sources were 2 kerosene lamps - very romantic! :-)

We passed the Sunday again at the sea. We went snorkeling (I spotted a little stingray!), jumped off the kelong, fooled around in the water and took a nap under the palm trees. In the afternoon we had to head back for Singapore. The whole trip was again absolutely superb. Apparantely we alway choose the right places. The only flaw is that the sand fly bites still itch and that I got a little sun burned on the last day.

Spiderman...

Today I have to report a very funny thing... Yesterday morning my room mate left the room earlier than me to get to his lectures. When I left the room I locked it properly, of course. When I was sitting in my lecture (the late one, you know), I got the following SMS:

My room mate was locked out because he forgot to take his key card with him. But luckily he had a creative idea to get back into our room:


It is not exactly dangerous, but our room is on the 4th floor after all...

Now to the really funny (and a bit embarrassing) part: This morning I just went to get a shower when my room mate was about to leave. I didn't switch on my brain so I - wearing only a boxer shorts - took just a towel and my washing stuff with me. When I came back from the shower... the door was LOCKED. So I was standing in front of my room in the described attire and had no means to contact my room mate! The next thing I tried was to knock at my neigbours' doors to ask them if I could climb over the balcony... but nobody opened the door. Now I was really getting a bit helpless. Several ideas popped into my mind but all of them were doomed due to my appearance. So I tried knocking another time and luckily one of my neighbours opened. In fact he was the same one who let my room mate climb over yesterday. I had to promise him that this was really the last time but the climbing it self was a piece of cake (so much for burglar-proofness...). Anyway it ended good and I don't have to spend the whole day sitting in boxer shorts in front of my room...