A month in Indonesia
4 Indonesian islands in one month
We flew to Indonesia from Thailand, and actually landed in a city called Medan on the island of Sumatra. This city has like 5 million people, but not a lot to do. It seemed insanely busy and quite chaotic. Pretty much how I had been told Jakarta would be. We booked Medan due to the cheap flight from Bangkok.
We stayed there a few nights and left Kurt to do his thing as we flew to Jakarta on the island of Java. Jakarta was cool, and not as chaotic as people state. The traffic wasn't even that bad.
One thing you need to make sure you're prepared for in Indonesia is the mosques playing the call to prayer really early in the morning like in Turkey. They're very loud, but not as aggressive as in Turkey. In Indonesia it seems more of a melodic tune, whereas in Turkey it sounds like they're demanding you wake up and sprint to the mosque. If you don't want to get woken up, check the map for a hotel that's far enough away from a mosque, or you will be woken up every morning.
Indonesian people are cool, very friendly, and generally polite. However, I noticed in my time there that service staff tend to spend a lot of their time not actually working, but playing on their phones or messing around instead, and more often than not, would get my order wrong. This happened throughout Indonesia actually. The wrong thing would arrive, or wouldn't arrive at all unless I went to the counter and asked where my order was - and they were generally sitting scrolling through TikTok. Quite a bizarre thing to see, over and over again.
We flew from Jakarta to Kalimantan to visit the Indonesian side of Borneo - we had already been to the Malaysian side last year. I jumped on a mangrove boat and saw some of these strange monkeys with the huge noses and some crocodiles.
We then flew to Bali, somewhere I never wanted to visit and guess what... It was EXACTLY how I expected. Completely overrun with tourists, it's impossible to cross the road safely as there's never a point where the cars and motorbikes stop. It's loud, it's filthy.
Never pay attention to travel influencers or wannabe influencers who tell you that you NEED to visit Bali. It's some sort of shit status thing. It's not expensive to visit, so why brag that you've been there? There are much, much nicer parts of Indonesia to visit. The beaches in Bali are literally full of trash, and the restaurant owners brush the trash back into the ocean, so it will just appear further down the beach. Go to any other part of Indonesia, fuck Bali. Shit hole.