Bandung
The only reason I wanted to go to Bandung was to do some family shopping and experience a town that was not a big destination for backpackers, but I ended up getting more than I bargained for which was great of course.
I took flight from Bali to Bandung for around $41. Bandung is located in Java Island close to Jakarta. There weren't many hostels in Bandung. The hostel I was in had many backpackers, many were from the Netherlands. I did a lot of shopping in Bandung and the price was just right, I found out that many people who live in Jakarta come over the weekends to do shopping in Bandung.
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| Just walking around in Bandung |
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| Bakso, a very famous dish in Bandung |
I meet an Egyptian backpacker in the hostel I was in. He had an excellent high banking position in Egypt but decided to quit and travel to see what is out there. My new backpacking buddy became famous when an Egyptian journalist heard about his travels and wrote an article about him. Now he has Facebook page called
Travel Like an Egyptian with over 80k likes (as of 09/2016). He told me some amazing stories throughout the time when we were traveling together. He told me one time about a temple or a martial arts school in the mountains of China. So he traveled for some time until he found it and just knocked on the door. He communicated with them and they accepted him with the condition that he helps out with the chores and they would teach him Tai Chi. I thought this was amazing, it was like something we see in movies. I was not as fortunate to try something like that, but I was glad to hear that such things were still possible. Imagine living without TV or internet on the top of a mountain just learning martial arts and living in harmony with nature - how fantastic that would be.
The next day, me and my Egyptian travel buddy rented a motorbike and rode for about two hours to a volcanic crater lake called Kawah Putih.
The lake was arctic blue, and in some areas the water was boiling. The area smelled of sulfur. There was a sulfur mine on the mountain but it closed after sometime. I thought the area would be good for a scary movie because everything surrounding the lake was dead and from time to time a heavy fog would pass by.
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| Fog passing by |
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| Boiling water |
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| Some powder from the lake |
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| Spider taking refugee near the lake |
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| Sulfur mine entry |
Once we explored the lake we rode just a bit down the mountain and the heavy rain made it impossible for us to get down the mountain. We were stuck for over 4 hours but luckily there was an open restaurant so we stayed there until around 8pm. The restaurant closed about 2 hours before we left. We were cold and my whole body was shaken from the cold until I bought a rain coat from one of the street sellers. In the restaurant we meet two Germans and two Indonesians who were also stuck and cold, they also could not get down from the mountain with their motorbikes. We spent the whole time with them sharing our travel stories. When the rain stopped we decided to go to a hot spring a little bit down the mountain. By this time it was night and there was a blackout in the hot spring so we had to use light from our phones and motorbike to enter through the tiny passage within the mountain and reach the hot spring. So all 6 of us enjoyed the hot spring in the dark with light from our phones. This was something I never tried before and I never forget it. It was definitely worth it.
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| Stuck at a restaurant, waiting for the rain to pass. |
Bogor
We decided to go paragliding in Bogor. The bus was suppose to take around 4 hours from Bandung to Bogor, but it took more than 7 hours. It was one of the most painful rides I ever had. It was not because that it took more than 7 hours but because the road was so small and there was so much traffic that it became very boring. Once we got to Bogor we found out that it was too windy and rainy
to para-glide. It always started raining around 1pm and stopped around 9pm and this was during the dry season, imagine how much rain falls during the rainy season. Bogor was the city with the most rain in the Java Island. Because of this, we decided to just relax in Bogor for two night and we then went
straight to Jakarta.
The video below is taken on the bus from Bandung to Bogor.
Next City is Jakarta
