Hello!...Who is it???

We flew from Phuket to Jakarta and took a cab straight to the train station. Jakarta is an interesting place to say the least. Lots of traffic, smog, garbage, and slums. It is on Java, the most populated island in the world. The people were incredibly friendly and also some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. There were little to no tourists and we were a bit nervous getting on the train knowing that Bandung would have even less foreigners. We took a 3.5 hour train ride to Bandung and met 2 girls from Denmark, Hilla and Camille, who were also just as nervous as us. We checked into a hostel together and explored the area a bit. There were no foreigners in sight and the locals knew no English. You would think that being with 2 white girls we would have been stared at like no other, but people barely turned their heads, it was kinda nice not to be gawked at by locals. It got a bit frustrating when we tried to order food at a night food court/market, with the slim to no English, but a neat experience anyways.

We got up early the next morning to hike a volcano. The drive there was great, Java has some of the most beautiful countryside. There are rice fields carved into the side of hills higher than I could climb, makes me wonder how these farmers do it. As we got closer and closer to the volcano, little kids knew foreigners were approaching in a jeep with darkly tinted windows, and would stop to wave and say hello. Indonesian kids are some of the cutest I have ever seen. They would drop everything to say "Hello! Who is it?" and I felt like some sort of a celebrity. It was nice to see kids having such a good time playing with kites and rocks and anything else they could find. It makes you realize how much technology impacts our lives everyday, we have become so used to Nintendo DS, Wii and iPods and these kids have probably never heard those words and are still having the time of their lives. A few hours later we made it to this volcano and never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I could get this close to a volcano, in it actually. We hiked up to a point where we could smell the sulfur and feel the heat coming off the rocks, I thought we were done but the guides continued, taking us to a stream of boiling water and steaming rocks. The smell of sulfur got so strong we had to cover our faces and hope not to choke. We saw what used to be a forest with only burnt tree stumps left and a few new plants. It was a beautiful contrast of old and new. We finished the day with a much needed dip in a hot spring.

The next morning we were to catch our train back to Jakarta and back to the airport for Bali. A walk in dawn with packs and no idea where we were going. We were told the station was close to our hostel, and it was, but things are different in the dark. Things were also complicated by the fact that no one knew English when we stopped for directions. For those of you who know India, imagine doing this in India with all of the traffic minus the cows. Words can't really explain that exact situation, but we made it!

Next stop - Kuta, Bali