I went to Indonesia

At the end of February I traveled to Indonesia for work. My meetings were being held in Bandung in West Java and I traveled there from Jakarta by car. It took 5.5 hours to get there on Saturday when I arrived because Bandung is a popular weekend destination for families in Jakarta, meaning the traffic was heavy.

My hotel was on the edge of town and this was the view from my room.

And this was the view from the other side.

So as you can see, there’s not much to Bandung. One afternoon, a few of us went to walk along Braga street which is known for examples of Dutch colonial architecture. Honestly, I didn’t see much but every now and then you’d see something that look distinctly out of place.

The rest of the week was hard work.

And I ate lots of fruit.

After I was done with all my meetings and fruit eating I had a day to see a little bit of the surrounding area. Three of us hired a car from the hotel to see one of the volcanoes nearby. It was really nice to get out of the city. We drove by several tea plantations.

And then our driver took us to the top of Tangkuban Perahu, one of the active volcanoes in the area.

It was a bit of a rainy day and unfortunately, we got socked in by fog and smoke pretty quickly.

And we got there just in time because about 5 minutes later it looked like this.

It was pretty cool to see but I was not prepared for the smell.

Our next stop was an orchid forest. This place smelled nice.

It was a nice combination of forest walk with greenhouses full of orchids and garden sculptures.

It was a pretty rainy day but we got very lucky, it didn’t rain very hard when we were walking around and it would take long breaks so we never felt impaired by the weather.

Our last stop was a floating market in Lembang. It was OK. It was busy and it was mostly just food vendors so there wasn’t a lot to do. But we wandered around for a little bit and then headed back to our hotel for our last night in Bandung.

All in all, this trip was really interesting. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Bandung but it’s always an interesting experience going places that are not of your own choosing. The Indonesia people are exceptionally nice and the food was amazing.