Above: Restaurant serving dog meat in many ways.
Long journey to Malang
My three Swiss companions from yesterday were headed in the same direction, Malang, as a stopover for getting to Mt Bromo. We had organised to share the same transport from our Solo homestay.
But the “travel” (pronounced trrrruffle, a shared longhaul minivan) took us to their station where we waited for 2 hours so it would be full.
Hawker selling food while we waited for our transport to fill.
So we eventually hit the highway at 1130. Not long after, I noticed a restaurant (feature photo above) serving dog meat cooked in many ways. There must be a sizeable non-Muslim population for dog meat to be sold; I jokingly call it Christian food. A couple of hours later when we reached Madiun, it was our lunch break. It came as a nice surprise that lunch was included.
The downside was that the local family with us now had to leave us to connect to a different destination. So after a bit more waiting we were once again ready to continue with a full car.
We dropped a man off at a town called Pare which is full of young people studying at English language schools. There were also Mandarin, Korean and Japanese language schools. We were pleased that this passenger didn’t have to be replaced before we could continue to Malang!
The approach into Malang was uphill and windy. We eventually arrived at 1930, some 8 hours after hitting the highway. That was actually the travel time I had expected but I had hopes of a shorter journey based on advice given by locals (who probably subtracted the lunch stop and waiting).
As you can see, the minivan has to make a profit on every journey. There’s not give-and-take or averaging!
Swiss Family Robinson
The long journey allowed me some time to get to know my Swiss companions a bit better. The guy puts me to shame when he speaks Indonesian. He is fluent after having lived in Makassar for one year (that was ten years ago).
The two girls work at Mont Blanc designing watches. We had an interesting conversation about copy watches in Asia! In short, the quality varies with price but the best ones are indistinguishable to them; they would have to get a technician to open it up to ascertain the authenticity … some copies are that good!
Out of curiosity, I asked them about the Swiss family that was shipwrecked … I didn’t think that Robinson was a very Swiss name. As it turns out, they’ve never heard of the book and agree that Robinson is a rather un-Swiss name too
All falls into place
Shortly after checking into Jona’s Homestay, the owner Anna presented us some options for onward travel. I had planned to take things at a slow pace and only go to Bromo.
The possibility of going to Ijen Plateau as well seemed very attractive. After working out my dates (as I have to be in Surabaya by Saturday night), I realised I could indeed fit it in if I shorten my stay in Malang by one night.
We agreed to do the trip through Anna rather than independently … travel in the Bromo area (especially at the hub town of Probolinggo) is problematic as there are many scalpers trying to make big margins. By the time you get ripped off for this-and-that, one would probably be left with a small savings only … but a big headache and a bad taste in the mouth.
Sure enough, the only time when the ATMs fail us is when we need it most to pay Anna for the trip. We tried three different nearby banks. Mastercard-Cirrus didn’t work for me while Visa-Plus … the former is free for me while the latter involves a big fee. The others could only withdraw unusually small amounts meaning they get stung with multiple fees. Rather strange as ATMs in Indonesia work rather well normally.