Sumatra

Well......sadly this is the last entry for this trip, because we fly back tomorrow. It's crazy to think that three months have passed by so quickly, although it does feel like we've been traveling for quite a while. As Emily briefly mentioned, after we were at Mt. Bromo we spent five days, a relatively long stay for our schedule, at a city called Yogyakarta. Pronounced Jogjakarta, and usually shortened to just Jogja, it is a fairly sizable city in central Java that has a really nice blend of lots of cool sights to take in (temples, palaces, ruins, museums), tons of culture various forms of dance, music, art, etc, all without giving over its own identity to becoming a tourist town. Every night there are huge crowds of teenagers hanging out on certain corners, showing off their fancy bikes, smoking, just generally trying to look as cool as they can in front of each other. So in other words it reminded us of Portland a lot.
While at Earlham I took a World Music class where I remember being really impressed by gamelan, which is a form of Indonesian music performed by large ensembles of musicians playing tons of different drums, gongs, string instruments, and usually some vocalists. We got to attend a couple of gamelan concerts while in Yogya, once accompanying traditional Javanese dancing at the Sultan's palace. While this was a tourist attraction, it was as much for Indonesian schoolkids and other natives as westerners. There is a huge cadre of professionals who basically make their living from the Sultan being artisans in residence to display the traditional arts.
The other time we "saw" gamelan was when we went to a shadow puppet show. We'd been able to catch puppet show in India and Thailand as well, and it was interesting to see how similar they are, and as no accident because the practice was brought east by traders many years ago.
We went to a series of ruins called Prambanan, which were nice to take in because while Hindu they had a lot of different styles than other Hindu stuff other places. Borobudur, which is the biggest tourist attraction in the entire country was indeed spectacular, but it was also unfortunately pretty crowded, and tons of Indonesian teenagers either kept trying to interview us to practice their English and get their picture taken with us. Why you'd want our funny-looking faces in their pictures I don't know. We waited at the temple until the very last minute before the security guard kicked us out and it became much less crowded and more peaceful near sunset.
Next we flew to the northern tip of Sumatra to a city called Banda Aceh. This is pretty much the epicenter of the 2004 tsunami damage, and there are tsunami-attractions you can check out here including a 1,600-ton ocean liner 5km inland and a boat that rested on top of house, thereby saving the lives of 59 people that were in it. The population of the city as well as most of the entire Aceh province was totally devastated as most people already know. A few people I randomly struck up conversations with told me their experiences, it was pretty crazy.
After getting in there, we took a ferry to a little island nearby called Pulau Weh. This was definitely the best snorkeling we've done so far on this trip, and if we were scuba certified, the diving could've been way more incredible. Divers regularly see manta rays, and sometimes even whale sharks. We were pretty happy with what we saw which included turtles, octopus, sea snakes, a shark, a billion different cool kinds of fish. It makes me want to learn more about tropical fish, they're so colourful and interesting. And they have such cool names like: lionfish, goatfish, unicornfish, but my favorite is Harlequin Sweetlips. Another great thing about our little cove on the island (besides our $5 bungalow with a comfy hammock) was that there was an amazing communal dinner every night at the place next door. You just let them know ahead of time so they know how many mouths to feed, then show up and eat as much as you can of about 5 different dishes with fresh seafood curry and different veggies every night for $2.50. And the best part is the really warm and friendly vibe. It was hard to leave Pulau Weh, but we managed after another five days.
Then we plunged into the mountainous interior of Sumatra by bus. And it took a while. Over a span of 3 days we were in buses for about 25 hours. Granted, it was a very scenic 25 hours though. We were planning on doing some trekking in the jungle, but it turned out that the only option is to pay a lot of money to have a guide take you. Most people don't mind this, but I seem to have an irrational soft spot where I'm not willing to pay some $60, which in US equivalent might be more like at least twice that to walk around in the jungle with us. But we had gotten some good jungle treks in Thailand, and the whole Sumatra trekking scene was kinda weird and not geared towards budget travelers.
So we've since made it to Medan, the biggest city in Sumatra, where we fly tomorrow to Kualu Lumpur and then on to LAX. Then we'll have the reward of spending the night in the LAX airport to await our flights the next day to the each coast to see my sister and her family in maryland. Emily also has an orientation meeting for her australia grant this summer. If you haven't heard about this and want to know email her and she'll tell you all about it. Also she'll hopefully post stuff about this summer on this blog. Well, we've sad to leave but excited to get back at the same time!