The Takeaway-East Java.
So we went from Bali to Surabaya, Bromo, Probolingo, Jember, and Mount Ijin and made several stops along the way in different places before we returned to Bali.
We saw primitive people along the way.
That is a bold statement but it is true. Let’s call the western world advanced. Let’s call Jakarta and Bandung people advanced and then hop back into the smallest villages we visited.
Simple day-to-day and hand-to-mouth living within these villages, they will survive for decades and keep expanding.
I love quiet places, and I love solitude but these places seem to be a place of absolute boredom. Most look dirty and lack maintenance. The maintenance or lack thereof is the biggest drawback of Indonesia.
Maintaining one’s assets.
I have worked in Indonesia for a while. I was in charge of building and running Jakarta film Studios and taking care of the facility. The main problem is…
We have done it this way all the time, why change now?
I can without a doubt say that this sentence drives me mad. Building a building with gypsum under the soffits and not using waterproof materials for places we know will get moist and fall down in a year is stupidity.
This bit of saving money will come back to haunt you and this is where the lack of maintenance comes in place. This very simple thing of keep doing what you are doing is Indonesia.
No one cares…
We met a very rich man at one of our stops. It was in a restaurant/resort and he has these amazing tables. These tables are cut from the center of a log measuring 19 cm by 10 meters and over 1 meter wide. The price of this table is 40,000 dollars. He was bragging about how many more trees he has like this and how many hundreds of hectares of land he owns. He was a man from Jakarta and owned this resort. The place was nice, service and the food were great. However, with so much money, there was no vision. There was not one word about sustainability or the future. I have, I have, I do this and that, but the man had zero ideas about the future of the country, the amount of garbage and all. I should have known when we saw about 10 monkeys in cages and tied to a tree at the back.
His success is one thing and maybe it’s just me or my experiences but I see very few people giving back to society in Indonesia. This is what disturbed me. Well-off people have little planning and foresight… Let’s hope is all changes one day.
#roadtrip #eastjava #surabaya
#bromo #volcano #traveling #travelling #exploreindonesia, #photography
#travelblog #indonesia
Zsolt Zsemba 