Singapore and Indonesia, May 2019

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This trip happened about 6 years ago now, so I'm trying to piece it back together after 6 years of letting the memories get fuzzy. In the past few years I've made a habit of writing these as they happen so they're as fresh as possible, so bear with me.

Singapore

After taking the 16 hour flights to Singapore from California, I met my friend Ethan at the hostel we'd stay out while in Singapore. I hadn't seen him in a very long time since he'd been traveling SE Asia extensively for almost half a year at this point. He'd spent significant time in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand working his way south to where I'd met up with him.

We caught up for a while, then headed out to see the city while it was still nice (albeit incredibly humid) out. The first thing we did was walk to the metro to head to the large Gardens by the Bay; it's the largest park system in the entire city-state and had tons of interesting things to do at it.

On the subway ride there Ethan noticed the warning signs on the subway that prohibited durian fruit. For those unaware, durian is INCREDIBLY odorous and many say it smells of stinky feet.

At some point before or just after visiting The Gardens we visited the massive casino nearby. It's 3 separate towers connected with a long flat slab on top of them. We searched for the craps tables tables and were directed to the "American Section" because apparently it's not a very popular gambling game out here. We ordered Singapore Slings, as if it wasn't more obvious we were tourists and proceeded to make average level of noise while playing. To Singaporeans though, thats A LOT of noise and we were repeatedly reminded to keep the volume down while we played. I can't find any pics of this, but I know I took some.

We then walked out of the gardens to get lunch and I was pretty shocked at how much Chinese calligraphy there was around. I know Singapore is a business-oriented mix of most SE Asian cultures, but at the time I just wasn't aware at how large of a percentage of that was Chinese influence. This was a very typical street:

We ended up getting lunch at a place called Hawker Chan, a hawker stall-style local fast food restaurant known for really good chicken and rice and also possessing a Michelin star.

At the time of this trip, Hawker Chan was actively holding a Michelin star and was the world's cheapest Michelin star meal. They were awarded it several years before this trip and you could tell they definitely blew up as a result of it. To get a seat, we needed to be scanning around the seating area for anyone that looked even remotely close to finishing and then just awkwardly stand behind them till they eventually got up; a majority of others were doing the same and unsurprisingly it happened to us when we were close to finishing as well. Very good food though!

We decided to wander more after lunch and not far from the hawker restaurant was an outdoor market with lots of cheap touristy things for sale:

For dinner we went to another hawker vender area called Lau Pa Sat. We walked through the maze of stalls looking for something good and smelled some satay skewers and immediately had to buy some, they were so good and each skewer was only in the range of 50 cents to a buck!

After dinner we walked around the waterfront near The Gardens again, generally checking out how the city changes at night.

Here's a pretty standard capsule style hostel dorm in SE Asia. Everyone pays for an individual twin bed with a row of lockers at one end of the room to store valuables. A typical sized hostel usually has 3-5 rooms about this size. Usually there's at least one female-only dorm of these capsules, but the rest is mixed gender.

Sumatra

After leaving Singapore we decided to go to Sumatra, the largest island of Indonesia. We landed in the capital of Medan, and the next morning we took a shuttle the 5 or so hours to Lake Toba in the middle of the island.

At the port town on the edge of the massive lake, we took a ferry to island in the middle. This lake used to be a super-volcano, and the lake is now the filled in caldera. In the middle of this lake is yet another island called Samosir, our first destination here.

Across from the guest house we were staying at was a general store with this sign advertising all the things they sold. I remember being taken aback seeing the Magic Mushrooms for sale right next to the part advertising scooter rentals. The fact that it was publicly advertised was interesting considering that it was illegal in the rest of Sumatra.

We rented scooters and rode them south to the closest town on the island where we found a historic site of King Sipabutar's tomb. Legend has it that he led the first wave of settlers onto this island, but this wasn't something easy to figure out in person. There was an attendant that told us stories and legends, but he didn't speak english and we didn't speak Indonesian. Much of what was communicated was through elaborate charades.

After leaving the cemetery we walked to an open air market, blanketed by plastic tarps held up by bamboo poles and acting as a large shade structure. Under the tarps were vendors selling meats, vegetables, sandals, combs, cheaply made clothes, and a variety of other goods made of plastic. Anything not elevated onto a table was laid out across blankets on the ground, with narrow walking passageways snaking through the rows of blankets. We bought some sodas and continued on.

We started making a counterclockwise lap around the island, heading south and uphill from the town we were in. Around now we were at the 3 o'clock position on the island shore and working south towards the 6 o'clock.

As we rode up the switchbacks of the views got increasingly better and eventually we pulled over for a break at a small coffee/snack stand.

Honestly the several times we'd had coffee so far in Sumatra wasn't all that amazing, this is a pretty typical level of quality:

I'm not complaining at all, either! It was good enough for me. It's just that if you look on coffee bean packaging you'll see Sumatra proudly touted as an origin for them so while you'd expect coffee to be high quality here, I think they just sell the premium product because that's what makes them the money and they keep the left overs for themselves.

The higher plateaus then descended back down into terraced farmland:

We continued around the island, occasionally stopping for snacks and lunch along the way. I don't think they see many redheads out here because I'd occasionally hear the Indonesian word for 'orange' when we went somewhere. It really was impressive how massive this island and lake was, and how it was all at one point in time a massive volcano exploding with lava. The lake this island is within at least 3x the size of lake Tahoe.

In the late afternoon we were at about the 10 o'clock of the island and started seeing dark rain clouds heading out direction. Our guest house was on the 3 o'clock, so we decided to take a shortcut back through the middle of the island. We ended up getting caught in the rain here, and stopped at a general store before it got too heavy. This next video was from that stop during the heaviest part of the rain and it was almost impossible to talk from how loud the corrugated metal roof was above our heads.

After feeling satisfied with the amount we'd seen on Samosir, we picked our next destination on Sumatra; Bukit Lawang. This is one of only 2 rainforest jungles where you can still find wild orangutans. We took the ferry back to the caldera shores, then asked around for taxis. After only about 30 minutes we found one and took it pretty much the entire way and were dropped off after 5 hours of driving on the edge of the town to walk in the rest of the way.

The town is split by a river with numerous cable suspension bridges for pedestrians and placed downstream of the jungle reserve.

And it's absolutely filled with geckos in the common areas at night

The next day we went on a guided walking tour of the rainforest to see wild orangutans.

There were tons of different types of primates throughout the jungle! We saw gibbons, langur monkeys, and of course the sumatran orangutan.

This wasn't an out-and-back hike; towards the end of the hike we arrived at a river and there was another man already there preparing a raft for all of us to get in. We secured all of out things then rafted down the river that would eventually lead back into town. I didn't have my phone out but at one point we pulled over for a rest on the rocky riverbank, and Ethan left the raft. About the same time, some curious orangutans started emerging from the foliage. It was pretty funny because at one point they started chasing him and the guides had to shoo them away back into the forest.

Java

After leaving the jungle, we returned to the airport and had a day layover in Java (the island between Sumatra and Bali). We had planned to go snorkeling this day, but ended up getting to the docks too late and not making it on time for the tour. We only had this one day here, so there wasn't enough time to have taken an extended trip out to the temples that Java is known for. We kept it local within Jakarta, and this town was pretty mid IMO. Sure there was a very wealthy city-center, but once you leave the area the quality of life drops off into some standard-issue poor neighborhoods, to downright shanty-town slums very quickly.

We tried just walking back towards the city center but the route had open-air sewers along it and I started feeling nauseous from breathing in the air after some time. We ended up spending the day perusing indoor malls, aquariums, and other similar places.

I remember we tried REALLY hard to find a restaurant this night that had drinks for sale, and for the life of us couldn't. It was Ramadan and because nearly everyone is Muslim it was impossible to find a drink.

Bali

Now we were entering the final leg of the trip (at least for me) in Bali. We landed in Denpasar and made our way through the crowds of overly pushy taxi drivers to our Uber driver, and eventually the hostel. I think we spent the first day kind of just getting situated with where we were and decided to just walk up and down the nearby beach. I remember near sunset there were tons of people taking photos of each other on the beach, lots of women jumping into the air and asking their partners to take photos of them like some Eat Pray Love fantasy they were living out.

On another day, we decided to do a sunrise hike to the top of Mt. Batur, one of the many active volcanoes in the area. We got picked up by the hiking guides at the hostel around 3am and drove for about an hour and a half to the start of the hike in order to make it to the top before sunrise started. We took the more arduous route up but it was nice because there were less people on that route and it was genuinely really fun. There was such little light pollution during the hike that for the second, maybe third time in my life I'd gotten a very obvious view of the Milky Way. I remember being taken by surprise that even though our guide said he'd seen it many many times, he apparently hadn't ever learned it's the rest of our galaxy we're looking at.

When we reached the summit it was still dark out so we used the remaining time to boil eggs. Because this was an active volcano there were steam vent holes in the ground and we were able to merely place eggs a few inches into the openings, wait 10 minutes, and have soft-boiled eggs.

The sunrise was amazing! It was one of the top 3 sunrises I'd ever seen in my life, possibly number 1. I think back this one significantly more often than the others. What makes it so unique is how Mt. Batur is the smaller cone in the center of the larger volcano's caldera. At the base of this summit but still inside the caldera is a town filled with mist and giant lake.

By the time we made it back to the vans, it was almost 10 am and we'd been up since about 3am. We almost immediately fell asleep after getting back in the van but I remember the driver mentioning that we'd stop to get coffee on the way back. Sounds good!

Some time passes and I feel the van pulling off the main road and into a dirt parking lot. We wake up, leave the car, and start walking into what looks like a decently maintained garden or arboretum. The guide told us that this was a coffee plantation and that immediately seemed odd to me because A) I assumed we were just getting some basic coffee at a store or run of the mill shop and B) the landscaping and sparseness of the coffee bean plants within the landscaping was clearly not how you'd run a real coffee plantation; you'd get such little ROI, there must have been some more 'space optimized' orchard elsewhere and this was set dressing for tourism.

Down the pathway the guide brought us to a small hut made of bamboo overflowing with the smell of roasted coffee. Inside was an old leathery skinned woman silently roasting coffee beans over a charcoal fire. We said hi, to which she nodded and continued working.

Further into the property, there was a pen with a few racoon-like animals. This is where my spidey senses started going off because they looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The guide mentioned their names and almost instantly I remembered! These animals are called luwaks, and if you aren't aware of what this means, basically this is an "artisanal" coffee plantation where they make coffee from the beans the animals shit out. Supposedly the beans used for roasting undergo chemical changes from the digestive enzymes of the animals, so when the beans are sifted out of the animal shit and washed they will roast and taste richer and smoother than normal coffee.

I looked over at Ethan with a shit-eating grin (get it?) and he immediately said "I'm not trying that" and to be fair, I didn't really want to either. This was definitely a tourist trap we got shanghaied into and although I did want to buy some coffee, we hadn't particularly been looking for this experience. We WERE given a sampler platter of their various drinks for sale and I did end up drinking the small shot of it. To be honest, I couldn't tell the difference.

We had spent some time cruising through bars and beach clubs chatting with other tourists as well.

At night time on the western side of the city of Denpasar, the beachfront is a massive party hotspot for miles along it. The beach is lined for miles with beach clubs are resorts, and at night they all are at full capacity. My personal experience here was mixed, I didn't feel particularly at one with the crowds here.

The next day we decided to visit the neighboring island Nusa Lembongan and explore it for the day. The island is known for it's tropical waters and picturesque beaches. It was a short ride over on the fast-boats and we were dropped off in a small bay.

We haggled with some locals renting scooters and then were on our way to explore the island

One of the first stops we made was to Blue Lagoon. There wasn't much of an accessible beach, but the water was a stunning blue and worth a few photos.

Between Nusa Lembongan and the smaller neighboring Nusa Ceningan is a very shallow bay of water that you can literally walk across at low tide. It's probably a mile between the two islands and the deepest it gets is about waist deep. Just off the shore was a series of hammocks hung up onto large wooden posts cemented into the sandbars to relax in. We waded through the water out to them with the drinks we bought at the restaurant behind us and chilled for a while.

On another day we tried renting surfboards in Seminyak beach, but there weren't hardly any waves. While walking out of the water a wave hit me from the back and knocked the board out of my hands. When it landed in the sand, 2 fins snapped off of it and I had to do a walk of shame with it back to the rental place to pay for repairs. I guess they could read the frustration on my face because they offered me a shot of homemade hard alcohol made from coconut water called arrack. It was ok, like a vodka with more floral tastes in it, but mostly I was just very relieved they weren't pissed about the board.

After that we chilled in the beach chairs on the same beach and bought some bracelets from the local women that walk the beach with arms full of them.

This was one of my very final photos I took during my time in SE Asia on this trip. I would fly back home the next morning, and Ethan would continue to travel in the region for another few months before ultimately returning home and getting back to the grind as well. This hadn't been the first international backpacking I'd done, but it further cemented my desire to prioritize doing more of it in the near future.