Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.

The Grampian Mountains are west of Melbourne, just past the Pyrenees. Australia is almost completely flat so they have to economize – anything you can’t throw a tennis ball over is a mountain, and the Grampians peak at 1167 meters. The road there is green farmland, site of Australia’s Gold Rush in the 1850s. The…

Ventured beyond downtown: Brunswick St in Fitzroy has lots of little offbeat shops, restaurants, galleries, and bookstores, and is not at all glossy like the central business district. It’s fun to walk and browse here. If they could only lose a couple of lanes of the busy Brunswick St, and maybe add a few head…

At the travel agency they told me that the spire at the Fed Square looks just like the Eiffel Tower. Boys and girls, if you think that this thing looks anything like the Eiffel Tower, you need to get out more! Fed Square is a somewhat sterile cluster of museums, boring boxy buildings with funky…

Editorial intermission: If you want to be really pedantic about geography, you might wonder what Melbourne is doing in a blog about Asia. Melbourne is not, in fact, in Asia but on a former penal colony off the coast of Papua New Guinea. At least, when you look my way from Europe, you’ll have to…

Never had so much opportunity to chat with customs officials as today, arriving in Melbourne. They wanted to know what I do, what’s in my backpack, and how I can afford to visit so many places. They browsed through my pictures to verify my statements. Apparently Bali is a major source of illegal drugs. That,…

The Ulu Watu temple is at the southern end of Bali. It’s small but very scenically perched at the edge of a huge cliff that falls down vertically to a foaming ocean. Admission includes a rental sarong. As before, the temple can’t be visited but the real attraction are the views of the ocean anyway.…

Tanah Lot is a pair of Hindu temples built on large rocks in the sea. The larger one is reached by wading out through shallow water on the lee side of the rock, while the surf crashes on the rock at the other sides. They have a holy spring in a cave at the bottom,…

After hurrying about hectic Bali for a few days, I decided to conclude my visit to Indonesia on the quiet little Gili Air island just off the coast of Lombok, the next major island past Bali. Perama runs a boat there from Perambai in Bali. There are no piers in Perambai, Lombok, or any of…

Quiet day. I have spent so much time in buses, hurrying from one place to the next, that I thought a rest day was in order. I went to the beach, and walked for several hours through rice fields and little villages. They have lots of roadside shrines, mostly consisting of a little empty throne…

Ubud is a town north of Denpasar, close to the center of the island. It’s known as an artist’s village. I went there by shuttle, motorcycle, and finally a bemo (a minivan with benches in the back) all to myself. Ubud is a quiet village with none of the hustle of Kuta. It’s very green…

I have been warned about Kuta. It’s a tourist trap gone wild, with big ugly malls and resort hotels, souvenir shops, brand clothes stores, fast food, billboards, and taxi drivers yelling “transport”. It’s also quite modern and clean. But this is also Bali, and a smile and some friendly words quickly make easy friends. And…

It’s three km climbing a steep dirt path up the forested slopes from the minibus parking lot in Ijem to the top of the crater rim of the Ijen volcano. A stream of workers carrying a pole with a basket full of big sulphur bricks at each end over their shoulders. I talked to Suleiman,…

A jeep picked me up at 3:45 to take me to the top of Mt. Penanjakan. The view of the sunrise is fantastic there. Much of the large crater with the Bromo volcano in the middle and its white plume are spread out before us. The bottom of the crater is with a sea of…

I woke up in my bungalow the next morning with a view of the Gunung Bromo. This is a small volcano in the middle of a vast crater ten kilometers across, and my bungalow is just meters from the edge of the caldera. There is a road from the hotel to the bottom of the…

The bus from Solo to Gunung Bromo National Park takes ten hours, plus a change of buses in Probolinggo. It’s basically ten solid hours of risky passing maneuvers. The road is in excellent condition but has only two lanes, and there are many trucks that crawl along at 30 km/h. So long lines form, and…

Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex of enormous 7th-century stupas on a large terrace, dedicated to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. It’s a Unesco World Heritage site and under extensive restauration; one stupa is all scaffolded and sevaral are closed to visitors. The stonemasons are clinking away on the stupas and on the ground to prepare…

Went on the back of a motorcycle to Borobudur, a large Buddhist temple in a forest before a backdrop of green hills. It’s a square of 120 meters at the base, with four square terraces topped by three round ones. The four square ones are walkways with very intricately carved panels on both sides, topped…

Yogyakarta’s main street is Jalan Malioboro, a busy road with separate rickshaw lanes. It’s one long shopping mall with clothes stalls in narrow dark arcades. It ends at the sultan’s palace. The sultan lives there but a cluster of very large reception pavilions and smaller attached buildings that house exhibits can be visited. The central…

Spent 15 hours in buses. People here work with numbers loosely – eight hours become twelve, and 5,000 Rp is the same as 50,000 except when paying. And we spent over two hours just leaving Bandung’s downtown gridlock. And the bus from Bogor to Bandung decided to flit by Jakarta. Arrived in Yogyakarta – or…

Puncak pass is at 1450 meters, 25km east of Bogor. The scenery is beautiful – lots of very green hills with tea plantations to both sides of the winding road. Unfortunately much of the scenery in hidden behind something like the world’s biggest shantytown strip mall. Only the last few kilometers allow some views. The…

Bogor is a town south of Jakarta that is in grave danger of getting swallowed by its big neighbor. The train station spits out passengers directly into a shantytown bazaar made of tarp and corrugated metal, very crowded and dimly lit. At the opposite end of the bazaar, across a small street, is the Abu…

Took the ferry back to Uleh Leh, VIP class this time. They are running a Karaoke video of ’60s rock songs. A becak driver took us into town, chatting all the way. Banda Aceh is known to the world as the place of a civil war between a fierce Islamic separatist movement and the military…

There is no beer on the island, officially. Sumatra is Islamic. But they aren’t too religious about Islam here so they smuggle beer to the beach, and store it in a separate refrigerator and list it on the menu as “B”. A can costs as much as a meal but it’s not going to run…

No scuba diving today. We rented snorkeling equipment instead and explored the bay for three hours. They have quite a lot of corals close to the beach, green, yellow, brown, sometimes with blue tips; in all kinds of shapes from big mushrooms to spindly treelike ones. Fish dart in and out of the corals and…

Pulau Weh is an island in the Sea of India off the northern tip of Sumatra. We chose Kabang Beach to stay. That’s just a beach, not a village, and it looks exactly like a beach on a tropical island is supposed to look like: green warm water, a crescent of white sand lined by…

Saturday was mostly a travel day. Settled the hotel bill – 65 euro for two people, three nights, and all meals and juices – the ferry to Parapat, a minibus to Medan, and a flight to Banda Aceh. There is a restaurant with a juice bar at the airport, but no matter what you order…

Rented bicycles to ride to Tomok a little south on the island, but it’s basically a cluster of souvenir shops. The ride north to Simanindo was much more interesting. The road at first ran between the lakeshore and the mountains, through incredibly green fields and tiny villages, and grazing oxen led by ropes. Later the…

Didn’t do very much at all. There isn’t really a town on Tuk Tuk, just a long circular road around the peninsula we are on. It takes about 90 minutes to walk the loop. There are lots of small children playing, and they all want their picture taken, posing for the camera, jumping into the…

Danau Toba is a volcanic lake four hours southwest from Medan and 900 meters up, with an island called Tuk Tuk where all the good hotels are. It’s cool up there, and our hotel is a tranquil resort at the lakeshore with small huts built in the traditional style with steep swept gables, in a…

Medan in Sumatra is not a major tourist hub and boasts exactly two important sights. The Mesjid Raya mosque has impressive black domes, and a simple and elegant, although slightly worn, interior. People were sleeping on the carpets. To get in, we had to hide our shorts with sarongs available for tourists at the entrance.…