The Lessons I Learned in Indonesia

Out of all the places I've travelled during the past year, I think that I learned the most about myself, about travel, about foreign cultures, about language barriers and the comforts of home from my trip to the Island of Java in Indonesia.

Here it is on a map:

Since April, I had been saying that I would climb Mount Bromo, one of Java's remaining active volcanos. In fact, since Devesh came to visit me, I had been plotting. We were suppose to go to Bromo the weekend of the Malaysian elections but due to the fact that I was terrified of what was going to happen during the elections, I made Devesh stay in KL with me instead of risking being locked outside Malaysia if they closed the borders if shit went down. Which it didn't.

Well, I finally made it to Java in the very last moments of my time in Asia. In fact, I made Indonesia the chosen country for my first and only visa run during my time in Malaysia :) And just like every other country in Asia, I had family there too :-P

Conveniently, this family was located in Surabaya, the city that you need to leave from in order to get to Mount Bromo, so this trip was a 2-4-1 kinda thing. Not only did I get to climb this mountain but I got to visit my family at the same time. I also had a friend from Montreal (John) come to travel to Bromo with me as the start of his multi-month Asia Trip. He's somewhere in Vietnam right now.

Who are the nicest people in Asia?

Straight up, it's the Cambodians. Now this is pretty bad but I'm about to update you on my trip to Cambodia, which I took about 3 months ago. Actually right now, I'm sitting in cold and rainy London, England and I've already started working in my new position in external affairs at a charity..... but, I have lots of backtracking to do before I expand more on that.

So, why did I go to Cambodia?

Very often, I'm prompted to travel somewhere because I've heard loving stories told on a particular country, detailing it's culture, quirks, sites, sounds and food and I become totally jealous as I begin to draw pictures of myself in my head exploring the foreign land. This feeling of longing begins to develop inside of me and it grows and grows until it completely fills me up and the intensity of my desire to travel begins to make my heart hurt.

I never felt this way about Cambodia.

No one had told me life-changing stories from their trip to Siem Reap and no one had described Cambodian culture to me in a way that made me say - "I gotta see this!". Truth be told, I didn't even desire to see the world-famous Angkor Wat and I had basically convinced myself that it was over-rated.

But then a weird thing happened.....

As I neared the end of my stint in Asia, I was forced to deal with the reality that if I didn't venture off to the countries surrounding Malaysia, there's a possibility that I would never see that country. Ever. I started to experience FOMO and asked myself - would I regret not seeing arguable the WORLDS MOST FAMOUS TEMPLE and getting to decide myself, if I liked Cambodia or not? I feared not having this experience and so a mad race against time ensued to get myself to Siem Reap. Luckily my dear Mother had plans to come to Asia to see her own mother in Singapore as so I deemed her my travel buddy and started planning my trip.

Pre-Trip
My mom and I started our trip to Siem Reap in typical Malaysian style - it was super, super frustrating. For some reason, Air Asia opened only ONE of their international terminal gates and forced every flight to leaveout of there, one plane after the next. To make matters worse, the gate its self could only hold the people boarding the particular flight.

This meant that we had to stand outside the passport check in a massive line (that was slowly turning into a massive blob) of people crowding to get in until the officer at the front of the line checked each individual's boarding pass and directed them either to stay at the front of the line waiting for the flight to board (hence the growth of a blob) or to enter into the holding area.

The inefficiency of the whole process was just amazing. At this point, I was well accustomed to the Malaysian logic and this didn't even phase me..........okay, it phased me a little and I was ALSO strangely and weirdly happy that my Mom finally saw what I was dealing with on a daily basis in KL. Misery loves company, as they say, and I was not holding back. I should work on that.

We eventually made it to Siem Reap and got to see all of the little town fairly quickly - our 3 days there were more than enough :) For anyone looking to travel to Siem Reap, I've put together a list of my thoughts and feelings and tips on traveling to the Land of Angkor.