Traveling in Indonesia

Tom recently called back to Doug and shared a bit on the phone of their wonderful month travel to Indonesia.  They had an awesome time and shared also, via email some of their trip highlights. Here are some of the things Tom and Ashley shared with us on this particular leg of their trip from Jakarta, West Java, to Yogya-karta in Central Java.

Their trip starts with flying into Jakarta from Singapore.  Then working their way by train and bus from west to east Java and then down to the island of Bali.  Our four-day trip to Yogyakarta starts in Jakarta, the current the capital city of Indonesia.  There are three different train tickets, based by type of class, you may purchase: economy, business and executive class.  The train station you choose will depend on the ticket class you want to purchase.  The business class and economy class trains mostly depart from Pasar Senen station.  The executive trains from Jakarta to Yogyakarta depart from the Gambir Station.  You may just go to the train station and buy the ticket there or you may book your train ticket in advance through the website of the national train company. Or you may book your train ticket through one of these two web sites tiket.com or www.traveloka.com.  It takes around 8 hours to go from Jakarta to Yogyakarta by train on the executive train.  Economy and Business class usually takes longer since they have more stops on the way to Yogyakarta.  You may either catch a day or a night service.  I recommend you take the day train from Jakarta, so you can see the views of Javanese countryside. It’s really beautiful.

We arrived in Yogyakarta relaxed but famished.  We headed over to The Packer Lodge.  We had heard great reviews online and through friends who have stayed there a few months ago. This boutique hostel is ideally located in the heart of Yogyakarta.  It is close to all the great historical and cultural attractions.

As for places to eat in Yogyakarta, there are a ton of places to eat. There are western style restaurants as well as Chinese restaurants and for sure Indonesian restaurants.  Ashley and I love to experience the food culture where ever we are so we had some great Indonesian dishes in some nice open air stand up “restaurants” and in some really neat sit-down restaurants.  One of my most favorite Indonesian dishes is call Mie Ayam Basah (literal words mean Noodle Chicken Wet) or as I like to call it “chicken noodle soup,” Indonesian style. The spices, the hot sauce, and the crackers that go with it is out of this world! 

To recap, Tom wrote back a few months later to share their travel highlights.  Here are some of the things Tom and Ashley shared with us on this particular leg of their trip from Jakarta, West Java, to Yogyakarta in Central Java.

Part 2 of 2 is our continued journey here in Yogyakarta.

Our next 24 hours were busy with hiking Mount Merapi Volcano. I will boil it down and give you the highlights of our trek and add some key pointers. Mount Merapi has been erupting so we were glad to hear that it was open to trek during our visit to Indonesia.

What to wear? – Mount Merapi temperature can be cold from around 0 – 10 degrees Celsius at night. So, you should wear warm clothes such as cotton pants (no denim or jeans material), sweat shirt, polar jacket, windbreaker jacket, hand gloves, socks and a good pair of hiking shoes.

Here is a timeline of our tour to Mount Merapi (a) At 22.00 hours – Our driver picked us up at our hotel and then drove us to Mount Merapi Basecamp. Then there was a short introduction presented by your guides. (b) At 23.30 – We started preparing our trek up Mount Merapi by getting properly dressed and hydrated.  (c) At 01.00 – Our guide started us on our trek to the top of the Mount Merapi to see the sunrise. It usually takes around 5 hours and we did it just over 5 hours. (d) 06.00 – The sunrise is stunning with views of the volcano backgrounds, a green valley and hilly mountains. It was exhilarating to see the beauty all the way around us.  We had a nice rest and snack before heading down to base camp.  At around noon, we headed back to the hotel with our driver.  But we did stop on the way at a restaurant on the way back since we were famished.

The next day we chilled in Yogyakarta to recover from our long trek up Mount Merapi.  We visited two wonderful restaurants Jejamauran restaurant specializes in mushrooms.  Both Ashley and myself love all kinds of mushrooms and so this was one of our highlights of our trip to Indonesia.  You can enjoy over 20 variations of mushroom dishes.  Backpacker’s guide at their web page here has some great information on this restaurant – (no need to read link) https://www.yogya-backpacker.com/jejamuran-restaurant-mushroom-resto-for-vegetarian.

The other restaurant we visited was The House of Raminten.  You may visit their web site here – (no need to read link) https://raminten.business.site. They are open 24/7 and have a lot of great simple Indonesian eats and tea to enjoy As you can tell, Ashley and I love to try all kinds of local dishes where we are traveling.  So, half of our cultural learning is through local foods and eateries. We did a couple other tours here like the batik tour that took half a day.  We saw how they produced different colored designs on cloth.  It was really neat and very cultural too.

But I have probably bored you sleep with my rambling.  I am glad you asked me about doing this because when Ashley and I get back to the U.S. we will write a couple long reports to share on our web site blog.  Sharing what we did throughout our stay in Indonesia is really a great exercise for me for our future blogs articles. 

A couple last thoughts. I will write to you about some highlights in Surabaya, which is where we are headed next.  Then we will be heading to Bali for our last couple of weeks in Indonesia before heading back to the U.S.  I will send you some more emails with some things we did and what we enjoyed doing.

And yes, thank you for the advice on the Insured Nomads travel medical plan here on your web page at gninsurance.com/travel.   It is really awesome to have the peace of mind knowing we have amazing travel medical insurance through you all at Good Neighbor Insurance in Gilbert, Arizona.