No offence to the creator of guacamole, but when it comes to creating an excellent culinary out of avocado, Indonesians win hands down.
Whenever I went out to eat at an Indonesian restaurant as a child, there was a default drink that I, and many other people who shared the same happy childhood as I did, always ordered: avocado juice (or jus alpukat in Indonesian).
Avocado juice sounds healthy and odd to those who have never tried it before, but it is seriously anything but. A juice may be a misnomer – it is after all more of a smoothie made out of the fruit mixed with milk and sugar. And no jus alpukat in Indonesia is ever complete without a generous dollop of chocolate condensed milk.
I know, avocado + chocolate, who would ever think that the equation = heavenly?
I don’t know when I stopped drinking jus alpukat, but I suspect it was around the time when I started not being able to fit into most of my clothes. So enjoying the drink was only reserved for special occasions in a bid to stop myself from expanding too quickly.
A visit to Medan, my parents’ hometown, after more than fifteen years certainly qualifies as a special occasion. This was why I was looking forward to visiting Macehat, a coffee joint at Jalan Karo no. 20, that was famous for its coffee based drinks as well as avocado coffee float – the Indonesian jus alpukat with a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a big spoon of Milo powder and a single espresso shot, a modern twist to the classic jus alpukat that Indonesians love so much.
The interior of the ‘cafe’.
One thing that you have to know about me: I hate coffee. It makes me dizzy and sleepy. People have served me different types of coffee drinks, but all they got from me was a disgusted look after one sip.
I have been distracted and somewhat grim, judging from my past few posts (or lack thereof). There was work, my badminton journalism stint, being wheeled around on a hospital bed, a boy, and just lots of things that kept me away most of the time from my laptop to write.
But I just came back from Bali, one of the most amazing places in this region, and it would be a travesty not to at least drop by and say hello at my so-called travel blog. Truth to be told, I have lost a little bit of that overflowing ideas on my writing angle on my travel stories due to lack of practice, which is ironic since I’m about to move myself a few thousand miles north to pursue something writing-related (more about that in the coming weeks :)).
So I looked into one of my main sources of writing inspiration – my travel photos (the other one is my favourite travel blog Everywhereist). Apart from finding lots and lots of pictures of food, one place that really stood out was Devil’s Tears Bay at Nusa Lembongan, an island just one hour ferry ride off the the southeast of main island Bali.
It’s looked promising since arriving.
If you think that the name Devil’s Tears Bay sounds intimidating, wait until you are actually at the place.
Anyone who has travelled with me knows that I have extremely low standard for accommodation. My logic is that since I will spend most part of the day travelling, I just need a bed to sleep and a clean bathroom to shower. I will normally opt for a hostel or a very cheap hotel, and so far both have worked fine with me. Rarely has an accommodation given me a bad impression that I do not wish to set my foot there again. In fact, I would recommend most of them to friends travelling.
Up until two weeks ago, I only had two places that I would advise anyone to avoid at all costs. First was the apartment that I stayed in Hong Kong. It was actually clean enough considering it looked very old, but for some reason it gave me the creep. As we were sitting down in the living room chatting away at night, we suddenly heard a surge of water bursting from the pipe in one of the bathrooms. We were understandably surprised and in a desperate attempt to push away any thoughts of ghosts from my mind, I went to check the bathroom and somehow came up with a scientific explanation to calm myself down that perhaps it was because the water in the heating system overflowed. As I’m writing this, I had no idea how I managed to talk to myself and my friends into believing that. As if to prove me wrong straightaway, my friend found a few sheets of test papers on top of a shoe rack and the name of the student was ‘Demon’. Now I know that Hong Kong people have an interesting way of naming themselves (Apple, Orange, Kitty, Ice, Star, Bambi, etc), but when a Demon appeared together with bursting water pipe, it was enough to scare all of us that we had to watch funny Bollywood videos to calm ourselves down.
Second was a hotel in Copenhagen that I stayed in summer 2013. I have never been so sure that poltergeists exist until then. I distinctly remembered putting my earrings on the table only to find the next morning that they were gone. After turning the room upside down, my dad found each side of the earrings at different corners of the room. What was even creepier was that they were not the only items that had moved overnight. I was charging my camera battery and in the morning the battery was no longer in the charger. Instead, we found the battery separated from the charger below our blanket. Either one of my family members had a case of violent sleepwalking that none of us knew about or my memory was certainly failing me or…
Anyway, the point is so far, only these supposedly supernatural encounters have created an impression so deep and deterring that I swear I will never go back again. Montigo Resorts have somehow found a loophole in this theory and gave me the next scariest experience than demons and poltergeists: cockroaches.
Yes, you read that right, cockroachES. With ES. Plural. Four to be exact. And I only stayed there for 2 nights. For a place that we paid quite a considerable amount for (even with the 1-for-1 voucher that my friend had, it was still quite a pinch), I was expecting at least a basic level of hygiene and that guests can be pretty much cockroach-free. But no, our first encounter of a huge cockroach was during our late-night dinner right on the first night and my friend saw something fly across the room. We (I) tried to ignore it and pretend that it COULDN’T have been a cockroach – what were the odds?
But as we were finishing our dinner, one of my friends exclaimed, “OMG, I see it now. And it really is a cockroach.”
Very understandably, I screamed and jumped up the couch, barely being able to stand because my knees had turned jelly.
We all stood in suspense until the cockroach crawled out of the villa. Only then did we dare to head back to our room, only to find another one was waiting inside our bathroom. And the next day, I saw another one at a different toilet. As an added bonus, we were also visited by a hairy giant spider. I felt I was right back in Nepal whereby everyday was a battle with a new species of crawling and flying creatures.
Spider hunter.
If not for the extremely comfortable pillows in the villa and my energy completely drained out from the shock of seeing cockroaches, I would probably have been insomniac over those two nights.
So here is the deal: I did not go to Bali just to eat, as this post and this post seem to have suggested.
Instead, I was there to attend a wedding, a very beautiful one if I may add.
It may not have started perfectly. It rained heavily and the venue for the vows had to be moved from a beautiful spot by the beach to a sheltered open hut. (And I arrived extremely late that I missed the saying of the vows, but the bride and groom do not have to know this. For a valid reason though since my hairdresser was an hour late!). But as the afternoon and the night progressed, it just got better.
After the ceremony, there were cocktails and canapes, which were amazing. I did not even know what cocktails I had and did not bother asking, but they were really good and the appetizers tasty. Not much good picture from the first part and this was the best one that I got.
After that came my favourite part: the wedding reception. It was set in a beautiful tent with a row of 6 tables (I think), each table decorated with beautiful flower arrangement. The whole setup together with the fairy lights surrounding it created a very dreamy atmosphere.
Leave me alone with nothing planned and I will do this: eat.
On my last day travelling solo in Bali, I could not recall doing anything else apart from ensuring that my tummy was not in want. One of the highlights in my not-so-adventurous pursuit of traditional dishes was babi guling or Balinese roast pork.
Bali is probably the only place in Indonesia whereby you can taste a lot of varieties of pork, served in non Chinese style. Being a country with the largest Muslim population in the world, most of the restaurants serve halal food since it does not make much business sense to ignore the meal preference of close to 90% of the population.
Bali is different though. The majority of the population in the island is Hindu, which means that they eat pork but abstain from beef, which is perfect for me since I do not eat beef. This is why you can find blatant selling of pork and pigs being hung which will leave the people in other parts of Indonesia gasp in horror.
Although this scene of lamb cutlet did scare the hell out of me a little too.
So anyway, back to babi guling. You can find this everywhere in Bali, but two of the more famous branches are Babi Guling Ibu Oka in Ubud and Warung Pak Malen at Kuta/Seminyak area.
Since Bali rained on me on my first day here travelling solo, I had nothing to do apart from enjoying my hotel suite. It was a classic example of a beautiful accident – I was just looking for the best deals for hotels in Agoda and not even realising that I had booked a hotel suite for myself.
So I wasn’t complaining that I had to be stuck in my room for the whole afternoon. But when night came and it was time for dinner, I grew a little restless. Since the rain had stopped, I decided to venture out for some food. I was contemplating whether to be adventurous and tried something new, but thought better of it and decided to be safe and sinful. I went for Naughty Nuri’s Warung, an amazing BBQ pork ribs restaurant that I visited during my last trip to Bali in September, and this time I was going to have a whole rack for myself!
No visit to Jogjakarta is ever complete without paying homage to the world-renowned Borobudur Temple. Situated in Magelang, about two-hour car ride away from Jogjakarta city, Borobudur Temple is worth the journey – it is after all the biggest Buddhist temple in the world and at one point in time was one of the seven wonders of the world.
We made a grave mistake of visiting the temple not only in the weekend but also on the eve of an Indonesian public holiday. Which was definitely not the wisest thing to do since Borobudur is one of the cheap destinations for pretty much everyone living in Java. Also, because we are not the earliest risers in the world, we only got there at around 11 AM. Considering some dedicated photographers would have already been ready with their tripod set up at about 5 AM, we definitely deserved the huge line forming at the ticket counter, not to mention the baking hot sun.
The ticket counter for locals.
At least among the things we did wrong, we got a couple of things right. Like the fact that one of my friends is non Indonesian and could get her ticket at the Borobudur International Visitors Centre. Check out the queue for that.
Nothing.
She did have to pay for the price for that, being a foreigner and all. Her entry ticket was USD 20 while ours was less than USD 3. Reminded me of my time in Taj Mahal when I had to pay a much higher ticket price as a foreign tourist (750 Rupee or USD 12) while my Indian friend paid close to nothing (20 Rupee or USD 30 cents). The best part of this arrangement was that we had the spillover effect from her being a foreign tourist and a very kind guy in the counter helped us to get the local tickets through the backdoor and did not even want to receive any tip! Truly hospitality at its best.
Jogjakarta is like a sneaky little person with a lot of tricks up its sleeve. At first glance, it could barely call itself a city. With an international airport that just about works and a city so small that it spans around 32 square km, I really did not expect much out of it save the legendary Borobudur Temple.
The terminal building, which was just 50 steps away from our plane.Cue chaos.
A closer look, however, will reveal that there is so much more to the place than a mere small town behind its time. The city may not be massive, but the province stretched far and therein lies a historic place with rich culture and lively art scene.
As is customary in most of my posts, I will start my praises of any place from its food.
missruslee 