Runaway plan to Flores

It has been a while since my last blog update. My last writing is actually i wrote months ago. So now i am trying to write again. Actually half hour ago i just finished this writing, but a stupid mistake done by me deleted my writing. This writing is about my plan to travel to Flores and the reason why i do this trip.
I am unemployed at the moment, and doing nothing at home make me go crazy. It is not that there is nothing to do at home. At the beginning i was still excited doing household activities, also some studying. But it has been 3 months now, i am getting soooo damn bored and not excited anymore doing my daily home activities. My only regular outside home activity is teaching math for junior high school students. Ofcourse i go out with my friends once in a while, but it is not that often also. I realize it is uneasy situation for me. I feel that i become offended by somethings and comments easily and reply someone's comment a little bit harsh, which is unnecessary at all. I really feel guilty about it and angry with myself. I need to do something that can make me feel good about myself and do more positive attitude. And i think travelling is a very good idea. It will make me keep moving everyday and encounter new things along the road. Hopefully it will refresh my mind and give me more positive things going on my mind.
So i plan to do travelling after i lodge my visa application for studying abroad. I plan to go to Flores. This time i will go further to the east, since last time i only went to Labuanbajo. I will fly to Labuanbajo from Denpasar. I have booked a flight to Denpasar for 1 May and i will arrive around midnite. I will book Transnusa for my morning flight to Labuanbajo on Monday, since i need to book it by phone. I plan to sleep in Ngurah Rai airport.
My rough itinerarry will be Ruteng-Bajawa-Riung-Bajawa-Ende-Maumere. Yaps i will skip Labuanbajo and Komodo, since i have been there. Actually it is still worthed to visit there again, but it is too special for me to visit there alone :) I probably will get a free ride to Ruteng. A guide just offered me a ride there. His route is actually to go to Maumere, but he said i can go with him until Ruteng, thats very nice :) hopefully i will meet many nice people along my trip.
So… wish me luck!!!!

One day in Jayapura

So...it’s Jayapura. It is capital of Papua. If you asking me what you can do in Jayapura for one day. Here is my answer. You can cross the border to Papua New Guinea from Jayapura. So..i made this happen to me, crossing Indonesia-PNG border. Although that  wouldn’t get my passport be stamped, but i think it’s cool too. For crossing the border from Jayapura, you should go all the way eastward to Skouw. This trip took about 2 hours from Sentani. We passed  through the hilly road with so many crooks, there was sea side view sometimes. I also crossed the flat area with rice field, just like in Jawa. Seems that Javanese people live there.

Before entering the border area, we must report to military post first. Actually both PNG and Indonesian are freely crossing this border, but only for one day trip. Usually people from both side will go to other side market for buying their daily needs. Maybe because we look like tourist group, so we have to report and left one’s id before we entered the border. We have to report again at Indonesian Custom office, but it looked like only for saying hi. Then we parked the car in Indonesia side, i can saw the light house from here. Apparently this border is located near the cliff of sea side. But i couldn’t see the sea directly, there are a lot of trees along the edge.

So, there are two gates at the border, the Indonesia gate and PNG gate. Between those gates is the neutral zone. Passing the PNG custom, we can not bring the SLR camera to PNG. Only pocket digicam or hand phone are allowed. I don’t know why, maybe they are afraid that we will do the espionage activity, haha...lol. and after that...here I’m Papua New Guinea! Generally the situation is similar with Skouw, but the market here is smaller than Skouw. They sell canned food, PNG souvenir such as hat, small flag, and t-shirts. There is also some food stalls, I tasted one of the food. The seller is a lady with her two sons. She sells fried lamb and fried banana. I tasted both the lamb and banana. Actually I did it, not because it looked delicious, more because I was curious. The taste is not that good for me, especially the lamb, I think it was cooked less well. You still can taste a little bit of the unwelldone meat of lamb. She gave me the salt to be added. Yeah..it tasted better than before, you just have to make sure that the salty covered the unwelldone meat taste. I don’t know how to describe the banana. It is only the simple fried pealed banana. I think I could feel a bit of the unwelldone meat of lamb in the fried banana. This lady btw and I think also the other sellers in that PNG side market, they know several Indonesian words. Usually the words that can be use for transaction, such as numbers, greet, say thanks, delicious, 5W1H words. And the English skill is quite good, at least for the transaction activity.

Btw the name of this PNG area is Wutung village.

One funny think i found here was, i saw the poster of Lukas Enembe, an Indonesian politician from one of Indonesian party from Papua electoral area. Hm... is that allowed?

PNG people in Skouw market.

After more photographed session, we went back to our car in Indonesia, and continued to twent back to market in Skouw. The market in Skouw is bigger and there are more people shopping there. I think more PNG people go to this market and shop here than the other one. But there is one minus thing that I dont like in Skouw, this market is dirtier than the one in Wutung. The variety of the selling goods is more here, they sell basic needs such as clothes, movie dvd’s (the piracy version), house hold goods, vegetables, and of course the most favourite thing in Papua that is pinang. Pinang is the most favorite fruit in Papua, I think. You chew this pinang with kapur, then you seep it until it becomes red, and maybe until the taste is gone after that you have to throw the pinang spit from your mouth, but dont forget to also spit the pinang because you are not suppose to swallow it. The pinang spit have red color, so no wonder there are lot of red stain everywhere in most public area in Papua. But there are some places that put on a board written the prohibition of the pinang spit.

PNG people parks his motor bike in Skouw market.

A Papuan kid smile to my camera :)

Then we drove back to Jayapura, through the different route this time. I didn’t really notice how is the route, because I got a pretty bad stomachache because of my period. So I fell asleep. But one thing I notice was I think we drove near the beach. And then we stopped at Base G beach in Jayapura (forget the name), quite nice beach, I tend to say that it is not a very clean beach, but ya...not a dirty one too, quite well, not dissapoint me as a beach. We paid I think 10 thousand per car for entering the beach. There are benches in the beach, that you can sit on, but you have to pay for that. It is a creamy white sand beach, it’s too bad that we can not see the sunset from here. The sun set almost behind the beach. And the hill blocked our sunset.

I walked around the beach side, watching some kids play around in the water. They are really sweet, I took pictures of them playing around the beach, capture their smiley faces, what a sweet expression, I like them. Most of them are really excited to be photographed, and they pose for me.

Then we left the beach, and then this shocking thing happen. The man that live near the beach, asked for the parking fee of our cars. And you know what, they asked 100 thousands rupiah for 2 cars for I think no more than 2 hours. What a very expensive parking fee in Indonesia.

Where to eat : We had dinner in Blue Cafe. It is a quite nice concept of restaurant, located in the sea side of a gulf. People here call this area as Ruko, near Swiss Bell Hotel. You can see city light of Jayapura from here, even they have live music here. They sell vary of grilled fish, but also another sea food such as crab and their friends :p they offer 4 kinds of sauce. First is the usual Indonesian red chili sauce, then dabudabu, yellow sauce (made from ginger), and ketchup chili sauce. The food here definitely way much better than the one we have at lunch. I like the dinner! Btw I also order the stir-fry of kangkung and papaya flower, very Manado food. For me this is the most perfect dinner so far.

Where to stay: Rasen Hotel. Quite nice hotel, clean, they have ac, tv, hot water. I stay at a twin bed room at Rp 290000 per night for my room. And only 5 minutes drive from Sentani airport.

Travel date: August 2011

my first Bali and Diving

Ok, to be honest this is my first journey to Bali. Ya.. it seems very late, but better to be late than never. I'm going to get PADI Open Water diving lisence, I'll take a diving course. Thanks to my friend Rere, she asked me to go with her for taking diving lisence in Bali. And I said, why not...? Then here the trip began. Rere fly from Timika on Saturday January 22 by Airfast. She spent a night by herself in Bali, because I took off from Jakarta to Denpasar the next morning by Merpati Airlines (I think it was the sampe type of Merpati plane that crashed in Kimana on the next May). We stayed at a nice-clean hotel at Poppies Lane 1 in Kuta. We reserved a four days diving certification at MolaMola Dive Centre in Nusa Dua.

1st day Sunday January 23 - First day just arrived and we're ready for beaches. We're getting around by car, drove by Rere's friend plus Rere's friend's friend. Totally we visited 3 beaches; Lilo, Geger, and Balangan beach. All of those beaches are on Uluwatu direction. We didn't do much activity there, only sight seeing and play around the beach. I wasn't in the mood for swim, because I just arrived this morning. But swimming around is one of the activities you can do in those beaches, don't expect to do snorkelling here. The current is fitter for surfing.

2nd day Monday January 24 - Second day in Bali and first day for my diving certification class. We walk around in Legian before we went to Nusa Dua for our diving class. The first day we only studied in a class room. We're going back to hotel in the afternoon. Then again we're getting around in Legian by walk, before we decided to rent a motorbike (according to Rere), we ended up at a luxurious restaurant in Seminyak.

3rd day Tuesday January 25 - The second day diving class, it took place in a pool. We're practicing what we learnt from the theory yesterday. After class, we rent a car from one of a master dive at our dive centre, he also drove us around. We decided to come back to Balangan and did some more photo sessions :p

4th Wednesday January 26 - The third day of diving class, and finally we're going to the sea. We're going to Nusa Dua for our diving practice, for real now. It's located about 2 km away from Nusa Dua coast, it took less than 15 minutes by boat. It was my very first experience diving in the sea. One word 'AMAZE'.

5th day Thursday January 27 - The forth day and last day of our diving certification class. The MolaMola guys  pick us at our hotel, and took us straight Tulamben. It's about more less one hour driving from Kuta to Tulamben. Tulamben diving spot is a shrink ship from World War II. The last day, and finally we can fill our diving log book. No diving tomorrow, so it's time for late night sleep.

6th day Friday January 28 – First day of no diving-related activity day. We rent a car plus driver to explore more beaches and see more of Bali culture. Spent the morning till noon in Dreamland, lunch at Jimbara, and see more Bali culture in Ubud. What a complete day :D

7th day Saturday January 29 – Yups last day, we’re only walking around Kuta and Legian. Visit to one shop to another, not always buy something. I try a short surfing lesson, which ends with an accident.

Rere fly to Jakarta at 7 pm, and i fly to Timika at 1 am.

So, that was my 7 days holiday in Bali early of 2011. Lot of new stuffs i found here. Definitly i’ll go back here, to do other new cool stuff i didn’t do last time. Gunung Agung, bungee jumping, and Menjangan are still waiting for me :)

Kerinci highest volcano of Indonesia

Here we go.. After all the discussion a night before with Bang Andi (our guide), we decided to go early morning at 07.00 am by ojek until park's gate. We crossed a large tea plantation (was belong to Dutch colonial) to reach the park's gate. We found no office for the national park at the gate, but there was an abandoned building. Maybe it was the office. So my conclusion is, you do not need any special permit to climb up Kerinci.

The typical of tropical rain forest was wetly welcoming us, right after we entered the gate. Seriously it was wet, although it wasn't raining. Whatever you touch, it was moist and wet. But they have much of flowers here, especially orchid. Very beautiful and i love to see them.

And one more thing, although there are quite dense canopy and big trees, but i still got cell phone signal even after almost 1 km i walk into the forest. My mom called me.

We only met 2 Spanish tourist with their guides and porters climb down to Kersiktuo, when we climbed up.
 We arrived at basecamp around 02.00 pm. This basecamp is located at 3100 m above the sea level. The basecamp is quite flat with space enough for about 3 tents. There was no water source during our trip to this basecamp. Our guide said the only water source is about before the summit.

We started for summit climbing at 03.00 am. It was steeper today, compare to our climbing yesterday. After leaving the vegetated zone, it was only gravelly rocks there. They are volcanic deposit, product of Kerinci's eruptions. It's getting more sandy near the summit. But the sand here is more coarse compare to Semeru.
The sunrise came before we reach the summit, too bad. But it's okay. It was amazing and beautiful though. We saw the orange horizon was starting to open the eye of day (sun in bahasa is matahari, it means "eye of the day").
We reached the summit at about 06.00 am. I had no words to say. It was so beautiful. I was the highest person in Sumatra at that time. The sky was clear, i could see Gunung Tujuh with its seven peaks. But its crater lake was covered by clouds. Kerinci crater is quite small, maybe it's just about one third of Gunung Gede crater. But the pyroclastic layers is quite obvious.

We spend about one hour at the summit. It would be more danger around the summit if we spent more time there. Because poisonous gas would be spread from the crater.

 
Band Andi took water at around the vegetation boundary. Taufan and me didn't follow him, we were waiting for him. So we didn't know exactly whre the water source is. We were only rest for having early lunch at basecamp, then went right away to Kersiktuo.
We met one whole family from France were climbing, when we climbed down. So, the Spanish guys and France family were the only tourist we met during our climbing. No other tourist.  I think it was a nice thing. Because I only found the pure nature sound and atmosphere here, without poluted by people crowd. :)

I took more flower pictures today, mostly orchid. They are colourful with very uniqe patterns. I really wanted to bring them home. :)

We arrived at park's gate afternoon. And ojek took us from there to Bu Paiman house, through  tea plantation covered by the golden array of evening sky