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.

Ofla pic at Bromo

As luck would have it, things didn't go as planned on this trip (AS ALWAYS). For one, my cousin Heena was suppose to come up from Jakarta to show us around Surabaya, travel to Bromo, and then Yogyakarta. But Heena had to unexpectedly travel back to Jakarta the day after she met me in Surabaya due to a family emergency. We travelled over night to Bromo anyway and although we weren't met with a sureal sunrise (like the one in my friend Oflavia's picture), we did get to experience the volcano covered in an ominous, misty, haze which had it's own beautiful landscape, in a depressing way. But, basically, as you can see from the photo - I have VERY GOOD REASON to go back to Bromo :-(

Bromo covered by the clouds

So, having Heena around would have been pretty favourable because basically NO ONE speaks English in Surabaya, or in the tiny town of Probolingo close to Mount Bromo.... and even though you may think that they must get a TON of tourists, the reality is that this mountain/volcano is a favourite trip for the local Indonesians. So, I learned my first two lessons in travel:

1. Things never go as planned and you gotta deal with it. Even more so, you gotta embrace it. Things do work out and you're more likely to see the positive when you keep up a positive morale & practice gratefulness for the things around you. It guides you to appreciate all of the amazing things you are exposed to.

2. Language barriers are tough but in this one year, I'd become ridiculously skilled at communicating to people who either spoke very little or no English at all. Sure, it required a lot of miming (good thing I'm good at charades) and a little bit of creativity - like thinking about how you can say something complex in the shortest and simplest way possible - but it is possible to get a message across, even if the message its self is completely lost because the warmness and friendliness and the effort you put into trying to communicate still has an impact on the other person and it creates a bond. Our driver spoke ZERO english yet at the end of our Bromo trip, we were absolute besties. And when you DO get the message across, the feeling is like winning the lottery.

One of my proudest language moments was when I managed to purchase Indonesian fabric and get a tailor made skirt for me in Indonesian style!! It didn't exactly fit at the end of whole thing but I fixed that back in KL.

We also managed to cause a scene in the Matahari in Surabaya when John went to buy shorts. A lady-boyish sales associate could NOT leave John alone and his very obvious advances attracted every single giggling female sales associate in the overstaffed store in addition to the local Indonesians who were full on staring at us. The conversation was only half in English, but I'm pretty sure a lot of laughing AT AS was going on.

We ALSO tried really hard to get into the cigarette factory in Surabaya but our driver, instead of stopping at the factory/museum/ drove RIGHT PAST IT. We thought he was going to stop further down but, nope, he drove us all the way home.

Good times.

Then John and I took the train to Yogyakarta to visit this 'Art Centre' of Indonesia. The small town was pretty cool! There weren't too many tourists and we quickly met a female lumber jack from Japan (no joke), an American who makes his own alcohol and a Ukrainian who had been teaching english in China for 2 years. Pretty interesting crowd.

We spent the day at Borobodur Temple and on the streets at the markets (which have so much batik, it's completely insane) and exploring around the town looking for things to eat. A lot of the time we took tuk tuk drivers who pedal people around by bike. I started feeling REALLY sorry for these tuk tuk drivers who were well over the age of 50 and were panting by the time we were back at our hostel. SO then, I started making sure that we only took tuk tuk drivers that looked a little younger.

At Borobodur Temple, I learned the next lesson:

3. No matter how immune to the sun you think you are, you should always wear sunscreen. A few hours walking around the absolutely beautiful Borobodur temple, my nose and cheeks were bright red. That's 1 year after living in the tropics in constant sunshine. Luckily, I was better off then John who's white... and that's all I'm gonna say. Luckily I had my trusty SPF 100 which I gladly handed off to John at the end of the trip because he definitely needed it more than I did.

Other highlights at Yogyakarta were seeing an Indonesian interpretation of the story of the Ramayana and seeing Mount Merapi, a volcano that erupted only a few years ago and left part of Yogyakarta in ruins. (Also, not long after I got back to KL, another volcano erupted in Indonesia, proving to me that erupting volcanos are real travel risks in Indo!!) We also checked out the palace and saw some stunning hand-made shadow puppets and learned ALL about the meaning behind them from a very friendly man working at the workshop.

I arrived back in KL and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief. It felt so good to be able to navigate the roads and COMMUNICATE with everyone around me. In comparison to Indonesia, living in KL was just effortless, not to mention way more exciting and happening than Surabaya (which is the 2nd largest city in Indonesia). And here, I learned my last lesson from my trip:

4. It is possible to EVENTUALLY adapt to the place that you are living. I FINALLY felt like Kuala Lumpur was home and I was so happy to be back. I was also so incredibly comfortable in my bed, my apartment building, my city, with my friends and with my life...... I felt all of this literally 1 week before I was leaving. And I really noticed how different I felt in comparison to my first few weeks / months in KL when I felt extremely uncomfortable about everything around me, and when I didn't know how to get around by public transport, and when I was super annoyed by the fact that no one understood me.

So there you have it. If ANYONE is thinking about spending time in a new country or city, well, DO IT. Our capacity to adapt as human beings to new environments is amazing and we should take advantage of that! We should explore and put ourselves in uncomfortable situations and watch how much we learn and watch how much we grow!

Overall, my trip to Indonesia was great. I think that these islands go a little bit forgotten on traveller's list of places to travel in South East Asia. Everyone is really keen on visiting Bali but really, the entire country holds so many treasures of places to see which are a little off the beaten track - and that makes exploring these places so much better. When you go to places where people have not met a white person, or have never spoken English, it's really.... an experience. It's something that you don't get if you follow the traditional route that all the tourists take cuz then you're treated just like a tourist which certainly doesn't involve getting laughed at and causing a scene in a department store.