The alarm goes off. It's 3:45 in the morning. The sun is still down and we are having a hard time getting up. I sit up and start pulling on my flower pants - loose and cool, but hiding my legs from the mosquitoes. My camera I hang over my shoulder before opening the door. The house owner has left two flash lights for us. I snap mine on as we sneak outside to find the old bikes leaning against the patio. My pants are just stretchy enough to let me climb on the saddle. Arno leads us with a map in his other hand while he cycles on. The bumpy little roads are so quiet. No cars, no people. Just silence, the little buzzing of crickets and the overall darkness that had covered the village after sunset like a big, soft blanket - allowing us to paddle without getting sweaty. The call to prayer starts to flow from the mosques, over the meadows and tiny houses, telling us that it is four o'clock and we are back in Java where the main religion isn't Buddhism like it is in the island of Bali. The gliding singing sounds so beautiful spreading over from several mosques at the same time.
With the blinking flashlights leading the way through the night we find our way to the temple area. Leaving our bikes unlocked on the yard of a hotel we walk into the lobby to buy tickets. We get directions and new flashlights - which was a pleasant surprise since ours were kind of dim. And so we started heading up. First walking to the temple and then just climbing. Narrow steps up all the way in the dark. I was moving sideways since my legs were still reminding me of the scooter accident by every rocky step higher from the ground.
After finally making our way up on the top of the temple we walked around wiping our flashlights on the rocks to see where we had come to. It was too dark to really tell how the temple actually looked like so we sat down to wait for the first rays of sun to break through the darkness of the night.
As we talked about everything possible they turned the lights off on the bottom of the temple. That was a sign of the sunrise getting closer. After 5 am we started to see some fog sinking on the bottom of the village. And we kept waiting. Slowly the sun started peaking from the horizon. The morning light was very soft and kind to my camera. The volcanoes started forming as the fog kept sliding down from the mountains on the green jungles next to the temple. The birds started singing while the island was slowly waking up. Breathtaking.
We enjoyed the sunrise turning into a morning sun and headed then downwards. Taking some loops around the lower levels to see the statues and carvings on the temple walls. And then down to the hotel to have some coffee and rice wrapped into banana leafs.
Back at the house we were staying we met my parents and brother who were enjoying some nasi goreng and papaya juice for breakfast before visiting the temple. We showed some pictures and then as they left headed out to enjoy some well deserved naps.
Luukas came back first as mom and dad love to walk around temples veeery sloooowly and see eeeeevry bit of them. And he had gotten so much admiration by the locals and posed in so many selfies it had gotten hard for a tall white guy to be there. So we grouped to come up with a plan to get some non-Asian-food we had been craving for some time. (Not that there is anything bad with having nasi goreng for breakfast, lunch and dinner). After some excessive googling we couldn't find anything closer than an hour cab ride. I was craving for some pizza but there was seriously nothing...
When my parents finally made their way back from the temple I sat on the patio and watched a local lady paint fabric by hand when the house owner came by. I asked him where we could get some western food since rice was popping out of my ears after two weeks. He was quiet for a moment and told that the village is a bit small for that, only local restaurants. But then he remembered that there was this one new "Western" "Italian" restaurant -that just opened its doors. So we jumped on our bikes. Though we got to the first corner before mom had to go get a new bike, since this one was a little crooked. We walked into the local little hut that sold chocolate bars and such to kill the hunger that was left from the little breakfast we had had. After a few beng-bengs we were fit to keep driving with Arno leading the way. The way that took us down the bumpiest little roads in the middle of rice fields. I was betting that there couldn't just be an Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere but we kept riding. Some local guys we passed by laughed when I had a hard time slowing down my bike with its' breaks broken and a few women gathered around a local mosque were amused to see white people in the forest. And we kept going 'till Arno said that we are were at our destination. And our destination was nowhere to be seen. So I gave up hope just before we bumped into the tomato sign that pointed to a garden.
We left the bikes and ran inside to discover that there was this tiny patio where locals made Italian food. We ordered everything from garlic bread to pasta and stakes. The quality was everything from I wouldn't pay for this back in Europe to this almost tastes like Italian food. But we were just so happy to get something Western and we didn't complain a bit and gave big thank yous to the chef who himself wanted to come and greet us. We were asked to pose in a picture with the chef's whole family before we departed to go do some shopping in the town.
While we went to visit a pharmacy with Arno we found the only place selling pizza: a little cart by the road - not found in google maps. But as the evening hit us and we were still hungry for some Western food we decided to skip the probably already closed pizza cart and headed walking to the nearest hotel that looked like it would serve also something else than rice or noodles. And the list really had fries, hamburgers, hot dogs and hamburgers in it. Tho 20 minutes after we ordered them the waiter came back to tell that "sorry, all out of them". So I got an omelet that tasted like fish and was a little hungry for the rest of the night, just dreaming of what I could find from the airports the next day as we were supposed to fly home. But that is a whole another story.
Hugs guys,
Linnea
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