Our Airbnb in Paris was outside the central area, in north eastern suburb of Romainville. We randomly heard about a twice weekly local market a short walk from our accommodation and left the kids to go and check it out. As you might imagine there was a lot of cheese and we had some trouble… Read More Local Market in Paris
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… Read More Java thoughts
Java’s rival to Paris is the city of Bandung, filled with fashionable uni students, and as it is only 150kms from the capital, it makes for a perfect weekend escape for Jakarta locals. We coincided our visit with a weekend, which wasn’t well planned on our part, and our initial Airbnb accommodation was not very… Read More Paris of Java
A ‘hidden gem’ of Java, Purworkerto was a town we stumbled across from this blog. It seemed like it had a few things to do and we had time, so why not? The tricky thing about hidden gems is that the tourist infrastructure isn’t there, so often you need your own transport and a decent… Read More Purwokerto falls
I find it weird that it’s still a thing that we, as white people, are a novelty in so many countries. Yet, in 2025, despite such an interconnected world, we get stares (and more) in many places including India, China and Indonesia. When M and N traveled to Japan in the early 2000s we were asked… Read More D list celebrities
After celebrating the successful navigation of the Indonesian postal system, N and M took a walk around central Malang and across to see the nearby painted villages. First stop was at a coffee shop with a balcony overlooking the Arema Blue Village, where all the houses were painted with the same blue paint. I imagine… Read More Rainbow Village
Who doesn’t want to visit an island paradise with white sands and clear, turquoise water? That’s the promise of Karimunjawa, an undiscovered gem just off the north coast of Java. It’s not easy to get to, there’s no public transport on the island and not much tourist infrastructure. Pre-COVID there were limited flights to the… Read More Get your motor running… (AKA Karimunjawa)
One of the things to do in Yogyakarta is a short (two hour) silversmithing course where you get to make your own piece of jewellery! For about $35 you can make your own ring, earrings or a pendant under the guidance of an expert silversmith (and polyglot). Our family all chose to make rings of… Read More Silversmithing
It’s a bucket list item: joining in a lantern release ceremony with hundreds of others. When I realised that we’d timed our Java trip to coincide with this celebration I was pretty chuffed! Java is home to the world’s biggest Buddhist temple at Borobudur and it is where about 90,000 people came to celebrate this… Read More Happy Birthday Buddha!🕯️
Java has loads of volcanos and many of which are active. One popular one is Mt Bromo and it’s usually visited at sunrise – which actually means getting a jeep about midnight and driving two hours to line up with other jeeps to wait for a couple more hours to see it. That sort of… Read More Bromo bronco
Country Hoppers 