I've got some catching up to do.

I'm sitting in a stuffy internet cafe in Jakarta right now, wondering how I'm going to spend the next 6 hours before my train leaves Gambir station at 2130. There is the glimmer of hope that it's a 'luxury' train, so I have something to look forward to at least. For now though, I'll try my best to remember the last few days and recount them for your reading pleasure.

The last night in Lovina was spent entirely in and around the homestay. I went to sit on the beach for a bit and found Georgio (the guy from Hounslow or wherever it was) there already. I'd bought my Lonely Planet for some light reading and he went through all sorts of places with me, telling me the best way to get from place to place, what to do about visas, where to avoid, where I shouldn't miss and all sorts of very useful stuff like that. At sunset I went to get my camera and it turns out he's into photography too, but he'd decided against bringing his stuff, so that fueled the conversation for a while. That was when I got the chicken shot in the previous post.

Eventually the conversation turned to cycling, which we're both fans of, even if he is a bit on the slow side. He wanted some help adjusting the indexing on his rear derailleur and showed him how to and even drew some diagrams. So it turns out I am useful for some things, even if rivetting blog posts about cameras and bikes isn't one of them.

As a reward he invited me to try some of the Durian he'd bought earlier. It's the most expensive fruit you can buy and, defying all logic, it's by far the most disgusting. First off it smells absolutely foul - gut wrenchingly so, if you take a deep breath of it. It's prickly enough to be painful to pick up, it's very slimy sticky and it's renound for giving people hallucinations and weird dreams if you eat enough of it. It doesn't taste quite as bad as it smells, but that's not to say it's by any means pleasant. I had a few tentative mouthfuls and had to resort to spitting the rest away and washing my mouth out. It took a good 2 days for the smell to completely leave my fingers (yes, I do wash my hands, thankyouverymuch), but I can at least say I've tried a Durian, which is something not many people can do. Although similarly, I can also say I've drawn a diagram of the indexing of a rear derailleur, so perhaps it's not such a good thing.

Dinner that night was tuna steak, caught fresh by Mr Gede's son, cooked in a very nice Balinese onioney sauce, which I enjoyed in the company of Mr Gede himself. He'd been playing the Gamelan that afternoon and I was asking about it, so he offered to teach me some traditional Balinese tunes. It's harder than it looks, but I picked it up quite quick. For those interested, it uses a pentatonic scale (the black notes of a piano), where no two notes will sound wrong together, so you can happily sit there with no musical prowess whatsever and make something resembling actual music! I might have to get me one of these!

Later that night I sat on the beach trying to get some more star trail photos, but got so harrassed by local touts trying to sell me stuff, I decided to leave it after one shot. Then for an early night, followed by an equally early morning, ready for my bus back to Kuta.

I went to Kuta much moer mentally prepared this time, and it paid dividends. I quite liked it there this time. You can have fun messing around with the touts, the food's cheaper than anywhere else and I was staying somewhere with a really nice pool. So two days were spent browsing (but not buying) in the local markets and relaxing in the hotel grounds, preparing for two days of continuous relentless travel (from which this blog is being made).

From Kuta, I flew to Jakarta and from here, I'll get the overnight train to Surubaya ni the east of Java and from there, it's a taxi to another station within Surubaya, then another train to Probolinggo, then a bus to Cemoro Lawang, where I'll finally be able to book a bed for the night. Cemoro Lawang is right on the lip of the crater of Gunung Bromo and I'll be up at 4am to trek to the summit for sunrise. Expect some good photos :)

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm writing as a means of time wasting while I wait for my train (5 hours to go now!), so apologies if I'm babbling. Well apologies if I'm babbling more than usual, anyway...

Now to try and put into words the vast monstrosity that is Jakarta. This is how Lonely Planet put it - 'America can keep its big apple; Indonesia's capital was never going to be an easy fruit to swallow. Dubbed the 'Big Durian', Jakarta is a chaotic landscape of freeways, skyscrapers, slums and traffic jams'. And I completely agree. It is, to not put too fine a point on it, fucking horrible here. You can actually see the pollution here! The air is hazy and if you look up, even when there's a rare cloudless moment, the sky is mottled and brown rather than blue. Flying in, you could see a quite spectacular change in atmosphere below the cloudline, where it went from clear and clean, to being abruptly dirty and smoggy, with maybe no more than half a kilometer's visabilty. It smells about as bad as it looks too.

I've found my way to the backpacker district, had lunch in a really quite nice and friendly café and am now in an internet café a few hundred yards down the road. The internet and computers are slow, the keyboard is sticky, but there's a fan pointed right at my face, so I'm happy to stay here. It's dirt cheap too... about 20p an hour!

I'm coming to the unavoidable conclusion that the best way to while away the hours might be to find another friendly little café somewhere and get started on the Bintang - a very nice Indonesian beer. Maybe there will actually be some other backpackers to talk to. We can only hope.

I think I've exhausted all my stores of inane nonsense, so I'll leave it here for now. Next time I write, I'll be either at Bromo, or in Yogyakarta - the former may not have internet access, I'm not sure.

Wish me luck.