Jakarta to Bandung

After a day or two in Jakarta I knew I had seen pretty much all it had to offer me. From talking to my new friends at Hunny Hostel I learned that Jogjakarta is considered the cultural hub of Java and it's the place to be. I had already decided to slowly make my way east across the island, eventually reaching Bali, and I figured Jogjakarta would be just as logical stop as anywhere else. But I couldn't make it there in one day, so I decided to stop first for a day or two in Bandung.

I had no real reason to go to Bandung except for that it was kind of east and being a major city it probably held some attractions. Roxanne was also stopping in Bandung on her way to some islands for a week of scuba diving. One guy at Hunny warned us that Bandung used to be a cool city, but not anymore. We brushed him off, but we should have listened. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I looked online and saw that there were train tickets leaving from Jakarta the next afternoon, so Roxanne and I rose early and walked to the train station to purchase two. We had some time to kill after that so we rode public transport to the mall and went to the cinema. It was an emotional foreign film about a Chinese girl who broke up with her perfect boyfriend when he proposed because she was dying of stomach cancer and wanted to spare him the grief. They made a contract to get back together if they were both single in five years because she thought she would be dead by then. Miraculously she recovered, but he had moved on and was getting married. Only not really. He still loved her; he was playing a trick on her. Soon the lovebirds get back together and they're going to get married, but her cancer comes back and she leaves him again. He still doesn't know she's sick. Eventually he finds out, takes care of her, but she dies anyway. The movie was called The Proposal. It wasn't all sad, there were some funny parts. I'd recommend it if I didn't just spoil it all for you.

Moving on. After the film Roxanne and I rode the public transport to the China Town of Jakarta. There really wasn't much to see there, but I was missing Chinese food, so we had an authentic dish and returned to Hunny.

Even though we walked to the train station in the morning, with our backpacks and the heat we opted for a cab. Too bad there was a bad traffic jam and too bad we misread our tickets. We had about fifteen minutes to get to the train station and at the rate we were moving- which was not at all- we wouldn't make it in time. After a few minutes of going nowhere, we paid our cabbie and got out to search for ojek drivers. We found some men willing to take us to the train station, but they were trying to charge us 50,000 rupiahs each (about $5USD). Roxanne, being a hard bargainer, got them down to 150,000 rupiahs.. It was money well spent, too. Our drivers were super quick and efficient; even going up on the sidewalk once or twice to get us to our destination on time. The train to Bandung was fairly uneventful.