Sloth Journeys

After Yogja, we had a few days spare before we needed to be back in Jakarta to be picked up for a tour before heading back to the UK.

We’d debated what to do with our few spare days, including considering a tour to one of Indonesia’s many volcanoes. Whilst that sounds exciting, it would also mean a couple of long days and we already had plenty of those to come with the tour to Ujung Kulon national park (more on that in the final blog) and then our long plane journey home.

So instead of a volcano, we plumped for coffee instead!

As most people who know Richard, he does like a nice cup of coffee. Unfortunately for Richard, it turns out that, much like South America, Java seems to export all its good coffee because he’s not had a cup that he’s enjoyed yet!!

Actually, the issue isn’t so much the coffee beans that are used, but the way in which it is processed and a cup of coffee made. Traditional ‘kopi tubruk‘ uses fresh ground coffee, which seems to be dark roasted, and no filter or cafetiere or similar is used to serve, rather the grounds are added straight to the cup and the drinker simply leaves the coffee to brew and then settle, so that a coffee ‘sludge’ forms at the bottom and you stop drinking when you get there! The result is very strong, somewhat bitter coffee with the risk of a mouthful of sludge if you’re not careful! (Admin – mmmmm, sounds delish 😋)

Anyway, Bandung, for whatever reason, has dozens and dozens of coffee shops, from little roadside shacks to Starbucks and everything in between. So we were hopeful that if anywhere was going to provide alternate coffee options that better suited our tastes, this would be it!

We’d also read about Civet coffee (known as kopi luwak here), which is a speciality of Indonesia, where partially digested and fermented coffee beans are collected from the poo (yep, you read that right!) of the Civet wild cat. So that intrigued us too…. However, we’d also read that the coffee is really expensive, it’s really a bit of a gimmick and the process doesn’t actually result in superior tasting coffee (Admin – that’s a shame since all the other coffee here apparently tastes sh*t too!!) and what is more, we’d also read that there is.an increasing trend to catch and cage Civets to produce the coffee. That sealed it then, we’d save our money and stick to the cheap crap tasting coffee as opposed to the really expensive crap tasting coffee!!

Other than being ‘coffee capital’ of Indonesia, Bandung is also situated at a slightly higher elevation than the other places we’d visited so far and so we were looking forward to a slightly cooler and less humid climate for a few days (Admin – ah, I was wondering when the moaning about the heat and humidity was going to start…). And it’s also located close to some.  forests which we thought would be nice to visit, even if the volcanoes and volcanic lakes were a bit out of reach.

So off we headed to Bandung. The trip from Yogja was our first use of the train network (other than the short train journey from the airport) and we had a 7 hour journey to really enjoy it! We’d managed to book our tickets in advance and had the choice of economy or ‘executive’ class. Whilst we are all for keeping costs down and trying out local transport, we also really didn’t fancy 7 hours on a searingly hot train and so we paid the small amount extra for the executive class which had aircon (and western style loos)! The train turned out to be really comfortable and the station staff very helpful in guiding us to our train and the train journey went through great scenery – all in all a much more sophisticated way to travel than the long distance bus rides we’d ensured in South America!

On arriving in Banding it became clear that my delicate stomach, which had started in Yogja (but I’d managed to battle through) (Admin – what a hero!), was still getting the better of me, so on Day 1 we had to have an easy day, simply following the points of interest in the city centre listed on a walking tour which we decided not to join. As it happens, this didn’t take us long – we were starting to get the impression Indonesian cities aren’t overflowing with history and grand architecture!! However, it was a good job there wasn’t loads of places to visit, given I could only walk at snails pace, and so we pottered around and saw a monument to the centre of the city, a statue of a printing press (I’m still not sure of its significance!!), some impressively dressed up people, in spooky costumes, having photos taken (we got the impression this was a regular occurrence at weekends) amongst a few other sights.

Thankfully the next day I was feeling a bit better, although not up to a full day volcano tour, and so we got a Grab to Djuanda Forest Park, which lies about 1/2 hour north of the city centre. This turned out to be a good call, and we had a thoroughly enjoyable few hours walking along the trails through the forest, seeing deer, monkeys, butterflies, bats and deafening Tonggeret (Indonesian version of Cicadas), which sound similar but distinctly different to them and their central American cousins.

One thing we’ve not really talked about on our trip is the food, but in Banding we also had one of our nicest meals in Indonesia; ironically though it was a Japanese meal! It’s not that the food in Indonesia was bad at all; in the main it was really nice, it’s just that it was mainly variations on chicken and fried rice, chicken and fried noodles or chicken curry, and so after 2 weeks were all starting to blur into one! So having a really great katsu chicken curry and rice just made a nice change (Admin – errr… am I missing something but isn’t that all the ingredients you were just complaining about?!!).

Anyway, with that the lovely Japanese meal polished off, our stay in Bandung was done; next we were heading to Jakarta to go on a 3 night tour to a national park before we headed home.