Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Soft Trekking



Last week I accompanied a French Group to do soft trekking from Ceto temple to Sukuh temple than continued to Tawangmangu waterfall, located about 100 km from Yogyakarta. Luca… un flic qui s’interrese beacoup a la politique (tu m’ as laisse un bon impression d’un flic francais).. Thierry est professeur…(n’oublie pas de m’envoyer les photos avec mon T Shirt de Henry).. Jean ( il etait Italien avec sa belle femme Sylvie) Claire, Veronique, Etienne, Martine, Delphine et Jean Pierre sont les proffesseurs

They came to Indonesia through a French tour operator called Nouvelle Frontiere. The real program was to climb Merapi volcano but due to the Merapi’s activities which is not possible to do the trek therefore we did a soft trekking from Ceto to Tawangmangu instead.
We left from Yogyakarta at 7 am and arrived in Karangpandan bus station at 10 am. We had to switch to smaller vehicule cos our bus from Yogyakarta was to big for narrow road to climb Ceto. We did some shopping actually in Karangpandan traditional market, provision for lunch during the trek. Jean a achete une CD de la musique traditionelle de Java..gamelan

30 minutes driving up through tea plantation to reach Ceto temple which is located on 1400 above sea level. Compared to Borobudur or Prambanan temple in Yogyakarta, Ceto is much smaller and looks like temples in Bali. Main temple is located in the back, is one of the characters of East Java temples. It doesn’t mean that the temples are always in East Java province. These temples are usually built after 10th century.

After visiting Ceto temple we started our soft trekking. A huge tea plantation was our first view for about 1,5 hour. My group was excited to see the tea plantation and and women picking tea leaves. What a wonderful panorama of this plantation. Everywhere just tea…tea mountain and very fresh air ..

Finally we arrived in a village which is also the end of tea plantation. After that we just entered in a pines wood. Wandering in a quite pines for about 1, 5 hour. We just met 2 peoples in the pines, a local people and another hunter with his gun chasing a bird …maybe. Our pique nique was also in the pines. Si tu veut faire sortir, fais sortir et les autres vont le prendre (Jean a di a Delphine). Merci Veronique pour nous as montre comment decortiquer les ananas

Walking, talking and kidding ..(on a bien rigole.. avec Jean a sculptor from Paris? sorry Jean I forgot, just remember that you have an exhibition in a gallery in Paris and Veronique wants to go there) sent us to another 14th century temple. It’s often called as erotic temple for its sculptures and statues.

That’s just a little ornament of the temple and here is the main temple looks like. Some say that it looks like Mexican temple or Pyramid in Egypt.

Well..we just did half trekking which means another 3 houres to go. Our next menu is Javanese village life…. Wandering in a javanese village life let us to explore small, clean streets in the village. People is very friendly and some traditional javanese houses can be found here. As the village is a plateau therefore we don’t find rice field cos rice doesn’t grow well above 1000 metres. We found some carrots and potatos instead. See a lady is cleaning her carrots on the street…
We arrived at the gate of Tawangmangu waterfall but unfortunately it was already close. We’re about 25 minutes late cos it’s closed at 4 pm and we got there around 4.25 pm. Tant pis, but still we could meet our little friends…monkeys..waterfall guards… Luca et Thierry ont goute boisson traditionnelle a base de cacahuettes..c’est bonne mes amis??

We left from Tawangmangu to Solo for a dinner then continued to our hotel in Yogyakarta. Next morning I dropped them in Tugu train station for next depart to Surabaya cos they had to continue their trip to Bromo, Ijen and Bali. And over next morning I picked up another group just for classic tour. Next month, I still have 2 groups from Nouvelle Frontiere and hope they won’t cancel cos the 3rd one already did.

Bonne continuation mes amis!! Je vous sohuite un tres bon voyage en esperant de vous revoir lors d’un prochain sejour.

Jean, n’oublie pas de m’envoyer le DVD de notre balade.
Agus

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