April 2002 - I was between jobs and a long trip seemed like a good idea.. Let's face it, I didn't have too much else to do, so my girlfriend and I decided to trek across Java, from Jakarta to Bali.
We flew into Jakarta from a 2 day KL shopping stopover. We drove out to Bandung, where my girlfriend has family. We covered the 150km trip in around 6 hours, which gave me a good taste of what was to come traffic wise. The only road rules in Indo seem to be that there are no rules... and the only way I can explain how this works is that everybody knows that there are no rules and nobody gets upset about the incredibly dangerous way everyone else drives!. A typical scene could involve three speeding cars all racing to overtake each other across both lanes of traffic, tearing around a blind mountain corner at night in the rain when a bus, itself overtaking another car at a ridiculous speed, blasts into view.
Nobody panics, nobody gets upset or goes into a blind panic and overreacts as you would expect a normally sane driver to do. Instead everyone just moves out of the way, the furthermost cars drive out onto the roadside embankments allowing the other cars to pass each other and everyone continues on as if they didn't just narrowly escape death..Well nearly everyone. I pretty much had a stomach ulcer by the time we got to Bali...

After a few days sightseeing in Bandung we caught the train back out to Jakarta (A beautifully smooth 3 hour trip) to meet up with a friend. We had shown him around Sydney when he had visited a few months before, so now it was his turn to return the favour. I checked out some of the coast line, but was not impressed enough to take any pictures. We spent the night out at a nightclub owned by one of the infamous gangster sons of the former President, then drove back to Bandung.

A few more days landlocked in Bandung and I was itching for a real Java beach experience. After much whining and moping and on my behalf, we finally set off on a two day trip southwest to the coast.
Our first stop on the way was an amazing wildlife park (and least to a westerner) called Taman Safari. Amazing because not only do allot of the animals run free, but you are actually encouraged to feed and pat them. Sure, they warn you not to get out of your car if you see a bear crossing the road in front of you, but apart from that, interaction is encouraged, as you can see from the pictures below.
To take the picture with the cheetah they charged me around a dollar. He was just like a big kitty, and I couldn't resist rubbing him behind his ears like I used to pat my cat. The trainer told me in broken english that maybe I shouldn't do that, to which I replied in even brokener Indonesian that it was cool and continued while he wasn't looking. Suddenly the big cat let out a growl that was so deep that I felt it at the base of my spine. I pretty much stopped after that...

We spent that night in a little town somewhere then continued west until we hit the coast at Pelabuhan Ratu early afternoon. Even though it was off season there was still a good wave breaking over the reef offshore, so I quickly jumped across the fist sized pebbles that passed for sand and had me a great little surf.
After a couple of hours of that I got out and took some pictures including the one below. Here you can see the storm out to sea that was soon to engulf us. It hit just as we got back into town proper, it rained so hard that the water bounced high back up off the ground. Anyone outside was drenched in seconds.. I looked towards the tidal flats of the town expecting to see all the people wading in the ocean trying to net fish run for cover, but the just went about their fishing. Seriously, it was probably dryer in the bay than it was on the land. I put on my gortex raincoat and jumped outside just for the fun of it (much to the amusement of the locals).. and I was pretty much soaked in all non gortex places straight away.

The storm was over fairly quickly though... we all found a little seaside restaurant next to where all the fishing boats put to shore... hard to find fresher seafood than that!... and had a dinner of monster prawns (or maybe midget lobsters...). After eating I took the second picture below, just as the sun was beginning to set.

Back at Bandung, we prepared for our drive across Java.. Mostly by shopping for original designer clothes like Ralph Lauren at about a tenth what you would pay in Australia. Finally we set off, stopping on the first night at Pangandaran, a spit of land that extends south so that one side of its coast faces west and the other east. This worked out well... we arrived in time for a great sunset on the western side then I got up early and took the picture below the following morning. Later I went for a walk in the nearby park, where I saw wild deer and monkeys everywhere.

Next main stop along was Yogyakarta, which is around halfway across Java island near the southern coast. Jogja, as everyone calls it, was one of my favourite asian towns... everyone is pretty friendly and everything is very cheap, especially thewestern style food, though expect pretty much everyone there to try to sell you something. A good example of this was when we asked a becak driver (a cart pulled by a person) how much to take us back to our hotel room. He quoted around $5 for the 10 minute trip, or said we could go on an hour city tour for $1, that would eventually go past our hotel.
Marveling at his grasp of mathematics, we took up his offer and got shown around town, which mostly included stops at his friends shops, where he no doubt got a commission everytime we purchased something!

Next day we went out to Borobudur Temple, an amazing Buddist temple that was built before 800AD. After checking out the temple and touching the buddha in the bell for good luck, we went for an elephant ride then went back to Jogja. We had planned to go the the coast the next day, then onto Mt Bromo, an old volcano... but I had a bit of a stomach bug so just took it easy. This type of stomach problem is common for Australian's travelling to Indo, we call it Bali Belly... which is funny to me as Bali is about the only place I didn't get the odd stomach twinge.Oh well, I had Jakarta Belly, Bandung Belly, Jogja Belly and Surabaya Belly, so I guess that makes up for it!

Next big stop was Surabaya... a hot and dusty town that I had no problem seeing the back of. The only thing I enjoyed was the incredible big and tasty serve of gelato we got from a famous ice cream cafe in town.
Out from Surabaya we followed the coast, stopping briefly at the swampy mangrove beach above to take some pictures at sunset. From here we drove another hour to the Ketapang Ferry terminal where we boarded a boat to Bali.

From there we drove to Kuta, where we stayed in a nice hotel near the beach for around a week. We were saying in south Kuta most of the time, which was a few kilometres down from the Sari club that was bombed seven months later.
While in Bali we did the normal tourist things... visited the beaches where we were ripped off by the local hawkers, visited the temples where we were robbed by the local temple monkeys (never say no to a monkey that wants a peanut!) and changed money where we were, you guessed it, robbed by the money changers! We were actually ripped off by two of them, so its possible to see how they did it in the similar things they both did. At the time I was completely unaware.. baffled even, as I had considered that I was being fairly careful.

First thing they did was to offer a higher rate than everyone else.. to attract potential victims ofcourse. Next thing they both did was to pay only in small bills. This is a big warning sign for me now... if their business is changing money but they don't have big bills, move on! The next thing they both did was to distract me near the end of the counting.. in both cases they had me consult a calculator to check that the conversion was correct. This is where they must have used slieght of hand to quickly disappear over a third! of the notes on the table. hard to believe, but it happened to me twice!
Don't worry, story has a happy ending. We went straight to the Tourist Police who quickly 'convinced' the moneychangers to return the disappeared money. Even after buying the police breakfast and giving them a little something for their efforts we still ended up with more money than if we had gone to an honest broker with a lower exchange rate....

The above picture was taken at Tanah Lot temple just after sunset, a stunning example of a Hindu style temple built on a small island that is exposed at low tide. The whole area is battling the effects of both enviromental and tourist erosion at the moment, hence the construction work. Other beaches I visited included Kuta (Top Picture) where I did most of my surfing on the city beach, and Uluwatu on the South coast.. where we went for a day trip to visit the temple and (you guessed it) went surfing at the famous surf beach there.

As mentioned above, most temples have resident monkeys that consider it their divine right to be fed by the visiting tourists. Most are fairly well behave, like the ones that like in Ubud (where we had lunch in a tree house cafe..), but the monkey mafia that runs the temple at Uluwatu are a whole other breed.
When visiting Uluwatu temple they make you where a sacred sarong... the priests, not the monkeys... though I'm sure they have a hand in it somewhere. On entering the temple you can purchase a bag of nuts to feed to the 'friendly' monkeys, which I did. Soon after entering the monkey's turf I was approached by the godfather monkey who held out one hand while pointing at the peanut bag. I gave him a nut and turned to hand out nuts to the rest of the mob when I felt a sharp tug on my sarong. The head monkey was grasping it tightly with one hand while holding out the other for more nuts. Any attempt by me to move was met by a fairly vicious hiss. In the end I just handed him the entire bag.... when he was sure I had no more nuts to give he started dragging me back over in the direction of the nut seller....