On Thursday morning we left Jakarta’s small domestic airport via Batik airline flight to Malang, a city in between 5 mountains in East Java. The flight was supposed to be just over an hour long but, wouldn’t you know, a thunderstorm came up just about when we were due to land. After circling for a while, the pilot decided (probably very wisely) to land in Surabaya, another city in East Java. After sitting on the ground there for about 15 minutes, the pilot announced we were now cleared to fly on to Malang as the storm had subsided. Of course, the plane then had to refuel, etc. All in all, we arrived in Malang over 3 hours late! Too late to do anything but go to the hotel and eat.
Since Malang is among the mountains, it has a much milder climate than Jakarta. As such Friday started out looking like a perfect day with blue skies. We headed to visit Gua Maria Lourdes. On the way we seemingly came across the Arc de Triomphe.
Did we make a wrong turn somewhere? No, this is just Kediri, East Java's facsimile of Paris' famous arch. It was built here about 10 years ago but I couldn't discover exactly why. I think East Java just wants to relate to France. This can be also seen in Gua Maria Lourdes. East Java wanted to have something like France's famous Our Lady of Lourdes, so in 1999 they created Gua Maria Lourdes.
Since they subsequently got it blessed and dedicated by the Pope, it is now quite the attraction with people flocking here.
After the Catholic shrine, we headed to an old Hindu Temple, Candi Penataran. This is the largest Hindu Temple in East Java and was built somewhere between the 12th and 15th centuries.
As you can tell from the above pics, this site now is such ruins as all the Hindu moved to Bali long ago. Of course, just as we pulled up to this site, the rain started. Although we managed to run between the raindrops to see these ruins, this marked an early end of sights for the day as the skies were now completely dark.
Saturday morning was another nice morning and saw us off to a local waterfall. After the waterfall, we went to the Secret Zoo. I don’t think this is much of a secret as there were people everywhere at the zoo. It was a nice zoo for the area with a great museum of stuffed animals, fish and insects.
I guess this is the closest I am going to get to a Giant Komodo Dragon on this trip!
Also of note here was the unusual hotel right in the middle of the activities.
As you can see, thbis modern hotel’s facade is made to look like an old wall. It is just right of the huge concrete elephant!
After the zoo, we visited the local Transportation Museum. This was a very nice experience as they had lots of old cars, motorcycles and bikes and many photo opportunities.
A bamboo VW?
My own car but they misspelled the name!
There were lots of European cars I have never seen before but even the American ones looked different as they are all right hand drives! In addition, many of the cars were available to be touched. That is something that doesn’t happen in the US. These visits and the fact there was no significant rainfall made Saturday a very enjoyable day.
Sunday was devoted to the beach. We visited two. The first pic below is the only one of the first beach that didn't seem to offer much except sand and surf. The other beach with all the little islands reminded of Viet Nam as it was very picturesque. However they really need to clean it up as there was trash all around! Thankfully it didn't rain today until about 5 PM so it wasn't much of a factor.
Today is Monday and we are on the way to Yogyakarta and Middle Java. We have a 1:25 PM flight from Surabaya. We overestimated the amount of time it would take to get here from Malang so now we have a long wait here at the airport. Hopefully this flight will be more timely than the past few!
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