Indonesian cooking class
At 7 o’clock in the morning we enter Ubud market, joined by the head chef of Warung Enak, we walk over the busy market looking for spices, banana leaves and other ingredients that we’ll need for our Indonesian cooking class. While wandering around the market the head-chef leads the way and stops at various stalls explaining what all the strange looking, typically Balinese, never-seen-before food products are.
After picking up a few items we head to Warung Enak where we get a warm welcome and an apron hung around our neck. It’s just the two of us, so we’re getting a private lesson in her professional kitchen. The assistant chefs have done most of the prep (hard) work and all ingredients are sliced, diced and layed out for us to start cooking. The head-chef explains that we’ll be making 7! dishes in about 4 hours (2 starters, 2 main courses, 2 desserts and 1 snack).
Time to start cooking! We get a menu with detailed descriptions of the recipe, what ingredients to use and how to prepare the dish. We start off with Buntil Ayam and Otak-Otak Tenggiri followed by Garang Asam soup, Pangek Sapi and Begedel Jagung, we finish the cooking with 2 desserts: Kue Lumpur and Pisang Rai.
After every dish is made we serve it up on a plate and enjoy it ourselves.. nice! See the pics for all the dishes we made.
After finishing the cooking class we enjoy a cold beverage and receive a certificate and an apron from the head-chef. We thank her and as icing on the cake we get all the dishes we made, but now with a head-chef touch again, in a doggy bag for dinner. Yummy !
Great time, great chef and awesome food. Now just hope we can also do it alone..
We also decided our next stop: Manado, Sulawesi !
Never trust the Lonely Planet…
After a long week in Ubud we decided to head to Manado, where apparently I have some far far roots. Manado is an old Dutch city, where supposedly some of the elderly still speak some. After following advice from the LonelyPlanet we decide to book a room in a cheap hotel and arrange for them to pick us up. After a thirty minute ride we arrive at a shithole hotel. We man up and decide we can stay the night here and look for something else tomorrow, it’s already 23.00. Big mistake, entering the room we discover the bed is dirty, in fact the the walls and any furniture in the room is filthy, windows don’t close well, no toiletpaper or towels, airco doesn’t work and the bathroom stinks. Damn LP gets it wrong a lot of the times! We grab our valuables and start wandering around and within minutes we find a nice hotel just around the corner. We head back to grab our backpacks and check out, paying 50.000 IDR (approx € 4,50) for the time we had our bags in the room and walked to the new hotel. For all you travelers, check out the room first, before you check in!
Sulawesi: Manado
After a couple of nights where we also switched to the 4* star Swiss-Bell hotel (for work reasons) and we try the Gado Gado at a small shop across the street. The people that work there cannot stop smiling while making the peanut sauce for us fresh on the spot, taste is great but the belly does not agree unfortunately… While walking in the local mall we get stopped by a group of girls that want to interview us and get a picture taken together. They say it is for a school assignment, but this is just an excuse to talk to Julian.
Bunaken: diver’s paradise
In Manado we charter a boat and head to the island of Bunaken. After approx a 30 minute boat ride we arrive on the beach and get led to our beach bungalow for the first night. We immediately get served lunch, as all meals are included at the resort. After a mediocre lunch we decide to go snorkeling, however the tide is out, which means we’ll have to walk out a long way dodging sea urchins, blue/red/yellow spiked sea stars. Half way out we realize the tide is so far out we can’t even swim over the first pieces of coral. Time to head back, again dodging with bare feet, it seems like even more creatures you don’t want to step on are on our path. We’re lucky and reach the beach unharmed. 
The next day we jump on a boat with a Singaporese family that go diving, we jump in and snorkel. Around Bunaken Island there are drop offs quite near the coast, so easily accessible. At the drop off there’s lots of coral and fishes in a variety of colors! While on the boat we also see turtles in the water and apparently yesterday they also swam with dolphins, but unfortunately we do not see any today.
We are in the beach bungalow which sounds very romantic, but in reality means that it gets extremely hot as we are right on the beach without any shade. We have no air conditioning and there are lots of mosquitoes because we are near the mangroves so we cannot open the windows. Thanks to the mangroves the beach is so well preserved, but the mangroves also bring the mosquitos. After not so much sleep at night and the snorkeling in the morning we decide to look for another place to stay. We end up in a very comfortable place for the same price and we stay there for 2 more nights (Bunaken Village Resort). The snorkeling around Bunaken is great! (Although there’s always a better place we discover talking to the other guests. Most of them are divers and they are always looking for the most beautiful place to dive). The boat back to the mainland does not go to the harbor, but we have to get out somewhere and wade through the water. Mind your step, there’s a snake right there!
Exploring the Minahasa Highlands
As Julian has some work to do online we have checked in at the Novotel near Manado which is surprisingly comfortable. For me it is a bit boring as Julian does not have time to go sightseeing so I decide to go out by myself for the day. My first idea is to go to the mikrolet station (a mikrolet is a small van which is the main form of public transport here) and charter a mikrolet for the day to take me around the Minihasa highlands around Manado.
el I ask the waiter for some tips about chartering a mikrolet. In the end he offers to arrange transport for me and somebody from the hotel to accompany me who speaks English. I accept the offer and we agree to meet the next morning early. When I get there, the waiter is there and walks me to the car. The driver actually speaks some Dutch because he works in The Netherlands now and then. His girlfriend is also a waitress at the hotel and she comes along, and the waiter himself also gets in to the car. While we wave goodbye to Julian I hear we are also picking up another colleague who wants to join! I was a little bit hesitant about going out by myself, when I leave the hotel there’s 5 of us in the car!
The highlands near Manado are very lush and mountainous. We visit ancient pre-Christian graves, beautiful lakes and I enjoy the company of my new friends! At the end of the day I am very happy that I asked the waitor for some tips, because I had lots of fun and have see some very beautiful and interesting sights.
Looking for tarsiers and macaques in the jungle
Sulawesi is one of few places where tarsiers (spookdiertjes) live, the Tangkoko Jungle is home to the smallest marsupials on earth. They grow up to 15 cm, sleep during the day and hunt for insects during the night. We arrive at Tangkoko in the afternoon at Mama Roos, another LP recommendation. It’s not great, but to be honest, I don’t know how much better the other accommodation options are over there. We start hiking with a guide at dawn to spot the tarsiers, they are so cute!! They sit in the trees ready to come out for the night. We walk through the jungle for 3 hours and damn… that’s hot! We’re wearing long trousers against the insects etc. but it’s so warm and humid! We are invited to attend a wedding but after the hiking we are both too tired and go to sleep quite early. That is; Na Young goes to sleep quite early, Julian stays up half the night because there is no air-conditioning an there appears to be an animal living in our wall that is very noisy during the night. We have to be ready at 5 in the morning to go on our next hike. As we walk to the jungle the wedding party is still going on… This time we walk for 4 hours with an British girl and our guide Jack who loves to learn Dutch for some reason. We get to see a whole clan of black macaques, which is so cool! They go looking for food with the entire clan that consists of about 70 monkeys. They are very relaxed and pass us with their babies hanging on or playing around.
Football fever in Indonesia
Although Indonesia is not participating in the World Cup they are very passionate about the World Cup! In Manado everybody is taking the World Cup anthem very literal, there’s a sentence which says “Wave Your Flag” and they are! Everybody here is showing which team they support, houses have huge flag poles and almost all motorized vehicles are decorated in the colors of a specific country. We even see a motorbike which has gotten a paint job and now has the colors of the Argentinean flag. Other favorites are the Netherlands, Germany and Brasil. Also in the small villages in the highlands around Manado I spot flags everywhere. When we fly to Makassar, on the other side of Sulawesi we see no flags, but we do see screens set up everywhere. There are big spontaneous open air motorbike drive ins and all the bars are showing the matches. We end watching in a café with 2 big screens and 6 TV’s set up. There are only about 15 people there, including us…
As Julian does some more work I decide to see Fort Rotterdam, an old settlement from the Dutch. Of course I get ripped off when I have to give my “donations” for entering the area and for having an old men walking with me around the fort… We also decide we do not have enough time to visit Tana Taraja, which is in the middle of Sulawesi. Our visa is expiring and it’s too much hassle to try to extend it. Too bad, because we have heard so many good stories about it. But this definitely gives us a good reason to return to Sulawesi.
While Julian is working I start walking to the Lion Air office to book a flight back to Bali, so we can fly to Perth from there. We cannot book online, but we looked at the map and the Lion Air office seems to be near to our hotel… We were very wrong about that one, I soon get lost and luckily I run into a guy who walks with me to the Lion Air office. I never would have been able to find it myself. On the way there I realize I have forgotten my pin code as I haven’t been using it in a while and I need cash to pay for the tickets. I try to call the hotel to ask Julian, but when I call the hotel the people there say that there’s nobody in the room… turns out I have called the wrong hotel!! We asked around at several hotels before picking one and I have taken the wrong card with me… oops. I end up using another bank card and I get a lift back on the motorbike from the guy who helped me find the airline office. Apparently I look like his girlfriend who died 2 years ago… Anyhow, I am so happy when I get back to the hotel and have the tickets:)
Goodbye Indonesia, Hello Australia!
We spend a few more nights in Bali before flying to Perth. We’re finally in the negotiating mode after some learning experiences and after talking to the manager for a while we get a free upgrade, very nice… The flight from Bali to Perth surprisingly only takes about 4 hours. After having spent time in Indonesian cities for a while, Perth is sooooooo clean and well-organized!! At the airport a lovely elderly woman is volunteering to help tourists, people here are extremely friendly. It may sound strange, but it may use some getting used to the friendliness of the people here :) follow our the update on our Aussie adventure here soon!
Groetjes NaYoung & Julian
