The Underwater World of Jacques (Daron) Cousteau.....(transferred from my old "Ikyosan" blog from september 2009)

Indonesia is a land where the things that can kill you are nearly too numerous to mention. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, bombs, spiders small enough not to see, but poisonous enough to end your life, snakes, monitor lizards that can detach their jaws to swallow you whole and actual, real life dragons. So with this in mind I thought I’d head below the waters for a holiday.

Most of the other teachers at EF were heading for Bali or the Gili Islands for the Idul Fitri break (The end of Ramadan has a public holiday to celebrate the end of fasting) but I wasn’t really interested in going somewhere so touristy. What I wanted after 5 months teaching was a completely relaxing holiday away from the masses and the thought for this came from a conversation with two of the teachers, Jeff and Chloe.

Jeff and Chloe along with two departed teachers had been to an island called Pulau Weh off the North coast of Sumatra at Christmas and done their PADI Open Water Scuba Diver course. This to me seemed like a perfect idea. I’d seen the pictures and the island is pretty remote with the only people really going there to dive, so about 8 weeks ago I booked the ticket.

As it’s a national holiday and I’d left it until relatively the last minute, the air tickets were quite expensive at 2 million rupeah (£125) for the return. I reckon if I’d booked a few weeks earlier I’d have got it for half that. Anyway, three weeks before departure a new teacher arrived at EF. Lucy Hiscocks is from Bristol and is already qualified to Advanced Open Water level and once she knew I was diving asked if she could join me.

So it was that on the 19th September we had a taxi arrive to pick us up at the house for the journey to the airport. We were booked on the 9.05 flight from Jakarta on Java to Banda Aceh on Sumatra with a short stop in the Sumatran capital of Medan to pick up/drop off passengers before catching a connecting ferry to Pulau Weh island.

Arriving at the airport around 7.20 we discovered on entering the departure lounge that the flight was delayed for 2 hours and this quickly progressed to 7 hours! The culmination of this was that instead of arriving in Banda Aceh with sufficient time to catch the 4pm ferry to the island of Pulau Weh, we were now going to have to find a hotel in Banda and leave the following day. This was to prove relatively easy but the first 3 hotels we tried were full and you get that little “Mary and Joseph” feeling that you’re going to be spending the night in the open air. (I should point out that the Mary and Joseph analogy is used for effect, Lucy and I are neither a couple or pregnant with the next Messiah). Checking into the 100 rupeah a night twin bedded fourth hotel, we dumped the bags and headed out to grab some food and were delighted with the chicken sate with lontong and sauce.

The taxi that brought us the 45 minutes from the airport had charged us 70,000 (£4.50) and seemed pretty reasonable so we agreed to a pick up to the ferry terminal for 100,000 the following morning. This was immediately cancelled when we found the chancer was overcharging us by 60,000! And again so it was that a great guy called Evan picked us up and gave us his card for the return when we got back to Banda Aceh a week later. I must mention his business card which had a picture of a beautifully sleek Mercedes SLK on it. I can only assume this was his other car because the one he arrived to pick us up in was a battered old Toyota with ill fitting doors.

It took no more than 10 minutes to get to the ferryport and we’d left early due to differing reports on ferry sailing times. These ranged from the typically British sharp intake of breath followed by lots of head scratching and consultation of similarly perplexed people to the extremely knowing look with a firm “yes, 2, o’clock” reply.

I never really know what to make of responses to questions in foreign languages. All of the phrase books give you excellent language points for asking questions but the analysis of the response if you don’t truly understand the language is entirely open to interpretation. Let’s take the two scenarios above, firm response coupled with a positive facial response equals definite whereas perplexed, shrugging and checking with confederates equals not sure? I’m starting to think that both actually mean “what is he going on about?” And the firm reply and look means you just go away faster.

This thought process was encouraged when at 12 noon on arrival at the ferry terminal having been assured by Evan there was a 2pm sailing, the first chap we met assured us the ferry wasn’t sailing today and would we like to go back into Banda Aceh and stay at his friend’s hotel for the night and get the following morning crossing. This was starting to get annoying. There were maybe 20 or so other people in the terminal who showed no sign of wishing to stay at this chaps friend’s hotel but neither was there any real sign of positive commercialism either. No food stalls catering to the captive market. No ticket office selling ferry crossing tickets etc. So we did what most Brits do in a situation like this, we sat down and refused to accept the potential inevitability.

As we sat there we were joined by 4 Indonesian guys. Encouraged by the opportunity to practice their English and accepting free cigarettes we soon found out that there was indeed a sailing but not until 4pm so armed with an English – Indonesian dictionary, Lucy’s practical Bahasa notebook and a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Indonesia we spent the next hour and a half trying to discuss everything from the state of play in world economics to comical Indonesian swear words.

We were joined later by a modern day Robinson Crusoe and his girl Friday. Will and Mel were twenty-something dive instructors from Scarborough who worked 6 months of the year on Pulau Weh and 6 months at Perentian in Malaysia. They were a fantastic source of information and great company on the wait for the ferry, in fact on the ferry crossing too and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d already booked with Rubiah Tirta Dive School I’d probably have gone to Lumba Lumba Dive School with them. I do hope our paths cross again.

Finally arriving on Pulau Weh 33 hours after setting off we got a taxi with a family of 3 obnoxious Scots from Aberdeen. The saving grace of having them in the cab was that it saved us money. Sometimes I meet people I just don’t like and the bloke was a bore, the older of the two women was a complete space cadet and her younger sister was possibly a sandwich short of a picnic too. When it turned out the bloke and the older woman had worked for EF as teachers in China I nearly cried.

Jeff Eide, who had left EF at the end of his contract 2 weeks previously, had extended his tourist visa and headed straight for Pulau Weh. He met us off the taxi and helped us to get some accommodation straight away. I’d planned on accommodation costing us around 100,000 (£6) a night following advice from the Lonely Planet so to be told that the rusticly attractive bungalow overhanging the sea with it’s extremely comfortable–looking veranda hammock was going to be 40,000 (£2.50) between us was perfect. Jeff was trying to barter it down to 30,000 but I just didn’t have the heart.

To call it basic may be a bit of an understatement, the only interior furniture was a double bed shrouded in mosquito netting and a stand fan plus some strategically placed nails for hanging clothes on. The bungalow was attached to another next door occupied by a French guy and his son and both units shared a squat toilet and a bucket shower. I hope the description of squat toilet needs no further explanation but a bucket shower is just that, a big container of water and a bucket to tip the (cold) water over you. This would no doubt not be to everyone’s taste, but to me it was as close to ideal as I could have hoped for. Lucy sleeps in a sleeping bag liner (like a little cocoon) so the double bed posed no problems plus I have a girlfriend in Jakarta and Lucy’s tastes run normally to Aussies for some bewildering reason.

It’s also worth stating again that this is an island nearly totally dedicated to diving and with a little sightseeing thrown in. The beaches aren’t the long stretch of golden sands you find in Bali and Lombok, rather they’re small patches of sand and broken coral ideal for a walking entry to dive the area and according to Michael my dive instructor the island has hardly changed in 10 years. You won’t find posh villas and 5 star hotels and instead of Starbucks you get freshly made Aceh coffee and homemade doughnuts for 4,000 (25p) for one of each made by one of the village women. Personally I find it a double edged sword in that I hope it remains this way for many years to come.

Having dumped our bags in the bungalow we followed Jeff to the Rubiah Inn, the only place open in Rubiah due to the recent end of Ramadan, and met some of the Islands other tourists, Manuello and Guillermo from Spain, Christof and Wolfgang from Austria and a Swiss couple whose names unfortunately have escaped me. I had some Nasi Goreng with a huge piece of chicken and a can of beer and a can of coke and called it a night. The food was more expensive than in Jakarta but only just more and the beer at 20,000 represented the fact that we were in a strongly Muslim area where alcohol is actually illegal. Many more people would arrive over the next 24 hours both foreign and local tourists but these were the guys who greeted us.

I couldn’t believe how quickly I was relaxing, so much so that I woke at 6.30 the following morning and just lay in the hammock. There is something fundamentally right about being on this type of island and relaxing on this type of furniture. At 8 I headed to the dive site with Lucy to find out the scores on the doors with the dive course. Yudi the owner’s son and the man I’d been liasing with was nothing like I expected. A skinny bespectacled Indonesian bloke in his mid 20’s, he was reassuringly warm and friendly. I would start my course that very same day with Guillermo as my partner and dive buddy. Filling in the time before 1pm we had free use of the fins and snorkels so Jeff, Lucy and I snorkelled over to the nearby Rubiah Island marvelling at the clarity of the water and the fish. The coral in this area was devastated by the 2004 tsunami and Rubiah Tirta dive school have made it a mission to help rebuild the coral in this conservation area.
Michael the dive instructor is a 40 year old German guy who’s been coming to Pulau Weh for nearly 10 years and whilst I had no reference point for dive instructors found him to be funny, positive, informative, patient and encouraging, not exactly traits I associate with Germans I’ve met to this point. Both Guillermo and I had previously done introduction dives so had a rudimentary knowledge of the principles involved but the course was to be extremely thorough and day one saw us doing basic skills and any thoughts of staying close to the surface saw us doing a 35 minute Open water dive to 12 metres.

Every dive finishes back at the Dive Shop which is the communal centre of the area. All the divers gather around to drink tea and eat sugar puff biscuits courtesy of the shop whilst cleaning your gear of the accumulated salt water and setting up for the next days dive. This really is a great opportunity to flick through the reference books and identify the fish you see as well as share stories of your personal adventure and experiences. This particular day we saw giant clams, star fish, lion fish, sea slugs called nudibranches, pipefish, clown fish (the ones in Finding Nemo), featherstars and long spined sea urchins.

I can only relate learning to dive with learning to drive a car. The equipment is varied and some of the techniques are complicated. You need to get your head around basic physics, chemistry and biology as well as mathematical equations to know what’s happening to you. We would have to complete the course and 6 dives within 4 days as Guillermo was leaving on Friday and had to have time to rest before flying. Each day was a mixture of theory and practical concluding with the final exam on Friday that we both passed with flying colours. The feeling of both satisfaction and relief was tangible.

Days 3 and 4 saw us doing 2 dives each day and the two dives that we did on the morning of day 4, the Friday, were amazing. The last one in particular was at a dive site called Arus Paleh. This translates as The Bastard Current and it was easy to see why. As we approached the surface following our dive we had to have a safety stop at 6 metres to get rid of excess nitrogen. This entailed holding on for all we were worth to a rock in a current so strong it was not only dragging us away from our hand hold, it was even loosening the breathing regulator in our mouths! At one point the rock Guillermo was holding broke away in his hand and I think the poor guy was hyperventilating in his effort to get back.

Having completed the course I was a little disappointed not to have seen a reef shark. They are getting rarer due to being hunted for their fins which sell for excessive amounts on the black market, but I’d seen plenty of other things including turtles, rays and moray eels. I was given a good price for a tutor-less fun dive of 15 euros so signed up for one more dive which allowed me to go out with some of the more experienced people. Diving with and Indonesian dive buddy I’d been at around 22 metres, a little over my allowed depth when my buddy gave the signal for shark and there about 3 or 4 metres away was the receding body of a reef shark. The experience was both dramatic and rewarding and when I also saw a turtle pass within a couple of metres of me ensured I would return and immediately arrange a week in February or March to return for more.

The week has been one of the single most relaxing weeks I’ve ever had. Thoughts of days sat in a car on the M25 and arguing the toss with belligerent pub managers and even more sycophantic business managers seem so far away that I have to remind myself that I have only been doing this a few short months. Playing volleyball with a group of Germans, eating basic food in basic surroundings, learning new skills have all been great and even revising for tests didn’t detract in the slightest from the experience. I think a good indicator of any trip is the people you meet and the friendships you make and by that account this has been special.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the teaching but Pulau Weh has quickly found a place in my heart and I am already looking forward to coming back.

Central Java Adventure 2014 - Yogyakarta/Jogjakarta

Landing at an airport in Indonesia, any airport in Indonesia, is always the same. It may even be the same across the whole of the Asian continent for all I know. It certainly is in every part of Thailand that I have visited. You must do battle with hordes of porters and taxi drivers trying to persuade you to take their overpriced vehicles to wherever it is that you want to go to, with most touts using tried and tested cajoling tactics. 

this photo wa taken on a day the airport was closed to taxis....and passengers

On a previous trip back to Jakarta towards the end of my third year in Indonesia, I still remember being told that a cab from the airport to my home town of Gading Serpong would be Rp300,000, or $30 (I think that you’re starting to pick up on the conversion rate that I’m using which, whilst not being accurate enough for a money changer, is as near as damnit is to swearing). The actual price at the time for this journey, using a metered cab, was closer to Rp50,000, give or take a couple of thousand. When I pointed this out to the tout in my pidgeon Bahasa he was most put out, both by my knowledge of local taxi fares as much as my ability to use his language. 

You could always try to circumnavigate this process by staying in a hotel that offers a courtesy car service which will pick you up from your airport or station of choice, or you can try to stoically walk past them with a look of determination on your face that says you know what you want and where you’re going to go to get it. We decided to choose the latter approach.

The last time we were here in Yogyakarta was for our mini honeymoon. On that occasion we gave in and took an overpriced, non-metered taxi but this time we sneaked our way through the taxi drivers and departing passengers and made our way out to the main road to flag down a passing cab. As we were waiting, Yohana struck up a conversation with a guy working in a roadside shop and talked about the best direction for Malioboro, the street on which our hotel was situated and he kindly suggested a suitable spot in which to wait.

I have lived in Indonesia for more than five years now and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it is the friendliness, inherent in Indonesian culture and which encourages these wonderful people to speak to random strangers, that makes me want to stay forever. 99% of the time the chief reason for this friendly banter is curiosity, a trait that while sometimes uncomfortable for Westerners who aren't overly happy about being asked their inside leg measurement as an opening question, does indeed grow on you. I have been drawn into conversations in all manner of places, from restaurants to urinals, on subjects as varied as my home town to how to shoe horses with one hand tied behind your back. 

Not all Indonesians are that pure in their conversational intentions though, so consequently it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between that friendly banter I mentioned and someone who is sizing you up for a sting. Having had my good nature bitten on more than one occasion, I tend to approach all conversations with a healthy dose of suspicion but not to the point of rudeness. If the end of the ‘where are you from?’ conversation ends up with a request for money, I just use a tabloid journalist technique; make my excuses and leave.  So as I watched the guy approach us now I still didn't know which way the conversation would go. As it happened, there was no pretence at all towards small talk, it was just a question. ‘Need a lift?’ and for a quickly negotiated $6 we were winging our way towards our hotel.

I should point out that my original holiday plans were for a solo trip. Every year I have the opportunity for a break between contracts and this year I decided that even though it meant a week unpaid, the benefits of an extra week off would be worth that sacrifice. Yohana originally couldn’t have the same time off from her job and her holiday year and mine do not run in sync, so it was only at the last minute that she found she was able to get the time off work to join me. Fortunately she was also still able to book seats on the same flights as me, even paying the same price, plus I’d already picked double rooms in each of the three hotels in which we’d be staying.

 I digress slightly but I really, really dislike small beds. When I first left home at the ripe old age of nineteen, I rented a room in a shared house in York. It was a box room in a terraced house, facing onto the busy Bishopthorpe Road and only contained a tiny single bed, a chest of drawers and a meter fed radiator. It is true what they say that we learn from our mistakes as many was the cold, cold night that that meter needed to be fed the fifty pence piece that I’d unwittingly spent on a kebab or a pint of lager. With the exception of my first house on my own in Indonesia, where a borrowed single bed was the extent of my initial furniture, it was the last time where I spent consecutive weeks in a single bed. My dislike of single beds reached its extreme when a year before I left the UK to work in Indonesia I went so far as to buy a super king-size bed. The pretext was that the room it was going in was big enough to house it but so huge was this thing you could roll over three or four times and still not fall out of it. How I know this is a story that would see me digress too far.

 The general plan for the week was to see some of the rich culture of Central Java, the earliest area for trade between Indonesia and the Indian sub continent, China, and Europe. The area is home to Batik, the distinctive, sometimes garishly bright, colourful fabrics worn throughout Indonesia and especially on Fridays in Jakarta. This, along with the museums;some of which depict Javan Man, supposedly the closest link between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, were of great interest. Plus I just wanted to relax, take some photos and write my blog.

To say that Yohana dislikes walking is something of an understatement. She comes from that Indonesian point of view that believes that Andong (horse drawn cart), Becak (a three wheeled bicycle in which two people can sit in a basket at the front and the rider is perched, cycling, behind you), Bajai (a motorised version of the Becak, called Tuk-Tuk in Thailand), Ojek (a motorbike taxi), Angkot (a mini minibus that holds anywhere from one to seemingly thirty people), Taxis, and trains, were all invented to remove the need for physical exertion, but she agreed to do some walking and that if I wanted time to see things that she didn’t, she’d just go shopping. I stopped short of broaching the fact that with her particular brand of shopping she would need to cover a few miles on foot in a market.  So it was that the deal was struck.

Yohana trying anything to get out of walking

The flight to Yogyakarta would see us spend  a whole day and night just hanging out in Malioboro, following which we would take the early morning  train to Surakarta (now called Solo) for a couple of days. The next stage would be a train North, to the coastal city of Semarang for another two days before finally flying back to Jakarta on Friday. Not so much an adventure as a carefully planned few days.

As for the hotels that I’d booked, they were all pretty basic and budget priced but I’d still plumped for AC instead of fans and made sure breakfast was included. In addition, the first two had swimming pools which for the price was an added bonus. The third, whilst not having a pool, had the added attraction of a pub attached to it. I believed that I’d thought of just about everything, especially with the World Cup showing every night.

There is some trepidation involved in arriving at any hotel that you’ve booked. You hope against hope that it is the same as it looked in the brochure or on the page on the internet. Even worse, it could have been recommended by a friend whose word you took and, even though part of you said that you shouldn’t listen, you booked it anyway. One man’s meat is of course another man’s muckle. Therefore driving across Yogyakarta, smiling at all of the beautiful hotels and hoping yours would bear a passing resemblance whilst inwardly cringeing at the awful ones, turning the corner onto Jalan Pasar Kembang, the street on which our hotel was situated, was enough to encourage a couple of butterflies in my stomach. If it were me on my own I’d make my complaints, if there were any, to the manager and then put up with whatever I’d let myself in for. Now I had the wife to think about too.

Those initial thoughts dissolved as the Istana Batik Ratna came into view and immediately struck us as perfect. The traditional Javanese fascia of the place with it’s decorated teak panels, a well swept frontage (we were adjacent to a busy main road) and working  signage bulbs were all pointers that we’d picked something  right. We were slap bang in the middle of one of Java’s biggest cities and yet this hotel wouldn’t have looked out of place in the fresh hills of Puncak or the lush fields of Ubud. All good signs.

Approaching the desk and armed with our printouts from Booking.com, we were checked in with the full knowledge that we couldn’t have the room until 1pm. A look around the pool and breakfast area left us happy to pay for the room in advance which at Rp412,000 per night, approximately $40, left me feeling good to have booked it purely from Tripadvisor reviews. The key to why I had booked this hotel in particular was not only the cost, it’s location adjacent to Jl. Malioboro, a thriving market of a street specialising in Batik material, souvenirs  and traditional food were of equal importance.Top reason though was that It was also directly opposite the train station from which we intended to make an early start for Solo/Surakarta the following day. So at 9am, leaving our bags at reception, we walked the few hundred yards towards Jl.Malioboro.

The city is more commonly referred to by its shortened name of Yogya, or Jogja as it is sometimes spelled, and it is a big city. It is home to a number of highly thought of Indonesian universities and is also considered to be a creative city, hence the Batik I guess. It has on its doorstep two very high profile temples in Borobodur and Prambenan, both of which have UNESCO heritage status and the city feels as different to Jakarta as black does to white. If the cities were to be compared to animals, then Jakarta is a chamaeleon whereas Yogya is more of a peacock. Yogya does still suffer from many of the same problems that plague much of the archipelago; traffic, pollution, a proliferation of litter, yet it also has a different ambiance which gives the visitor a more engaged feeling. Jakarta is vast with no true centre to the city whereas with Malioboro, Yogyakarta has it’s heart. 

Walking along the covered pavements, lined with shops on one side and hawkers on the other, it is a testament to the durability of the locals that whilst everyone is selling exactly the same products, they must all be earning enough to support themselves and their families. Outside the pavements, the open streets themselves are also subdivided. The central two lanes are for motorised traffic such as cars and the more numerous mopeds and motorbikes. On either side of these, next to the pavements, there is another lane given over to the horse drawn ‘andong’ and their poorer cousins, the becak. All forms of small public transport are open to negotiation with westerners, or at least non-Indonesians, coming in for a usually less than subtle price hike. My wife is from the town next to Yogya and even that is insufficient when negotiating with a Bule (non Indonesian) by your side. To tour one side of Malioboro by andong would cost you $5 or Rp50,000 in local cash.

We enjoyed our morning enormously, stopping for a newly introduced Wall’s Magnum pomegranite flavoured ice cream, haggling with a store owner for a baseball cap to keep the intense glare of the sun away from Yohana’s head, passing the time of day with locals who threw out random comments of ‘hello mister’ and at one point undertaking a survey to help local high school kids practice their English. Interestingly, the involuntary nervous reaction amongst teenagers seems to be an uncontrollable fit of the giggles.

Something that was pleasantly surprising was the number of obviously city council motivated modern art pieces on display on the street. The theme was obviously recycling, given the materials involved. Old and rusting paint cans had been turned into a ball around one particular lamp post, plastic bottles had been used to create a kind of sea monster and old water drums had been turned into highly decorative shields. The sad part was this focus on litter didn’t seem to have influenced the local populace to use the numerous rubbish bins any more than the last time we were here.

Form a culinary point of view, and whilst not particularly hungry, Yohana was keen to try some of the food from her childhood that just isn’t the same outside of the area in which you first try it. I consider myself to be from the North of England (even though I was born in Bedford) and the singular truth is that the national English dish of Fish and Chips is only at it’s best when served in the North. At the risk of alienating myself, the North to me includes; North Yorkshire, Cleveland, Wearside, Tyneside and Northumberland. On a good day it may include very specific parts of Cheshire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumberland but this hardly ever happens. So it is that Yohana believes that certain foods are exceptionally associated with specific places. This thought process was confirmed a second time on telling the staff at my office where I was going on my contract break. “We want Bakpia(a sweet, doughy ball) from Jogja!!” came the cry in unison. When I suggested that this would mean me carrying it around for a further 5 days and that I could easily buy it from Semarang, you could have been mistaken for believing I had committed an act of unconscienable heresy.

If further proof were indeed needed, it came in the form of a warung halfway along the opposite side of Malioboro to where we had started. These warungs, or street food stalls, with no stainless steel prep benches or colour-coded chopping boards, defy everything that my years in catering ever taught me. It is easy to think that you’re going to walk away with a stomach parasite that will eventually push tendrils so far through your body and into your brain as to make you want to voluntarily listen to Justin Bieber songs, on repeat. But in five years I can guarantee I have never wanted to voluntarily listen to the Biebs. Something that I would suggest is that if you’re a vegetarian, or more importantly a vegan, this may not be the place for you, and by that I don’t just mean Yogyakarta. The warung at which we stopped, selling only Lumpia (spring rolls), offered 3 varieties; Egg and vegetable, chicken and vegetable, or just vegetable. Yet they are all prepared in the same space, using the same equipment and then cooked in the same oil. Indonesians just don’t see food issues and dietary restrictions in the same way that westerners do. I have never once come across an Indonesian who is lactose intollerant, a celeriac or allergic to nuts. I guess they must be there, I’ve just never met one. The crowd here was, I kid you not, five people deep, always a sure sign that you’ve hit the jackpot of whatever it is you’re looking for. There were other places selling Lumpia, but this one was obviously the best. Rp3,000 bought you a single Lumpia of your choosing, and I still don’t see how they made a profit once you add in the chillies and garlic. It was also here that I undertook the student survey, grew a beard to rival Father Christmas and mastered 3 new musical instruments, we waited that long. It is another Universal Constant that the longer you wait for something, the better the outcome.  Here was the proof.

Hurriedly walking along the street, clutching our long awaited spring rolls, we were looking for a stall that sold Javanese Coffee (a sludge of the most perfectly balanced coffee in the world) where we would also be able to eat our prized lumpia and we soon found ourselves in luck. We ordered our drinks and opened the packet of six huge, piping-hot spring rolls, accompanied by a bag of volcanically hot green chillies and, more importantly, a small plastic bag full of pureed garlic. On biting in to one of these rolls of joy, dipped in soft garlic flesh and supported by an explosion of pleasure/pain that can only come from the tiny, green cabe rawit, the only expression that comes to mind is the currently overused vernacular of OMG!! These deep-fried parcels of pastry, containing a mixture of beansprouts, chicken, julienned vegetables and spices were surely too good to be true. Having left Yogya and able to reflect on the experience, it was still nothing short of spiritual.

After this the rest of the day was spent crashed out by the hotel’s small swimming pool before retiring to the room for a well earned afternoon sleep. The room was basic but clean and the bed more than comfortable. 7pm arrived far quicker than we’d hoped but hunger was starting to kick in. We showered and dressed and once more made our way back to Malioboro and to the Legian Garden Restaurant.

We’d noticed this place earlier in the day, a first floor building perched on the corner of a street leading off Malioboro. It looked interesting, was strategically lit and would offer a great view of Malioboro’s night time street life. We made our way up the marble stairs and along the veranda to a window table. The menu had a variety of Indonesian and western foods but the emphasis was on the local dishes. Yohana chose Nasi Gudeg, a dish of steamed rice and jackfruit famous here in Yogya while I went for a sate with rice. There were three to choose from chicken (ayam), beef (sapi) or goat (kambing) and I went for the latter as it makes a much more flavoursome dish.

The waitress returned with the Gudeg and a few moments later with my sate. “sate sapi” she said as she put down the earthernware pot with the sate sticks on top and a burning coal in the chamber below. “I’m sorry” I said, “that’s not what I ordered.” “What did you order?” she enquired. “sate kambing” I replied. “Yes, this sate kambing” she responded with a huge smile that could also have been a nervous grin. There is a choice to be had here...on looking at the meat on the sate sticks, I knew it was beef and on tasting it it was unmistakeably beef. I could have called the waitress back and got her to change it but by that time Yohana would have finished and it really just wasn’t worth it. The sate was perfectly edible and was served with both a peanut sauce and a sweet soy sauce mixed through with red chilli slices. A cold Bintang beer helped to wash it down and 30 minutes later we were on our way back to the hotel. As we left the restaurant, there was just enough time for a little more street food. Yohana spied a Wedang Ronde stall which would make a suitable dessert. It’s a strong, sweet fresh ginger tea that has pieces of white bread, freshly roasted peanuts and small pieces of jelly, all served in a bowl with a spoon. Ideal to soothe the colds that we had both been nursing on and off for the last week.

We fell into bed exhausted and full, sleep immediately taking the pair of us and both looking forward to a train journey to the historical Surakarta the next day.