Yogyakarta: Planning and Day 1

Posted on June 17, 2016 by memoriesandsuch

We’re back from Yogyakarta for more than a week now, and all the photos have been uploaded and shared and so I thought I’ll do a post on what we did and where we went. This can be useful to anyone else planning on visiting this place.

Changi Airport

This trip was one of the most hurried and last-minute trip ones I’ve done. We were vacillating between destinations and then when we zoomed into Yogyakarta, we realised that travelling by a full service airline was almost two to three times the cost of travelling by budget airlines and S was not really interested in using a budget airline. Finally I managed to convince him and we chose the budget airline, Air Asia Indonesia to travel. The flight originates from Yogyakarta and leave from there at 7:30 am and this meant that we had to stay an extra night there. The only other airline servicing this destination is SilkAir, the regional arm of Singapore Airlines.

Eastparc hotel, photo from Agoda.com

Next up was a place to stay in. As usual I looked up TripAdvisor and decided to finalise the Eastparc Hotel, which was one of the top rated hotels in Yogya. The hotel is very close to the airport (around 10 minute drive) and to the Prambanan complex (around 20 minute drive). There is a mall close by (10 minute walking distance) which is standard as malls go, but has shops and a hypermarket which is good for necessities.

We also decided to splurge on a higher class of room, called the Premier room, which would guarantee us connecting rooms. This was around SGD 10 more than the standard room rate and was totally worth it. The room’s minibar was complimentary and the kids and S had a blast using it.

With two UNESCO World Heritage sites in its vicinity as well as others in the city and close to it, we decided to use the services of a driver and/or guide. I used trip advisor and the yogyes.com site and emailed quite a few of the names mentioned there. After going back and forth with some of the agencies, we finally settled on Danar and Ibot from Jogjakartadrivers.com as we felt they gave us the best deal. We spent around IDR 110,000 for the use of a driver for 2 days and Yus, the driver was a wonderful person, warm and affable and went out of his way to accommodate us and our needs. The money didn’t include any entrance fees to the sites, any guide fees and food and drinks. But Ibot, whom I was liaising with, sent me the amounts for all the attractions and also helped book tickets for a performance we were interested in (more about that later). So all in all, fantastic service and I will not hesitate in recommending their service.

Changi Airport

The flight out of Singapore was at 11 am and we were expected to reach Yogyakarta around 12:30 pm. We had arranged for the hotel to send us a vehicle to pick us up as this was a new place. This was not a free service and we paid the equivalent of SGD 10. We also used this on our way back also as we had to leave the hotel at 5:30 am and I was not sure if we could successfully get a taxi at that time, which also happened to be the first day of the fasting month of Ramadan!

The flight was uneventful and when we reached the hotel, only one room was ready. So we had lunch at their in-house restaurant Verandah which was quite good and rested for a while till the other room was ready. Then we decided to venture out to buy some provisions for the next two days which was supposed to be very hectic.

The next day, Yus was supposed to pick us up at 3:30 am to take us to Borobudur to see the sunrise and then on to the Dieng Plateau which was supposed to be a three hour drive from Borobudur. The third day was also action packed with sightseeing within the city envions including the Sultan’s Palace, an erstwhile water palace, the temples of Prambanan and Ratu Boko to see the sunset and capped by a Ramayan ballet performance to end a hectic day. We planned to keep the last full day in Yogyakarta free to shop and just recover from the two hectic days.

I’ll post more about the places we saw next week….

Holidays….Planning and Dreaming

Posted on May 6, 2016 by memoriesandsuch

Since I am at home these days, I thought I’d get a head-start on planning our 2016 and 2017 holidays! The June holidays are just about a month away and we are considering a number of options to travel regionally.

I came across this list from TripAdvisor and this seems to be a good starting point for anyone wanting to travel around Asia. Here are the top 25 Asian destinations of 2016. Of these, I’ve been to roughly half this list. I now need to start looking at the others, but I do know there will be some I won’t go to which may be overrun with backpackers and are famous for activities I am not interested in.

The top 25 Asian destinations are:

Siam Reap, Cambodia
Hanoi, Vietnam
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Bangkok, Thailand
Hong Kong, China SAR
Tokyo, Japan
Kathmandu, Nepal
New Delhi, India
Taipei, Taiwan
Hoi An, Vietnam
Kathu, Thailand
Krabi, Thailand
Jaipur, India
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Bophut, Thailand
Beijing, China
Singapore
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Kyoto, Japan
Goa, India
Shanghai, China
Seoul, South Korea
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Osaka, Japan
Mumbai/Bombay, India

If you want to know the top destinations worldwide, here’s the link:

London, United Kingdom
Istanbul, Turkey
Marrakech, Morocco
Paris, France
Siam Reap, Cambodia
Prague, Czech Republic
Rome, Italy
Hanoi, Vietnam
New York City, USA
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Barcelona, Spain
Lisbon, Portugal
Dubai, UAE
St. Petersburg, Russia
Bangkok, Thailand
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Cape Town, South Africa
Tokyo, Japan
Cusco, Peru
Kathmandu, Nepal
Sydney, Australia
Budapest, Hungary

This list has seriously awakened the travel wanderlust in me, and I need to start planning for trips out of this region. We have pending trips to meet family to both Europe and North America and I need to start saving up for these trips. For a family of four adults, this will be serious $$, especially flights!

OK, gotta start looking for jobs now!

I’d love to visit….

Posted on March 16, 2016 by memoriesandsuch

I love travel, if I could have the time and money, I’d love to travel the world! I remember one of my first conversations with S was exactly this….At some point (has to be soon lol) I will try to see as much of the world as I can…

I am a bit sad that there are so many parts of the world that are now inaccessible to me. With all the terror attacks happening around, travel these days has become something that you fear, rather than cherish. The Middle East has along with the countries to the west of India have now become unsafe to travel and so it’ll be long time before anyone can visit them. And when that happens, will the countries be as they were? Will the historical treasures, some thousands of years old, still survive?

If you read my blogs regularly, you will see I love reading books which are related to the Indian subcontinent as well as other cultures. So I’d love to actually go and visit all these different cultures myself and try and see it on an intimate level. I love going to places which I read about and if I’ve read something recently about a place I am visiting, it makes the place come even more alive to me. Also when I read about a place after I’ve visited it, most times the book becomes more real to me and instead of just reading it, it becomes my personal movie and I can actually ‘see’ the book come to life!

One country I am a bit obsessed with is Pakistan. As an Indian, born post-Independence, growing up, Pakistan was and probably still is in some people’s mind’s ‘the enemy’! Textbooks in school reinforced this and I am sure this is the same thing across the border. My wanting to visit this country may seem strange and slightly weird to any Indian who is reading this! A lot of people I know, including my dad, have memories of independence and the subsequent wars India and Pakistan have waged. I remember the Kargil War which happened when I was working in India. I remember my company going around asking people if they wanted to donate to the war efforts and most, if not all, of the people working in that place decided to donate one day’s salary to the war chest for the soldiers and their kin. My company, if I remember correctly, made a donation equal to what the employees donated. During the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, my dad was a air raid warden for our area and his responsibility was to make sure all houses had blackout paper in their windows and that when the air-raid signal went off, no one had lights shining. My neighbors in India, who are Sindhis were originally from Sindh in Pakistan and came to India as refugees post partition. But to my mind, that is politics and not the people and culture of the country and from an early age, I’ve been fascinated by that country since we share a common history for the last thousands of years, except for the last 60.

One incident comes to mind which crystallized to me just how same and at the same time different we were. I helped out in a project for a professor in a university I was working in Singapore many years back. One component was to translate Indian, specifically Hindi newspapers on specific issues. Since they could not find someone willing to do the translation, I was roped in! The study also had someone from Pakistan doing the same thing for Urdu newspapers and we both sort of translated articles relating to the same incident and the way each side portrayed the incident was a serious relevation to me! What was white on one side was shown to be black or at the very least grey in the other side and vice-versa!

Since coming to Singapore, I’ve met, interacted and befriended many Pakistanis and found them to be just as we are. The specter we always taught about may be politics and when we speak someone ‘across the border’ they are just like us, with the same language, food and clothes. I’ve realized the two things you should not speak are politics and cricket; otherwise we have loads of common things to speak about.

Excavation of Mohenjodaro, source Wikipedia

I know as someone born in India, to parents who are Indian, the chances of me going to Pakistan to see the country is probably as remote as going to the moon! I’d probably hitch a ride to the moon faster than visit Pakistan. I’d love to go and visit the sites of the Indus valley civilization and Mohenjodaro and Harappa and also see the towns and cities I’ve only seen in movies and television shows.

When I see ties between Singapore and Malaysia so cordial and movement between the two countries so easy, I mourn for something similar to happen between India and Pakistan. When we share so much together, why is it so difficult to visit each other? Maybe the politicians and people who govern both countries fear exactly that – that when we realise how similar we are, we won’t need all that hateful rhetoric and live in peace. I do hope one day (not too hopeful that it will happen in my lifetime), this does come true. In the meantime, I will live out my obsession with pictures, books, movies and television!

This actually turned out to be a fun post to write. I’ll do this on and off – listing places I’d love to visit, who knows this may be the key to me travelling there soon!

Is there any country you’d love to visit but can’t for a variety of reasons? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!

An Unforgettable Trip

Posted on December 23, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

While in India, one of our smaller trips was to Bangalore to meet my maternal grandmother who is nearing close to 90 and also to meet an uncle who is suffering from a double whammy of Alzheimer’s as well as Parkinson’s!

The four of us plus my mum were supposed to be taking IndiGo both ways, with us taking the 12:30 flight from Mumbai, reaching Bangalore around 2:15. The new airport in Bangalore is very, very far away from the city and to get to anywhere in the city is at least a 90 minute drive, this is assuming the horrendous traffic that Bangalore is famous for is clear and non-existent at that point! We’d planned for a two hour drive to my aunt’s place which is in one of the outer suburbs, the other side of the airport and which should take around 70 – 80 minutes at that time of the day and had expected to reach latest by 4 pm. We’d also arranged for a taxi to pick us up at the airport.

In the morning, while getting ready to leave, I got a message from the airline that the flight had been retimed to an hour later than it was supposed to leave. Though it was irritating, we shrug it off and changed our plans accordingly. We left around 10:30 which should get us to the airport around 11:15, which would be well in time for the 1:30 pm flight. On the way to the airport I received two messages from the airlines – one after the other, which now changed the flight’s departure time to 4 pm!

I was thus, quite upset when I reached the check-in counter. The person who checked us in told me that it was a technical problem and he could check us into the next flight to Bangalore which left at 3:45 pm. When asked, he said there was no guarantee that our scheduled 12:30 flight would make it at 4 pm, but the 3:45 flight was assured to leave on time. So we did the change and spoke to my dad. My dad was by that time not interested in us going to the city, he wanted us to cancel the tickets, get a refund and return home. My mum, on the other hand wanted to meet her mum, sisters and brothers-in-law. Around 3 pm, when we were waiting to start the boarding process, I got another message from the airline saying the 3:45 flight had now been postponed to 5:30 pm.

At this point, I completely lost it! The boarding gate area at this point was resembling a small town bus stand with passengers all over the place. The domestic airport didn’t even have decent places to eat and we were hungry, bored and super angry. I then went to the airline counter and spoke to one of the supervisors. What she told me was a completely different story from what the check-in guy told me. Her story was that since all their flights originate in the northern part of India and that part was fogged up, all flights were running 3-4 hours late, there was no technical problem at all!

Then me and another lady who had to get to Bangalore also urgently spoke to her and when I told her what I was told while checking in, she decided to get it reconfirmed. That was a lie I was told initially. Then that sweet lady (I did write down her name, but now I can’t find the paper) told us she will put us back in my original flight (the 12:30 one) which was now going to land shortly and depart for Bangalore at 5:30 pm.
We (the five of us plus the two of them) then were led out of the security area and had to re-checkin for the 5:30 flight. Clear security once again and then start the wait all over again. We finally got in the bus to get to the aircraft around 5:15 pm and when we reached the aircraft, we saw that all the passengers had not disembarked. What we saw made everyone on that bus comment again! We saw groups of people who used the gangway to take photos and selfies! This sheer selfishness of people really threw me away! These people have also been delayed by 3-4 hours and they know this flight has to go to another destination, yet they spend, nay waste precious moments taking pictures that they can do outside the plane.

We finally boarded and the flight left around 6 pm. We reached Bangalore around 7:15 and got to my aunt’s place at 9 pm! What was roughly a 6 hour journey door-to-door became an almost 12 hour one!

The return journey was nothing like what I wrote above! It was a breeze and what IndiGo is renowned for and we made it home by 3 pm (We had taken the same 12:30 flight from Bangalore to Mumbai)!

This is one trip that none of us are going to forget in a hurry I am sure!