Indonesia PT. 1

Let me start off by saying EVERYONE NEEDS TO GO TRAVELLING. This was possibly the greatest experience of my life and I got to experience it with 3 of my favourite people (shout out to Sophie, Amy and Brad).

On July 16th we set off on a 3 week adventure to Indonesia, a place none of us knew much about apart from it was the home of the beautiful Bali. After 16 hours of flying, a delay and a lot of waiting around we finally made it to JAKARTA, Indonesia and had a good night sleep (so good we slept until 1pm the next day, jet lag had hit hard).

Jakarta. Where do I start... If you are ever wanting to travel Indonesia, I would NOT recommend Jakarta. Jakarta is a very much a non-tourist city, no-one spoke English, there was no restaurants to eat at and a lot of very unpleasant honking; we spent our first day trying to buy a train ticket for our next stop (turns out you buy them from supermarkets). So you can imagine what we were thinking "WHAT HAVE WE GOT OURSELVES IN FOR, FOR THE NEXT 3 WEEKS?!? :(", little did we know at the time that everything was going to be just fine. The next day we woke (by woke up I mean we were already wide awake from jetlag as it was 9pm UK time) up at 3am to get a taxi to the train station; a taxi driver offered us a very cheap price to take us, this was a big mistake; we let a random man (illegal taxi driver) take us in his car to god knows where, it took us about 25-30 minutes to get to the train station and the whole time we thought we were going to be taken and used as sex slaves. So learn from this lesson kids, only go for taxi's that actually say TAXI on the top of the car, HAHA *awkward cheesy smile face*.

After a long 8 hours on a very rickety, uncomfortable train we were finally free of Jakarta and were now in YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia. Yogyakarta was 10 thousand times better than Jakarta, we stayed in a nice room and had a few temples for us to visit, however, was still a non-tourist city and the only road (with no paths) was like the bloody A1, with the drivers were flying all over the place and feeling the need to honk at us every second. Anyway, enough of the ranting, our first temple we visited on day 4 or 5 into the holiday was Prambanan Temple, an hindu temple. It was huge, like nothing we had ever seen before (if you ever go Yogyakarta I would highly recommend visiting Prambanan).

*STORY TIME* Whilst we were walking around and admiring the scenery we had a Asian mum run up to us with her daughter asking for a photo, we thought they were asking for one of the family altogether, however they wanted one with us, which we were very confused about and thought they thought we were someone else, but throughout the day it continued to happen and by the end people were just coming up to us and holding their phones in our faces and taken photos of us, we even had someone stop their car to take a photo of us as we left the temple, we felt famous but it was hilarious and was definitely a highlight of the trip.

Another place I would recommend to visit is the Water Palace, where we managed to end up with a free tour guide/security guard, who we brought some of his father's art off of at his house (yes, i know, you would have thought we learnt from going off with strangers after the taxi encounter, but no, off we went again).

Yogyakarta was a nice place, again, not much english spoken to the point where we couldn't eat out of our hotel because no-one understood us, but has a few places worth visiting.

After an eventful first week of travelling we were off on our next and most exciting part of our holiday, Bali and the Gili Islands, PT. 2 coming soon.

Hannah x