getaway to southwest java
it’s christmas break. my kids are out of school for six weeks. back home this would mean sledding, snowmen, hot chocolate and snowball fights with the neighbor kids. here it means swimming, dodging rainstorms and finding things to do while most of their friends have gone back home. keeping kids entertained in jakarta is no small task. everything is harder here. there aren’t neighbors to play with, you have to drive for an hour or more to do just about anything. it is just a different way of life. period.
so. i packed up the boys. my friend packed up her boys. and we headed off an adventure to southwest jakarta. we’d already been to a five star resort in bali on this holiday so this time we decided to “rough it” and try something different.
we booked a beachfront bungalow near a small village called pelabuhan ratu at a little resort called ocean queen. ocean queen is about 130 km from jakarta (that’s about 80 miles) the trip took nearly six hours. that was six hours of windy, hilly mountainous roads.
i have to admit, as we made our way there, as i listened to the kids whine because they were packed in like sardines in one row of seats i thought maybe we were crazy to be headed to bamboo walled bungalow in the middle of nowhere. what if a kid fell and cracked his head open? what if griffin had an allergic reaction. what if a kid wandered off and got too close to the enormous waves in front of the bungalow. what if there was a tsunami warning. suddenly life inside the comound walls seemed like a better option. but we were halfway there by now so we pressed on.
there was a lot to see on the way. we passed teak plantations. rubber plantations. plenty of views of life in the “kampung” outside of city living. we saw barefoot, naked children. we saw women collecting water from a muddy river. we saw children no older than mine carrying babies in papooses on their backs. we saw rice paddies. sadly, with three kids in the car and minimal options for pulling over, I wasn’t able to take any photos of the travel too and from.
i did catch this … a dump truck filled to the brim with bagged and loose trash. the doors bulged and pushed outwards against the fraying rope that precariously held it closed. we followed close behind this truck for nearly 15 minutes. i kept my eye on it, waiting for the rope to fray through letting fly a mass of who knows what all over our car. all the while we are twisting and turning along a narrow road at a frightening speed. cars are whipping around us to get past the truck. i found myself secretly hoping that my driver would do the same so we could avoid the trash calamity before us, but at the same time the prospect of zipping full speed into the oncoming lane along a winding road wasn’t very appealing. at last a straight away and we got around.
we arrived. alive. relatively unscathed. the kids jumped out of the car. we ordered a coke from the little cafe and checked out our new digs.
The boys loved jumping the waves.
We enjoyed sitting on the porch savoring a hot cup of tea and watching the lawnmower. So much more pleasant than the noisy kind!
i looked up one morning to find this smiling face in the coconut palm in front of the bungalow. this little guy had shimmied up to chop down coconuts for his friends.
later that day it rained and rained. the boys played soccer in the rain, but then they came in to write a comic book. the adventures of noodle the napkin.
after the rain we were paid a visit by the same little boys who were enjoying fresh coconut water that morning. they were selling darling handmade wooden sailboats exactly like those moored in the sea in front of the bungalow. we couldn’t say no so we negotiated a “deal” on a collection of eight boats. (it was their lucky day!) when clare and i ran in to collect our money we also grabbed some cupcakes and candy for the boys. (it was really their lucky day!)
the flooded ditches were great for an impromptu boat race.
when we weren’t boogie boarding, playing soccer or improving our badminton skills we hit the pool. parker always is one for “gear.”
there was a nice soccer field and lots of new friends to play with.
all in. it was a good time. one step above camping. a good getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city and the electronic devices that consume our lives. after three nights it was time to hit the winding roads home. the boys were exhausted and glad to play some mindless video games in the car.
the winding roads didn’t do us any favors on the way home though, griffin threw up. thank goodness he’s always been a kid who knows it’s coming so he managed to hit a bag. of course, now i was posed with the problem of what to do with the bag of puke. i asked my driver to keep an eye out for a trash can. this is one of those instances where the term LOL is perfect. it was an LOL moment because in remote indonesia there aren’t trash cans. the roadside is littered with brightly colored wrappers from convenience food of all sorts but there is very little mechanism for removing the trash. furthermore, there is little care for the trash. people just throw their trash out wherever they are when they suddenly have trash. it’s disturbing, actually.
back to the bag of puke. i asked the driver to be on the lookout for someplace to put it. so, doing his duty, he pulls over on a bridge, rolls down the window and tells me to chuck it out into the river. below were naked children bathing and moms scooping water for washing. i wasn’t about to throw a bag of puke down there. i politely told him no. which elicited a hearty laugh along with “oh, you americans.”
i sat with a bag of puke by my feet for the next few hours. thankfully, it didn’t smell! we threw it out at the gas station when we stopped to fill up. we’ve been in indonesia for just over six months. in all this time, i’ve not been involved with a “fill up” so imagine my surprise when we filled up with the engine running and while we were all in the car. my police friends tell me this is perfectly safe. but it made me really uncomfortable so we will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
soon after the fill up, one kid tells me he needs to go poo but that he won’t go in a squatter. so here i am trying to calmly explain to him that this isn’t jakarta. the “toilets” are all going to be squatters (complete with buckets of “water” to splash on yourself to clean up and also to flush). knowing we are getting close to the relatively large city of bogor i google starbucks. low and behold we are only a few miles from one so i demand a detour and we get starbucks and a toilet. life is good.
we are home again. two more weeks to go before the kids go back to school. i’m sure we will survive. one thing on my list to do is make the kids try going poo in the staff squatter. it seems like a prudent skill to have!
