Java!

Well we've not had any crazy journeys for a while and we thought we hadn't felt the stuffy, ram packed, god knows how much we are supposed to pay and being dropped off in the middle of nowhere feeling for a while so thought we'd go for it. We decided to book through an agency and pay probably more than necessary but at least it should get us to our destination... We got picked up in a car by a guy at 6am who then dropped us off in the small market town we went to yesterday. He then said we wait here until the bus comes. It might be 30 or so minutes... We quickly grabbed Nasi Campur for breakfast and sat and waited... And waited... And waited... The bus finally came at 8am and it was the local bus. To be fair we did get a seat each which was nice but the bus was rammed and had no aircon so was unbelievably sweaty. It was supposed to be a 4 hour journey with an arrival at the ferry port at 9am. The journey was looooong, with many stops to pick up more locals and a lot of deliveries. We finally arrived at 12:30pm,grabbed a quick Bakso Ayam and then jumped on the ferry. Actually quite a smooth ride in the end!

Did I mention that Will hasn't had mobile data for 2 weeks?!! Wow! And he hasn't even complained too much about it, until now hehe We arrived at the ferry in Java and had no idea where to go, where to stay, how to plan our journey up Ijen or even how to leave the ferry port. So I went and found a guy to take us to town on his motorbike and told him we need to just go somewhere with WiFi. He did exactly that! We sat for an hour in the reception of a hostel planning our next steps and Will had a fight with Three mobile over their live chat and then was finally able to resolve the issue by ringing them up once their office open so he could use roaming. So in 24 hours Will will be able to roam again 😂 So after sorting accomodation and a possible tour to Ijen we headed to the guesthouse. On the way we found a coffee place full of students with their menu price listed in Mb (it was a geeks cafe), but super cheap so we headed in for a cheeky coffee before heading to the guesthouse. After having a coffee we walked through a park and heard live music, so obviously went for a nosey. God knows what was going on but we ended up being filmed on a big screen in front of the whole park! The hosts only really spoke Indonesian but it suddenly escalated with Will announcing we were a married couple (don't get your hopes up folks we don't have any big news lol!!) and then everyone in the park insisted on having selfies with us. After being in such a western part of Asia it truly feels like we are back amongst the true craziness of SEA again haha We have only been in Java a couple of hours and although we are just in a small town is great fun! The plan for the eve is to eat and get to bed really early as our tour to Ijen starts at 12am!! Mount Ijen is famous for its blue flame and having the largest acidic crater lake in the world. Super excited though 😁

For dinner we went for Soto which is a chicken, peanut and rice soup with prawn crackers on top, yum!! Then we went next door to the bakery for our 12am breakfast prep. Well we couldn't not grab some pudding too so we tried Ketu one with hazelnut and one which we though was vanilla. Ketu is deep fried banana. One came with smothered in chocolate and hazelnut and the other smothered with chocolate and cheese!! The cheese one was unexpectedly the best haha Its now time to go home and SLEEP!!! Watch this space for incredibly, let's be honest with our luck, rainy washed out volcano pictures 😂Read more