Indonesian travels: Leaving Rosa's and falling off track for a day...

We left Rosa's early in the morning on Feb. 1st loaded with a travel breakfast Ahmed made for us and a good driver as we headed back to Banuwangi to catch another train for Sarabaya. To our surprise we just missed the morning train by minutes and found that it now runs on a 8 AM schedule. Our next train option was 9:45 PM with us being stuck in the train station in a small town that Lonely Planet says is somewhere to mainly use to make connections elsewhere. Fortuntately we were soon greeted by Hari who works at the station and speaks very good english. Hari was full of information on things to do there (and sounded a bit like a tour guide) and places to go for one or more days and that it would be better than our recent national park experience. After determining that he was indeed sincere and well informed we decided to go for it and he arranged for a more mature and safer driver to pick us up. This is an important consideration after you have traveled the roads and cities in Indonesia! Off on an unplanned and uncertain day adventure we went.

What a day we had yesterday too with our friendly driver offering stops at a nearby chinese temple "Kongco Tan Hu Cin Jim" and to see a very brightly colored fishing fleet as we were traveling for several hours of mostly backroad driving to get to a national park that is considered one of Java's last remaining sacred spaces. When we arrived at our destination we had the Alas Purwo National Park nearly to ourselves after driving through teak and mahogony plantations. There we saw the wild buffalo (aka Bantang) herd protected in the park from a great observation tower as well as Timor deer, huge numbers of wild pea fowl and a number of other species. We didn't find the wild dogs (dhole) or boars there but were able to meet park staff including the manager who has also worked in Sumatra on tiger conservation with help from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. We had a great discussion with him. We also spent time at a nearby beach sea turtle facility complete with egg and young rearing facilities and hands-on information. We got a brief look at the very big surf here that draws surfers internationally but we had the whole beach to ourselves today. The opportunity to compare two national parks in this region has been a great treat and we plan to do more of this on this and our future trips to Indonesia.

At the end of this long unplanned day we were dropped off at the small train station in Rojojambi (try to find that on the map sometime!) where we waited several hours to catch the night train that we needed to catch after missing the morning train. What a day it had been and all done with time to get back on "track" for a long night ending with being back in Sarabaya before morning (4:30 AM). We had made hotel arrangements but couldn't check in before 9 or 10 AM so we hung out at the RR station for a few hours and then caught a taxi to the hotel. We had a great breakfast and then hung out in the lobby waiting for our room and enjoying the first internet connection available in over a week. We spent the day resting, working on our remaining travel plans that have some loose ends to sort out. We also took several free local tours around town including the most unusual and interesting House of Sampoerna tobacco museum making for quite a full day. The videos of workers making hundreds of clove smokes an hour alone is worth the time. Meanwhile not solving our laundry needs has also caused us to do a fair amount of washing work in our hotel sink and hopefully getting everything dry before we leave in a day or so for somewhere as yet unknown to us.

Our next travel plans are still undecided. We need to be back in Bali around the 8th to pick up our visa extension which is hopefully in the works so our trip can continue for an additional week. When we return to Bali soon we are likely to spend a few days again around Ubud at the Bird Park, Green School and more before heading back to Java for the final time on this trip. We may also get to Bandung where Eko's parents and other relatives like and hopefully meet up with Nana again. We will get back to Jakarta a couple of days before our flight back on the 16th. Among other things we want to see everyone possible again before we leave. That includes Reza who will be returning from two weeks of work on his regular schedule on Kalimantan then.

We still have quite a bit to do to get our travel plans sorted out not to mention lots of writing and photo updating to do for all the things we've already done. This travel adventure takes a long of energy!

A few more iPhone photos until we can get better ones uploaded.