My roommate Maybelle and I both share the same issue – it’s really difficult to blog about travel. We both love to travel, take pictures, and write, but travel blogging is a whole different level more difficult because it involves poring through hundreds of photos, whittling them down to less than 20, editing them, renaming them, uploading them, before finally writing about them. This is definitely the most difficult thing to blog about as a lifestyle blogger and I seriously don’t know how the travel bloggers do it!
REALLY, HOW DO YOU DO IT?
This is the reason why nowadays, I post about my travels months after they happen, or sometimes never at all.
Well, not never, it turns out, because I have a couple of travel posts that I thought I’d never get around to blogging about, until I decided that I needed to do it during this A to Z challenge, before I completely forget about them and regret that when I’m already old and as gray as the ash of Domas crater.
So today, let me tell you about our 2011 trip to Bandung and Jakarta, Indonesia.
It was my friend Cate’s birthday, and she decided that she wanted to spend it abroad and invited us to join her. So we booked sale tickets and flew over for the weekend.
Our college classmate Junjun now happens to live there with his wife Monica, and when we told them we planned on going there, they graciously volunteered to tour us around. We were so grateful for their generosity!
Our first day and half was spent in Bandung (after traveling there from Jakarta). We went shopping at the Factory outlets in Riau followed by a sumptuous dinner at The Valley Bistro Cafe.
We spent the night for free in a beautiful three-floor villa owned by Junjun’s boss.
The next morning we had breakfast at the Lembang market for a taste of Bandung’s traditional food.
We needed the energy for our hike towards the Domas Crater.
Domas has an active bubbling crater where you can boil eggs. We brought eggs for that purpose, and it actually worked!
We also dipped our feet in one of the hot springs which was supposedly good for you because volcano mud has healing properties or something. It wasn’t as hot as the crater which could boil eggs, obviously. It was nice and warm and relaxing.
At the top , you could see a bird’s eye view of the crater. There were also a lot of salesmen peddling rabbit fur hats and bags.
After that, on our way to Jakarta, we also got to try rabbit meat in the form of satay. It kind of tastes like chicken liver.
We were back in Jakarta that afternoon, and had dinner at the Grand Indonesia Mall.
We ended the night with crazy surprise presentations for Rodel and Cate at our room in Sunlake Hotel. You can watch our musical medley revolving around the theme “time” to suit our watch present for Cate.
Here is another musical presentation we made right before that, our version of our theme song for that trip – “Millionaire” (because Indonesian currency is so small, we were millionaires while we were there).
The next day, Tyne (go check her out, she’s doing the A to Z challenge too) and I watched The Time Traveler’s Wife on our hotel room TV and ended up bawling – not small tears, but ugly snotfest – while using our blanket to wipe away our tears.
We also had Cate’s lunch treat at Kenny Rogers in the Mall of Indonesia before we had to travel to the airport and fly back to Singapore.
This post is part of the A to Z Challenge, a blog hop that goes through the alphabet for all the days of April except Sundays. Today’s feature is J for Jakarta.
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