So we do try to keep things positive here but for us, four weeks in Java was too long. The people are very friendly, generally when they chat to you it’s to help or to ask questions, rather than try to extract money from you. We even had our first family hitchhiking* experience thanks to a kind local – I was sure he’d want to charge us but no. And then he directed us in the “back way” to the place we were going so we didn’t have to pay 🙌

The things to do are nature based (like looking at volcanoes at sunrise), the food often lacks variety and may make you sick, and the tourist infrastructure can be fairly basic which means it can be hard to get around. While this might have been ok for the adults, once you add kids it makes it more challenging and in the end, four weeks was a good week too long for us.

We all got frustrated with the lack of space – something we could have done better in hindsight. For example, in Yogya we planned for some down time and so did a week long stay but it was a room in a hostel. Seemed like a good idea at the time: there was a pool, a kitchen and a common area. In reality, the kids only went in the pool once, the kitchen was very basic and hard to cook anything in and the kids stayed in the room (with the AC). It was a nice place, well set up for tourists (local & international) and the staff were lovely but a week in one room is a long time.

Even when we did have an Airbnb, it was often not much bigger and, one in particular, was really not well maintained, especially the bathroom that needed buckets of bleach to remove the mold growing 🤢We were supposed to stay there for three nights and ended up bailing after one. We were lucky to get some money back there but it was all a bit painful.

I very much am aware that these things show the privilege of our lives – something that is often uncomfortable to admit but, especially when visiting these countries, becomes very obvious. (One of many privileges we are lucky to have like skin colour, speaking English as our first language, and of course our health.)

We did enjoy Java, but we just should have reduced the time so don’t let us put you off! And if you are keen on volcanoes, waterfalls and don’t mind the early rising you’ll love it.

*hitchhiking if you count someone offering you a lift as hitchhiking… which probably doesn’t count but I am going with it!