Monthly Archives: February 2013

The eye of the crater was smoking, bellowing smoke serenely into the air with a calm belying the fierce burning lava that was boiling underneath. The cliff of the caldera was steep, smoking sand, its lips at most one metre wide. One misstep will send us tumbling down into its fiery jaw with nothing in our path to offer any chance of salvation.

It was a situation too surreal for words. And here I am thinking I am being dramatic – trust me, I am not.

The scene was one Mount Bromo, an active volcano three hours drive from Surabaya which last erupted in 2010. To reach the rim of the caldera, one has to cross a marshland of almost mystic proportion. It was dawn, the sun has just risen, and the entire plain was shrouded with fog. I can’t see more than five metres in front of me, and wherever I look up I saw tall, dark walls looming in the distant.

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For the second half of our trip, we were lucky to have a very efficient and knowledgeable tour guide.

For one, thought we made a mistake with the pickup time, we were still able to make it packing our stuff that very morning and have a somewhat leisurely breakfast while the guide waited patiently at the hotel lobby, perusing the local newspaper like he had all the time in the world.

For second, he had the foresight to make us to make the trip to Madakaripura – one of the more dramatic waterfalls in Java – today instead of tomorrow, since the weather was relatively good (and that we would be probably too tired after our Bromo hike tomorrow).

The plan was simple enough – we will leave the hotel to Lava View Lodge where we will be spending the night, and on the way we will make a pitstop at Madakaripura. I had no idea what was in store for me, but the guide told me I would need an umbrella, I had my first red flag.

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It was one humid, hot afternoon in Surabaya, and I found myself in the land of too much onions.

It would have been an awesome sight if you are in that kind of thing. There were onions everywhere. Baskets after hundreds of baskets of all sizes, hanging in sacks overhead, on the head of passing women, or just strewn on the floor. Even cats got into the action (I will leave that to your imagination).

Pasar Pabean is one of those darkly lit market designed to invoke anxiety attack for those who suffer from claustrophobia. We were walking around in Chinatown when we accidentally stumbled upon this market which sold everything imaginable under the sun.

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There was an irritating bee buzzing around my head. I was standing in the middle of some dark caves, with water dripping onto my head. The light from my phone was hopeless trying penetrate the dense darkness. The only thought that I had in mind was…

… what the fuck am I doing here?

Some context, if you please. Chris and I ended up at some caves the Japanese used to hide in during the war (which one, I don’t know, the Indonesians have had way too many wars) as we wanted to get away from the hot spring. Let me tell you know, my readers, that an Indonesian hot spring is very, very different from the one in Taipei.

Although the Cangar Hot Spring is located at the top of a mountain which took us some two hours plus to get to, the weather was far from being pleasantly cold. It alternated between acceptably breezy and scathingly hot. The place was packed with locals – nary a foreigner in sight so Chris and I stood out like two sore thumbs – and every men, women and children were crammed into very few pools. Nobody seems to pay heed to the many signs around the place – they smoked and ate away merrily. In the water.

All Chris and I dared to do was to soak our feet into the suspiciously murky-looking water. Ah, the joy of a true Indonesia experience. Not.

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Did you know in Chinese, Surabaya is called “Four Water”? As in 泗水 (pronounced “Sìshuǐ”)

I learned that from the very pixelated, very old screen of the inflight entertainment of my Cathay Pacific flight to Surabaya. The four hour flight was uneventful, except some Indonesians (maids) who seem to have no reservation to chat right across me. So I did the polite thing and held up my magazine higher and higher in a fruitless attempt to block out their line of sight.

And oh, this is the closest I ever get to the equator. It might come as a surprise to you (as it was to me) that Surabaya is actually located in Java, not Sumatra, and that it is located between Jakarta and Bali.

And that it is rather close to Australia!

First impression of Surabaya. It was a rustic town, kinda like my own hometown of Menglembu, with instances of “modernity” and “urbanisation” here and there. It is quite disconcerting to see a towering new hotel built right next to a slow flowing river where thatched huts and abandoned old buildings hugged the riverbanks.

We got in to Surabaya rather late in the day, and checked in directly at the hotel. Garden Palace Hotel is a large, clean and unpretentious accommodation of choice by my travel buddy, Chris, located within a large compound with at least one bar and one club (which for some reason thumped our some real loud music from 6 a.m. onwards one day. Goodness knows what the youngsters were up to. This old chap needs his sleep!). The hotel is well equipped with restaurants – Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Western – and throughout we sample some of them. Some were okay, others were not worth mentioning.

Thank God for the nearby shopping mall.

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