picking guava on java

This past weekend we went up to the mountains with some friends to enjoy a little escape from the city. It's hard to believe that only 2 hours outside of this hot, dusty city there are beautiful green mountains and cool, clean air. We escaped the city Friday night and arrived at our hotel, The Hotel Hot Water, pretty late. So we went to bed and then bright and early (like breakfast at 5 am early) set out to see the sights. Our friends, K and I, had a list of things to see. We had no idea what was going on and were just along for the ride and to take pictures.
Our first stop was a waterfall in the middle of the mountains.

K and I just found out they are expecting their first child at the end of May, so K is making sure to include the baby in the picture.

No babies to include in our picture, but we did have fun seeing the sights with our friends.

After enjoying the waterfall we ate some corn and went to the lake. We took a boat across the lake to a guava orchard and spent about 30 minutes picking fruit and taking pictures. While we were at the lake we saw one of the country's recently erupting volcanoes, Mt. Kelud. There were many other boats going across the lake and we were able to watch all of the faces on those boats erupt into smiles as they saw the two of us paddling our boat. Then we watched their smiles get even bigger as our boat driver bragged that not only did he have white people on his boat, he had white people that could speak the local language. There's no better feeling than making people smile, especially when you have to do nothing but be white.



Later that day, after a short nap, we experienced some agro-tourism. We went to another orchard and picked apples and strawberries.


For dinner we tried a local specialty, rabbit sate, which is pretty much rabbit meat on a stick, grilled and covered with a spicy peanut sauce. I felt sort of weird eating Bugs Bunny, but it was good!

The next day we went to the "amusement" park. It was actually better than we expected, half educational and half recreational. We rode rides, went through the haunted house and swam for a little bit.


Then after another meal of roasted rabbit we headed back home to the city refreshed, but exhausted and sunburned.
There are many, many more pictures from our trip so go click here to check out the rest of our pictures.