[Travel] Our roundtrip on Java, Indonesia

We recently did a roundtrip on Java and went from the west coast to the east coast with a private van with both a driver and a guide. It took ten days and we did a lot of sightseeing. In the next posts I want to cover some of the things we did by showing some pictures.

On the 1st of June we left off from Amsterdam and we landed on the 2nd of June in Jakarta. It was warm and already dark. The traffic was quite a mess but luckily we did not have to drive. That is something that a tourist should not do ! There are a lot of scooters who pass you on all sides and as a driver you should know when to honk, when to use the big light and what it means when others use them. So after a while we were dropped of at Hotel Alila in Jakarta to get a good nightrest and to prepare for the roundtrip. The hotel was very nice, the room very spacious and clean, the breakfast was good and the coffee was great !

The view from the hotel in Jakarta

From the hotel we first went to the national monument which is a tower of 132 meters which symbolises the fight for Indonesia's independence.

After that we went to the old center of Batavia, getting there took some time since it was quite busy. A lot of scooters and other traffic.

Finally we got to the old center and we saw the old gouverners office which was still present on the building in Dutch.

It says "Gouverners office"

After that we went to Sunda Kelapa, which is the old harbour in which wooden sailing ships (they call them pinisi) are docked and were the cargo is retrieved or stored by manpower.

The harbour was not very impressive to me ... But after that we went to Taman Mini which is a kind of park in which all 26 provinces of Indonesia are represented with their specific building, clothing and culture.

Zoomed in on the woodwork on the previous building

A typical hut for the Sulawesi people

After the park it was time for lunch and a Bintang, the local beer from Indonesia with Dutch roots.

After that we left for Bandung, which is the country's third largest city. We saw a lot of guys controlling the traffic, people give them a small tip. However during the trip to Bandung we saw at least 100 of them and most of them do not contribute to the flow, they just wave their hands in the hope they will get a few hundred rupiahs.

We encountered a lot of rice fields next to the road.

Before reaching Bandung we also stopped on the top of a large hill with a nice view on the tea fields where we had a nice and fresh cup of tea.

In the evening we reached Bandung where we were dropped of at the hotel. More on that in the next post.



[Cool] An amazing little robot climbing all types of terrain with its 4 legs

This is the more advanced version of this robot, created by the University of Southern California. The robot is completely autonomous and trained by machine learning algorithms. The video is real-time and not speed up as I was thinking.

[Photo] Very impressive photos of Chernobyl 25 years of the disaster

25 Years ago Chernobyl was headline news. On April 26th 1986 at 1:23 A.M. reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, near the town of Pripyat, ruptured a vessel during several extreme power spikes. Several explosions followed and these caused the graphite moderator components of the reactor to be exposed to air, setting them on fire. The fire sent a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. It drifted over large parts of the Sovjet Union and Western Europe.
50 People died as a direct result of the disaster and it is thought up to 4000 people have died as a result of being exposed to the radioactive materials which entered the atmosphere. Over 350.000 were evacuated from contaminated areas around Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In 2011, 25 years later, the area surrounding Chernobyl still looks like a ghost town.
Fan of TotallyCoolPix David Schindler went to Chernobyl and took these amazing photos which will take you right back into time to 1986.
The impressive photos made by David Schindler can be found on reallycoolpix.com