Leaving Sumatra – from Padang to Jogyakarta

Wow what a day – since Amaia is already falling asleep next to me, im going to write for both of us in English – at least I’ll try. After having a great day yesterday, starting with a nice breakfast in Carlos Losmen (a place we can recommend for staying – although we stayed at Cavery Hotel, AC, clean sheets and Voila, the first Indonesian toilet with flush) we went on a boat ride for almost an hour to an relatively deserted private island. Snorkeling was fun, but even more fun for me was the toe-surfing – water ski on a surfboard. After failing continuously, i finally managed to get up once and was re-payed greatly, finally a bit of surfing. Anyhow, today was travelling time – we took first the public transport to the market, the opelet bus was ridiculously slow, just going around 5 km/h, waiting for more passengers to jump in. When finally all “seats” were taken, and the tiny bus was crowded, the driver still did not accelerate or show any sign of will to reach our destination. The reason was obvious, we had a different view of the term “full”, but after a FEW more people squeezed in, the bus finally went faster. The clock was running against us, we knew that the private transport would have taken about 1 hour, but this definitely would take much longer. After getting off and catching another bus to the airport, we still got our flight and the way to the airport only took us almost 3.5 hours. Hurrah – After flying to Jakarta we took another plane to Jogyakarta but arrived late around 8. We checked at TripAdvisor in advance for a nice hostel, but all efforts to reach the selected Munajat Backpacker hostel by phone or email were unsuccessful and the he cab driver neither was able to find the place or the address. We wandered around with our heavy luggage so long searching for the place, that our mood darkened a bit already. Every person we asked send us into another direction or street, but they sure all made the impression of knowing the place … Finally we gave up and went into the “backpacker” zone of Jogyakarta, but the first 10 hostels we checked out were full or had completely unacceptable rooms. Well, in the end we found a place that is somewhat decent, not very clean but the owner was nice and we were just to tired to keep on looking. Speaking of being tired, that’s it for today – since we both caught a cold on our beach day or at night with the AC, it was quite an exhausting day. I’ll just hope that my immune system will realize, that there is some work to be done – No more colds for a while please, i had my fair share.

Pictures and stuff will be added soon – maybe we’ll make an extra post for the island- please be patient – its almost midnight here already and the nearby mosque will stop our sleep at 4.30 with some urgent news i suppose. –  Allah akbar

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