I have been wanting to take this 3 hour train trip since I heard about it in our first weeks in Jakarta. Our friend Rebekah described it as 'watching a National Geographic movie out your window.' That about summed it up.
The view out the window of life alongside the traintracks went something like this:
Heaps of garbage upon heaps of garbage.
Urban madness.
People showering themselves and others, Indonesian-style.
Men shaving and cutting each others' hair.
Woman carrying babies.
Little girls carrying babies.
Hand-washed laundry laid to dry along the tracks.
Graffiti.
Heaps of garbage.
Shifting to
Fish farms nestled among villages of corrugated tin, bricks, tarps and plywood.
Flooded villages, flooded houses, fish farms, and a blurred line between them all.
Heaps of garbage.
Fish farms located beside heaps of garbage.
And then
Rice paddies.
Terraced mountainsides.
Plunging mountain crevasses.
Fields and rivers and flags of fabric flapping in the wind to keep the birds away from the crops.
Tea plantations.
Tobacco fields.
None of the pictures I took did the landscape any justice, so I put my camera down and stared out the window for hours.
(Pat took these ones.)
We stayed at a bed and breakfast that we had stumbled upon on TripAdvisor. For $100 USD a night, all six of us had a place to stay, and our own personal tour guide and driver. Heri, our host/tour-guide/driver, was recently laid off from his decades-long employment in the oil industry. He decided to open his home to visitors and start up a new business in tourism. (Incidentally, if you're planning a trip to Bandung and need a place to stay, we know this guy....)
It wasn't a four-star hotel. The mosque speakers were literally outside the bedroom windows. The bathroom door was wonky. He gave us hot dogs for breakfast.
But it was everything we wanted. Warm Indonesian hospitality, local knowledge, and a genuine cultural experience. And Ezra liked Heri's truck.
We would have had no clue where to go or what to see, but Heri knew we wanted fresh air and green spaces.
So he took us to see a giant flower.
(A few days earlier it had been three meters high, but the day we saw it it was kind of flopped over and shriveled.)
We saw monkeys climbing in the trees.
I may have even shrieked, 'I am in Indonesia and there are monkeys climbing in the trees around me!'
We visited the mouth of a volcano.
And walked through an other-worldly marketplace of hawkers selling 'I ❤️ Bandung' tshirts, ninja dolls, jewellery, carvings, and sand from the crater. Among other things.
We saw people selling angklungs - these musical instruments made from bamboo.
And then bought one from this man.
We went to a waterfall.
(This is our family with Heri.)
And then through the waterfall.
And up the side of a mountain.
Pat and Naomi might tell you it was a gentle hike. But I say it was up the side of a mountain. And I'm the one writing this, so I can create any false social media impression I want, right?
Worst day ever to wear jeans, by the way.
I finally summoned up my courage to ask some of the locals if I could take their pictures.
Landscapes are pretty, but I think the deepest beauty lies in smiles like this:
And this.
I had my picture taken with a bunch of people I don't know.
And a few with people I know very well.
As a reward for those who actually read this whole blog post, here's a picture of this guy again.
He loved that I asked to take his picture.
He even pulled out a mug and his ladle and posed for us.
That smile is all I need to get me through the day.
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