After quite a few plane journeys I think this landing made me feel the most uneasy! As we descended back down to planet earth the pilot barely even slowed the plane down coming in extremely fast and smashing down on to the run way! After what felt like a lifetime of breaking the plane finally slowed down to a sensible speed where we were allowed off and to plant our feet back onto solid ground! I can see why Lion Air have one of the worst aviation safety ratings! Previous research before hand I found that the airline had 3/7 stars. Just to put that in perspective, Malaysian Airlines whom we all know have had considerable bad luck recently have 5/7!

We are meeting Scott whom we became friends with in Nusa Lembongan at the airport today, waiting for about half and hour until his flight came in after ours. We shared a taxi to the centre of Yogyakarta (pronounced Jogjakarta) and found out that Scott is actually staying quite far from us, about a 25 minute walk which in this humidity and heat is forever! We are lucky because where we are staying is where all the shops, restaurants and bars are. One of the reasons why we don't book until we get somewhere so we can scope out the area before, sadly Scott had already made his booking. Good news and bad news, Andrea Hotel which is where we wanted to stay had 1 room available for walk ins, the bad news it had a squat toilet! I can't believe these things are still popular around Asia because they are just awful, awful, awful creations! But luckily we changed rooms the following morning so we were much happier after that.

While we were here we visited the Sultran Palace which was rubbish! Not worthy enough to have palace in its title. But it did give us something to do. After the "Palace" we made our way to the Water Temple. We got lost, quite a lot actually and a local guy obviously noticed this and started to take us there. Feeling a bit hungry at this point the three of us stopped at this tiny cafe that hardly anyone must find at the end of a narrow road. Turns out that this cafe specialise in Luwak coffee. For those who don't already know, Luwak coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world, and a Luwak is a type of animal, probably best if you google it for info on what it looks like etc. I thought it was a type of weasel but I think that I may be misinformed? Anyway the Luwak eats and then defecates the coffee beans. It was explained to us that the coffee tastes so great because firstly the Luwak only selects the best beans to munch on, and secondly it has to do with the fermentation process within the guys of the Luwak. Someone then collects the poop (must be a s***ty job) and then cleans the beans before drying them out in rice. The owner was really good at explaining all this to us and had examples of every process, from a Luwak he kept in the cafe, to the poo, drying and finally the coffee served in front of us.

We were taught how to properly taste coffee, starting by slurping it through your lips and breathing out through the nose as you swallow, and then take half a mouth full and swishing it around in your mouth like mouth wash. It would be very appropriate to say that this coffee tastes like crap, but actually it was good, albeit very strong! 10 minutes later both Scott and I could feel the effects of the high caffeine content!

It then began to rain! Really bad! And we ended up retreating indoors in the cafe and the owner showed us some traditional knives which he could balance on the floor on both the handle and the tip. Challenge accepted all the lads (4 of us now) set out to do this mystical balancing trick. The handle was easy, but to balance it on the tip took some persevering.

Feeling like we were spending too much time here we decided to head back to the room. Still raining a little we decided to get a ricksaw, grabbing the first one that we found. Unfortunately we probably had the most elderly man operating the Ricksaw. We felt so bad for him as he tried his best to cycle us around but even on a slight upward slope he was having to get out and push us. I couldn't let him do that so I got out too to give him a hand. When we finally got to our hotel we paid him double the going rate, hopefully it would help him go home a bit earlier tonight.

We had a fairly chilled and early night before our busy day celebrating Waisek Day.

C & E x