Saturday 15 June, 2019, Malang, East Java
Another early start today, for a 330km seven hour train ride from Surakarta (Solo) to Malang, across East Java - both towns I'd never heard of until this holiday.. Our trip took something over seven hours - but I'm told the equivalent drive would take 12 hours. The roads and traffic must be awful for that.
During the day, we passed through dozens of towns and villages, and some larger towns- but they all had their share of level crossings. The train driver was obviously obliged for safety reasons, to sound his horn approaching each level crossing, and for a while there, it appeared he was on the horn every 30 seconds of so. And at most of these crossings, bikes far outnumbered cars and vans.
We lumbered though rice paddies, bananas, rubber tree plantations, corn fields and fields of unidentified crops, and more rice. Always rice, and always green. With the backdrop of a volcano or three. I'm now probably imagining things, but every mountain looks like a volcano, extinct or otherwise.
We've
been on worse trains in Asia - although Dave says his seat was uncomfortable (he's
not as well padded as me).
This train was better than the one from Bangkok to Kanchaniburi
last year, when our carriage sprang a leak in a storm, but nowhere near the
class of the Japanese express.
The Japan high speed one would have done the trip in an hour, not the 7+
hours this one took.
First impressions of Malang is that its a big-ish city, with all the usual traffic hassles that entails. Based purely on the drive from the station to our hotel, Malang seems to have more than its fair share of Catholic churches and schools and other colonial buildings, but with all the usual south east Asian street slums. The hotel, set in extensive parklands, is a bit quirky – obviously, orange was the designers favourite colour. I couldn't live with that for too long.
