We spent a night at an Environmental Education Centre out in the countryside - it had cute little bungalows with bathrooms that had only three walls and one side open out onto the surroundings! They had gardens of organic vegetables and medicinal herbs as well as a few animals. We went for a walk around the area, through rice paddies and across streams - it was very pretty. The centre runs a program of helping local farmers to produce organic crops and the resta...

The road from Pangandaran to Yogyakarta went through beautiful countryside with rice fields and hay stacks and lots of people cycling around. Yogyakarta (or 'Yogya' as it's known) is renowned as the cultural capital of Java - I wasn't particularly enamoured by it but it was a good base for visiting the impressive temples at Prambanan and Borobudur. In Yogyakarta city, men in batik shirts and traditional Islamic hats, and women with long headscarves, zipped aroun...

It was nice to slow down for a while after a week of moving to a new town every day. We did spend an entire day getting there though - after leaving our hotel in Jakarta at 7:45am, we travelled by taxi, train, jeep, bus and becak (almost like a wheelchair propelled by a man on a push bike) and eventually arrived at our accommodation in Pangandaran late at night. We stayed in a beautiful hotel there with a swimming pool. One thing I noticed along the journey was ...

I had no time to see around Jakarta but by all accounts I didn't miss anything. On the journey into town from the airport I was struck by the urban poverty and slum housing, on a scale I haven't witnessed anywhere else in Asia. Five of the guys I'd travelled down from Bangkok with came with me and we were joined by some new people from Australia, Malta, Canada and England - all had travelled quite a bit already - Indonesia doesn't seem to be a first-time travell...