Self-reflection is one of the most important parts of writing a blog, and I feel that reading back over the things I have written which describe my day often tell a lot about the kind of person I am.
For coming out here on my own, I feel like the term 'adventurous' might come to mind for many people (fool-hardy also works). My explorer side tends to come out on every foreign vacation I have been on, and it's also present in England quite a lot of the time when I got to new towns or cities.
Being here alone means that exploring the bounds of not only my surroundings, but often my comfort zone comes into full effect during each and every outing.
I believe you learn a lot about yourself in difficult circumstances and how you handle these can often dictate what kind of person you develop into following their conclusion.
One of the ways I have been trying to improve myself on this trip is to try to be organised with what I'm doing and where I'm going, but also be efficient with my time. Due to financial constraints and the number of things I am wanting to do whilst I am here, I can't really afford to 'waste' days, and one way I have attempted to do this is by booking flights which are early in the morning so that when I arrive in a new place, I can hopefully achieve something other than sitting in an airport lounge all day, therefore allowing me to cram much more into my packed itinerary.
This does however come with issues, as on a couple of occasions because I have caught the first flight out of one place to another in the morning, I have had to wait around in the airport until I am able to check into my hotel at an appropriate time. I much prefer to arrive somewhere new in the morning though, so that I can get my bearings in the light and be all set to go when I have a full day. I always worry slightly about travelling at night and usually because of the length of the flights I am taking I can either fly early in the morning, or late at night - it appears there is no happy medium.
With my stay in Bali ending yesterday with a fantastic visit to the wonderful Uluwatu Sea Temple, I was leaving this morning to head to the next island along in Indonesia which is Java. It would be my third and final island on this archipelago, although not my final stop in the country. I was planning to visit Sumatra which is the island which lies closest to Singapore and Malaysia, but upon reflection of my notes, I felt like I'd get much more of out my time if I spent it in Kalimantan, Bali and Java.
My only option of a direct flight into Yogyakarta Airport in Java was to fly early this morning. Several of the other airports here such as Surabaya and Jakarta are served several times a day, but the closest one to where I am going to be spending my time had a solitary flight at 8am this morning.
It sounds ridiculous, but sometimes when I book an early flight I forget to factor in the two hours (or one for domestic flights) that I have to be at the airport for in order to check-in. I'm usually concentrated on the price of the flight, or thinking about how it will affect my itinerary for the day, but like in Kuching when I was struggling to flag down a taxi early in the morning, I had a few issues here today trying to 'escape' Bali.
I feel like one of my many oversights with this blog is not effectively explaining very well the many smaller details of my accommodation or my surroundings. In Bali I was staying in my third different type of place, having mostly been in hotels earlier on before arriving at a guesthouse in Kuching and in Jimbaran I was in what is described as a 'homestay'.
It's a bit like a villa really, but not as flash, everything is self contained, but it also has the guesthouse element of a greater interaction with the owners and the guests around you.
When I first arrived there after my 14 hours of travelling from Pontianak, one thing I did consider was how isolated the place I'm staying in was. It turned out not to be an issue, because I ended up having a moped to get me around, but when I've stayed in places in Europe I have often been brave enough to take public transport and then use a map to guide me to where I'm staying.
Not only is there no real public transport on the island of Bali, I certainly wouldn't have trusted myself to find the place - I only just about made it back to the right place every night.
Due to the fact I was on an 8am flight, I left my apartment this morning at about 6am, with the intention of catching a taxi which would certainly have be there by 6.30am, and therefore well in time to check-in and make my flight. As I was leaving so early I had to leave my room key, moped key, and moped registration in front of the Homestay owners door this morning as they weren't home when I got in last night. I had to attempt to quietly unlock the gate and then padlock it behind me so that I didn't cause too much of a fuss.
Where I was staying was a pretty dark side road off an already dark side road so there wasn't too much lighting, but what I did know was that I was bound to have at least one animal encounter before making my way onto the main road.
Grazing just to the left as I walked out of my gate every afternoon were a couple of cows who at this early hour were still asleep. No idea if they were tethered or not, but I didn't fancy finding out as who knows how they'd react to being woken up.
As I continued to walk down the dirt path I could hear mopeds going by, indicating that it wasn't quite an un-Godly hour to be leaving, and it was actually starting to brighten up into daylight a bit when I reached my second obstacle.
I wouldn't exactly call myself an 'animal person' (some people wouldn't call me a 'People Person' either) but I certainly have no problem with them. The only animals I've ever owned are hamsters and fish and even then I got a certain amount of assistance from my mum. Dogs and cats are never something I've considered, but obviously I have experienced them in other people's homes before. I used to have a terrible allergy to both until a couple of years ago, but thankfully it seems to have eased, and I'm sure at some point in the future I will be the owner (or at least part owner) of one.
As a former paperboy however, I feel like I have a torn relationship with canines. There always used to be one particular big, scary, intimidating dog during my first foray into employment that I'd always have to brave my way past - and the owners would always be like "Don't worry, he doesn't bite". That was until the time it went for me one morning! From that point onwards their paper was always left shoved between the gap in their gate.
When I was a kid as well, my next door neighbours had a pretty frightening dog that used to have a bark petrifying enough to make you get scared whenever you heard it.
There are examples of nice dogs I've encountered, however I feel like they can mostly sense my apprehension that they're either going to bite, scratch or jump up at me at any moment.
Unfortunately as I believed I have mentioned before, South-East Asia has its fair share of stray dogs which roam the streets. The Philippines had quite a lot, and when I was in Bali, there was a fair few on a couple of the beaches. When I was in Phuket, I remember their being a beach described as 'dog beach' because the whole place was literally filled with so many of them. It's strange, because some of them look desperately underfed, but others look like they do quite well for themselves on the streets, but their similarities all range from how scraggly they look, almost mangy. Something to make you trust them even less.
This morning at the top of the street I was coming out from there were about five dogs lying at the top of the path so I tried to sneak past without rousing them. It was pretty much like a cartoon because as I tiptoed past I stood on a stick which woke one dog up, which they caused a chain reaction appearing to wake up every single dog in Bali. There were honestly about 40 different barks going on with lots of growling from the one whose slumber I'd disturbed. It started to come towards me looking pretty menacing so I immediately retreated back towards the gate with the dog coming closer with every bark.
Ten minutes later and this dog was still barking at me, and by now he'd roused the livestock too who started getting agitated, presumably that I'd woken them up too. I really had no idea what to do, and by now it was about 6.30am so I needed to get a move on. Thinking fast I went to the nearest tree and snapped off a couple of branches presuming that even street dogs like sticks.
When I advanced back towards where I had cowardly backed off from before, another set of dogs, this time behind a gate, started barking, and yet again I set off a whole chorus of dogs, very few though that sounded as though they were close by.
The one dog who'd tried to get up in my face earlier on was still parading around the area and came towards me step by step, still snarling. I was so close to the exit to my street and freedom so without even thinking I launched the stick in the direction of the dog who ceased his barking to go and follow it allowing me to quickly speed around the corner and out of sight.
With the scenario of my rabies jab needing to be activated out of the way, I was now free to try and grab a taxi along the main road. In typical fashion, whenever you need a taxi one never showed up - never had this problem in the Philippines....
Where I'm staying was at the top of a hill and literally all the traffic that was driving in both directions for a twenty minute stretch were mopeds. At one point I got excited and thought I saw a car, but when I looked back it was just two mopeds driving really close to one another.
I didn't give up hope though, and started to descend down the hill knowing that as I got closer to the town itself there'd probably be a slew of taxis.
I looked at my watch and it was 6.50am now, and not long before I figured that my check-in time would be over. Just at that moment someone pulled up behind me and said: "You need a ride?"
I turned round to see it was an old man who I'd passed on the street earlier as he was loading his moped up with what looked to be crates of fruit. Obviously I was slightly concerned by someone who I didn't know offering me a lift, but considering all my options I decided to offer him some money in exchange for a lift.
Working out how I would be able to carry both my rucksacks, the old man said: "Airport, you drive" and started loading one of my backpacks onto his shoulder. I wasn't in a position to argue with him at this point so I stuck my other bag down at my feet and then off we went in the direction of Bali airport.
After a fifteen minute drive or so I eventually got to the domestic departures terminal, paid the old man who had basically saved my skin, and strode towards the check-in desks where I was delighted to find that there were still people queuing. Bali airport is actually quite big so it took a while to get to the right gate. I brought myself a drink, and a snack for breakfast and ended up waiting about ten minutes before my flight was called to board just after 7:20am.
The flight to Yogykarta was set to be a fairly short one, around one hour and fifteen minutes. I remembered this from my unexpected stop there the other night. It's actually in the +7 timezone so it would actually only be 8:15am by the time I arrived leaving me with plenty of time to fill once I landed and waited for a reasonable time to check-in.
I left it until about 12.30pm before eventually deciding to fight my way through the battle of taxi drivers to find one who would transport me to my hotel for a reasonable price. I eventually negotiated down from 100,000 Rp to 70,000 Rp, and about 30 minutes later I was at my hotel the Ndari Guesthouse.
I checked into my room, an went across the road to grab myself a snack. I use the term 'room' loosely, as I'm pretty sure this used to be the BBC broom cupboard, I think Ed the Duck is probably in here with me somewhere.
This morning when I woke up I wasn't feeling too great, started to have a few sneezes which I think were made worse by the amount of air circulating in the tight space of my 'room' so I decided to go out for a walk to see if the fresh air would help. Just before I was about to though there was a Bali-style strike of lightning followed by about an hour and a half of rain which came pouring down. It started when I was going to the shop, and then almost prevented me from crossing the road as the cars were essentially driving in a river. Just when I went out to take some pictures it had all subsided and the rain was gone allowing me to continue with my plan of heading out.
Didn't really know where in particular I was walking too, as I hadn't planned to spend that much time in the city itself. I did notice that there was an area on my way to he airport called Marliboro, and whilst I was walking I saw a sign pointing towards it facing the opposite way so I an about turn and headed back there.
Marliboro looks to be the main shopping area in the city, it was fairly
busy, but didn't look touristy in the traditional sense. I found a few stores to walk around inside a miniature mall, also came across the train station and a couple of places where there were some restaurants that I might frequent on my stay here. Feeling a little poorly thought I decided to retire to my room a little earlier than normal with the hope of recovering and feeling much better tomorrow morning.
Who Let the Dogs Out
Baha Men (2000)
For coming out here on my own, I feel like the term 'adventurous' might come to mind for many people (fool-hardy also works). My explorer side tends to come out on every foreign vacation I have been on, and it's also present in England quite a lot of the time when I got to new towns or cities.
Being here alone means that exploring the bounds of not only my surroundings, but often my comfort zone comes into full effect during each and every outing.
I believe you learn a lot about yourself in difficult circumstances and how you handle these can often dictate what kind of person you develop into following their conclusion.
One of the ways I have been trying to improve myself on this trip is to try to be organised with what I'm doing and where I'm going, but also be efficient with my time. Due to financial constraints and the number of things I am wanting to do whilst I am here, I can't really afford to 'waste' days, and one way I have attempted to do this is by booking flights which are early in the morning so that when I arrive in a new place, I can hopefully achieve something other than sitting in an airport lounge all day, therefore allowing me to cram much more into my packed itinerary.
This does however come with issues, as on a couple of occasions because I have caught the first flight out of one place to another in the morning, I have had to wait around in the airport until I am able to check into my hotel at an appropriate time. I much prefer to arrive somewhere new in the morning though, so that I can get my bearings in the light and be all set to go when I have a full day. I always worry slightly about travelling at night and usually because of the length of the flights I am taking I can either fly early in the morning, or late at night - it appears there is no happy medium.
With my stay in Bali ending yesterday with a fantastic visit to the wonderful Uluwatu Sea Temple, I was leaving this morning to head to the next island along in Indonesia which is Java. It would be my third and final island on this archipelago, although not my final stop in the country. I was planning to visit Sumatra which is the island which lies closest to Singapore and Malaysia, but upon reflection of my notes, I felt like I'd get much more of out my time if I spent it in Kalimantan, Bali and Java.
My only option of a direct flight into Yogyakarta Airport in Java was to fly early this morning. Several of the other airports here such as Surabaya and Jakarta are served several times a day, but the closest one to where I am going to be spending my time had a solitary flight at 8am this morning.
It sounds ridiculous, but sometimes when I book an early flight I forget to factor in the two hours (or one for domestic flights) that I have to be at the airport for in order to check-in. I'm usually concentrated on the price of the flight, or thinking about how it will affect my itinerary for the day, but like in Kuching when I was struggling to flag down a taxi early in the morning, I had a few issues here today trying to 'escape' Bali.
I feel like one of my many oversights with this blog is not effectively explaining very well the many smaller details of my accommodation or my surroundings. In Bali I was staying in my third different type of place, having mostly been in hotels earlier on before arriving at a guesthouse in Kuching and in Jimbaran I was in what is described as a 'homestay'.
It's a bit like a villa really, but not as flash, everything is self contained, but it also has the guesthouse element of a greater interaction with the owners and the guests around you.
When I first arrived there after my 14 hours of travelling from Pontianak, one thing I did consider was how isolated the place I'm staying in was. It turned out not to be an issue, because I ended up having a moped to get me around, but when I've stayed in places in Europe I have often been brave enough to take public transport and then use a map to guide me to where I'm staying.
Not only is there no real public transport on the island of Bali, I certainly wouldn't have trusted myself to find the place - I only just about made it back to the right place every night.
Due to the fact I was on an 8am flight, I left my apartment this morning at about 6am, with the intention of catching a taxi which would certainly have be there by 6.30am, and therefore well in time to check-in and make my flight. As I was leaving so early I had to leave my room key, moped key, and moped registration in front of the Homestay owners door this morning as they weren't home when I got in last night. I had to attempt to quietly unlock the gate and then padlock it behind me so that I didn't cause too much of a fuss.
Where I was staying was a pretty dark side road off an already dark side road so there wasn't too much lighting, but what I did know was that I was bound to have at least one animal encounter before making my way onto the main road.
Grazing just to the left as I walked out of my gate every afternoon were a couple of cows who at this early hour were still asleep. No idea if they were tethered or not, but I didn't fancy finding out as who knows how they'd react to being woken up.
As I continued to walk down the dirt path I could hear mopeds going by, indicating that it wasn't quite an un-Godly hour to be leaving, and it was actually starting to brighten up into daylight a bit when I reached my second obstacle.
I wouldn't exactly call myself an 'animal person' (some people wouldn't call me a 'People Person' either) but I certainly have no problem with them. The only animals I've ever owned are hamsters and fish and even then I got a certain amount of assistance from my mum. Dogs and cats are never something I've considered, but obviously I have experienced them in other people's homes before. I used to have a terrible allergy to both until a couple of years ago, but thankfully it seems to have eased, and I'm sure at some point in the future I will be the owner (or at least part owner) of one.
As a former paperboy however, I feel like I have a torn relationship with canines. There always used to be one particular big, scary, intimidating dog during my first foray into employment that I'd always have to brave my way past - and the owners would always be like "Don't worry, he doesn't bite". That was until the time it went for me one morning! From that point onwards their paper was always left shoved between the gap in their gate.
When I was a kid as well, my next door neighbours had a pretty frightening dog that used to have a bark petrifying enough to make you get scared whenever you heard it.
There are examples of nice dogs I've encountered, however I feel like they can mostly sense my apprehension that they're either going to bite, scratch or jump up at me at any moment.
Unfortunately as I believed I have mentioned before, South-East Asia has its fair share of stray dogs which roam the streets. The Philippines had quite a lot, and when I was in Bali, there was a fair few on a couple of the beaches. When I was in Phuket, I remember their being a beach described as 'dog beach' because the whole place was literally filled with so many of them. It's strange, because some of them look desperately underfed, but others look like they do quite well for themselves on the streets, but their similarities all range from how scraggly they look, almost mangy. Something to make you trust them even less.
This morning at the top of the street I was coming out from there were about five dogs lying at the top of the path so I tried to sneak past without rousing them. It was pretty much like a cartoon because as I tiptoed past I stood on a stick which woke one dog up, which they caused a chain reaction appearing to wake up every single dog in Bali. There were honestly about 40 different barks going on with lots of growling from the one whose slumber I'd disturbed. It started to come towards me looking pretty menacing so I immediately retreated back towards the gate with the dog coming closer with every bark.
Ten minutes later and this dog was still barking at me, and by now he'd roused the livestock too who started getting agitated, presumably that I'd woken them up too. I really had no idea what to do, and by now it was about 6.30am so I needed to get a move on. Thinking fast I went to the nearest tree and snapped off a couple of branches presuming that even street dogs like sticks.
When I advanced back towards where I had cowardly backed off from before, another set of dogs, this time behind a gate, started barking, and yet again I set off a whole chorus of dogs, very few though that sounded as though they were close by.
The one dog who'd tried to get up in my face earlier on was still parading around the area and came towards me step by step, still snarling. I was so close to the exit to my street and freedom so without even thinking I launched the stick in the direction of the dog who ceased his barking to go and follow it allowing me to quickly speed around the corner and out of sight.
With the scenario of my rabies jab needing to be activated out of the way, I was now free to try and grab a taxi along the main road. In typical fashion, whenever you need a taxi one never showed up - never had this problem in the Philippines....
Where I'm staying was at the top of a hill and literally all the traffic that was driving in both directions for a twenty minute stretch were mopeds. At one point I got excited and thought I saw a car, but when I looked back it was just two mopeds driving really close to one another.
I didn't give up hope though, and started to descend down the hill knowing that as I got closer to the town itself there'd probably be a slew of taxis.
I looked at my watch and it was 6.50am now, and not long before I figured that my check-in time would be over. Just at that moment someone pulled up behind me and said: "You need a ride?"
I turned round to see it was an old man who I'd passed on the street earlier as he was loading his moped up with what looked to be crates of fruit. Obviously I was slightly concerned by someone who I didn't know offering me a lift, but considering all my options I decided to offer him some money in exchange for a lift.
Working out how I would be able to carry both my rucksacks, the old man said: "Airport, you drive" and started loading one of my backpacks onto his shoulder. I wasn't in a position to argue with him at this point so I stuck my other bag down at my feet and then off we went in the direction of Bali airport.
After a fifteen minute drive or so I eventually got to the domestic departures terminal, paid the old man who had basically saved my skin, and strode towards the check-in desks where I was delighted to find that there were still people queuing. Bali airport is actually quite big so it took a while to get to the right gate. I brought myself a drink, and a snack for breakfast and ended up waiting about ten minutes before my flight was called to board just after 7:20am.
The flight to Yogykarta was set to be a fairly short one, around one hour and fifteen minutes. I remembered this from my unexpected stop there the other night. It's actually in the +7 timezone so it would actually only be 8:15am by the time I arrived leaving me with plenty of time to fill once I landed and waited for a reasonable time to check-in.
I checked into my room, an went across the road to grab myself a snack. I use the term 'room' loosely, as I'm pretty sure this used to be the BBC broom cupboard, I think Ed the Duck is probably in here with me somewhere.
This morning when I woke up I wasn't feeling too great, started to have a few sneezes which I think were made worse by the amount of air circulating in the tight space of my 'room' so I decided to go out for a walk to see if the fresh air would help. Just before I was about to though there was a Bali-style strike of lightning followed by about an hour and a half of rain which came pouring down. It started when I was going to the shop, and then almost prevented me from crossing the road as the cars were essentially driving in a river. Just when I went out to take some pictures it had all subsided and the rain was gone allowing me to continue with my plan of heading out.
Marliboro looks to be the main shopping area in the city, it was fairly
Who Let the Dogs Out
Baha Men (2000)
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