Day 1: Singapore – Batam – Jakarta
The flight is delayed and we have no clue how long we would be grounded. The weather is dank and the air is dense with plumes of cigarette smoke! I look through the glass swing door and my eyes catch a 3′ x 3′ “No Smoking” board at the center of the corridor leading to the boarding pavilion. Sampling glances at Abu and Dolly I return back to checking my watch – We were running late by 2hrs. We should have been in Surabaya by now. We were still holed up in Jakarta, waiting ……. neither time flew nor us . We were on our first leg of our Javanese Adventure. We were hungry, tired from lack of sleep and frustrated….. We didn’t come here all the way from Singapore just for this! This is not how it is meant to be. I look back at how the past few hours went by. We had flown in from Batam late in the morning after a short breakfast at the Batam airport. Airports are the first images of a country and this is what I saw 
Did you read Dunkin Donuts??!! Being in Singapore for longer than necessary had allowed complacency to settle in and I made a mental note to not end up a stooge. Batam is just about an hour ride by ferry from Singapore. We arrived in Batam the previous night after a seemingly event less ferry ride were time moved slow and the boat, …… slower! We checked into one of the hotels recommended by Lonely Planet. The place was dirt cheap and reasonably comfortable (about 10 SGD/ room). We had to forage for food and myself and Dolly being vegans, didn’t make the hunt easy. Abu’s bhasa skills helped us get some allegedly vegetarian food. We ate quietly shoring up the strange ‘veggies’ on our plate to one side. Curiosity got the better of Dolly, when she ventured to try one of them, the ones she had painstakingly removed to the corner of her plate! and guess what…it turned out to be a Squid!! .We stopped further investigations. With fresh fruits stacked to one corner, Juice seemed like a great idea. I went for Orange and soon found myself sipping on a glass of carrot juice. Well the color did match, but then not the fruit! To be really fair, the juice was fresh and sweet and Apple turned out to be the star performer of the day. Thanks, Xavier and Dolly for generously parting with your Apple juice. We checked back into our rooms soon after and barely managed a five hour sleep before we caught our flight to Jakarta.
Day 2: Jakarta – Surabaya
We return back to where I started, to the Smokey aisles of the airport, Jakarta. The airport had an interesting architecture, typically Javanese and one I can closely relate to certain parts of India. After rows of Airline reservation counters, you come though an array of coffee shops, canteens, Dunkin donuts (this time the real one 
)), ice cream parlors, massage parlors, KFC, bookstalls (consider yourself extremely lucky and bet on your favorite horse if you find an English magazine) and a lot more. Of them, what I found particularly interesting was a shop called ‘ Roti Boy’ .The smell of fresh Coffee flavored breads filled the air . We took some quick bites, and offered the remaining to the trash can. It came next only to raw sugar in the scale of sweetness. One thing that caught my attention, and still keeps me wondering, is the extreme levels of dispassionate calm that surrounded me in the hall. The departure hall was packed to capacity, stemming from the fact that a lot of flights were delayed. Resigned to believing that we would never be able to fly out and vacillating indecisively between a dash to the train station (and that was way across the city) and waiting till eternity do pass, we waited. The announcements in their mellifluous bhasa tongue, ensured that we stayed ignorant of the world around. We had no clue what was going around and why these people were so composed and unforgivingly patient.It was like telepathic waves of thought flying around in the hall and convincingly bouncing off our heads. I didn’t find a single soul walking up and down , restless and impatient nor a wrangle at the counter, it was all as if ‘they’ all knew and silently laughing at the joke upon us. Wondering if the utopian peace would sustain and embracing the culture shock that stared before me, I was silently hoping that someone would flare up. Someone….please God, let someone flare up, its been a long wait …I need some action !!!. Guess what, like my all other prayers, this one went unanswered as well 
.Our numerous questions soon found answers, in a friendly Surabayan . The ’strange salt lakes and paddy fields’ that we saw spread across the city shores during our decent, seemed to have fulfilled their destiny or so we thought. The city was FLOODED ! the arterial road connecting the city to the airport was totally jammed, allowing only a trickle of traffic to pass. The airline crew was caught up somewhere is the endless line of frozen traffic and hence the delay! Ah it wasn’t the flight after all ! Very soon after, the intercom crackled to a now familiar tongue, and in a fraction of time that even my Swatch chronograph failed to capture, a swarm of people collected at the gate……….caught unawares, we tailed the line. Dolly, in all her effervescent enthusiasm and congenial disposition, took seats next to the friendly Surabayan guy. In a sequence of events that cannot be attributed to coincidence with magic that only she can weave , and in a frame of time that can only be described as total darkness as I settled into deep sleep, soon after, I found myself sailing through the Surabayan cityscape in the friendly Surabayan’s car .
Time do pass, still, some memories linger. That explains why I would return back to this post after months had rolled on. Listen…… that is the essence of this blog. Read on ……… The rain was incessant but not torrent. The car briefly came to a halt near an array of food stalls by the side of the road. Food. I breathed.
Introducing Pecel !
Widely unfamiliar with what the randomly arranged English alphabets on the menu card described, I left it to the experts to pick a vegan dish.Here, I would joyously thank the Surabayan, for Introducing the King of the Surabayan vegetarian cusine a.k.a Pecel (pe-chel). Served with a bowl of rice and a crispy papad (I add this to the general vocab of the English dictionary with the great Indian migration that started this century, and the growing spread of the Indian cuisine ! – use it to describe anything made of flour , thin , flat and round, salted and flavored, and fried in a generous amount of oil, like a chip of course). what went into it is a mystery, like a trade secret, but this is what I could taste- ground nuts, asparagus ???, some flavors from the Tom Yam soup, mystery sauce and served with a lot of goodness ! I relished two helpings of the dish. I was already starting to enjoy the trip. Rightly said, the way to a mans heart is through the stomach. Java was getting a special place in my heart. For the night, we crashed into one of the backpacker’s places. If I remember correct, It was somewhere close to the Airlangga university in Surabaya. If I am ever to finish the post, I’ll have to cut the details. so here goes the dawn of the third day.
Day 3: Surabaya – Probolingo -Cemero Lavang
Probolinggo, conveniently interposed between Cemero Lavang and Surabaya meant, we had to be wary of the agents operating there. Taking the public transport from Surabaya would mean that you will have to alight in Probolinggo. The bus captains, in nexus with the travel agents, would force you to get off near the agent’s office. Hold Firm. Insist that you would get off only at the bus terminus which is only a few yards away. After a shakey ride in a rickety bus and refreshing to some chewey green sweet dish flavored with coconut scrapings, generously offered by a lady in the bus, we alighted in Probolinggo at an Agent’s doorstep. After listening to his incessant ramblings, and being mesmerised by some stunning pictures of Ijen Sulphur lakes , and helplessly watching a couple of travellers being sucked into his trap, we moved on. For the next couple of hours, we had to contend squeezing ourselves into a “Bemo” until we reached Cemero Lavang.
Day 3: Cemero Lavang
