A train mistake
I woke up at half 9, and treated myself to a simple egg sandwich, courtesy of the hostel. When it’s free, food is food. After an hour, we packed our things and got ready to go to the train station, bound for Surabaya. We took a taxi there, and I’d already booked the ticket on tiket.com. At the station, we had to wait for our number to be called up to be seen. When I was finally called up, it turned out I was at the wrong station. The first stop was 1 before Banyuwangi, and I was kicking myself.
The counter assistants conversed amongst themselves to see whether we were able to be allowed on. After a small but tense wait, we had the all clear…phew! Before long, the train to Surabaya arrived and we hopped on, prepared for the 6 hour journey. For whatever reason, we went for executive seats, very unlike us. However, it was a nice change to travel in comfort for once, so I’ll let us off this time. To pass the time, I watched some videos, read my manga, and of course had a nap.
A wet arrival
The train arrived in Surabaya in the evening, it was pretty much dark already. In addition to this, it was absolutely lashing it down, proper thunderstorm. Despite the shelter we still got pretty wet whilst we waited for a taxi who seemed to take ages. We stayed at one of the RedDoorz hostels, a popular chain in Indonesia, nothing to shout about though. They’re usually pretty naff quality, but at least you usually know the facilities you might get. Unfortunately, we went to the wrong one, ours had a ‘2’ on the end of the name. We ended up walking for 5 minutes or so in the rain to our hostel.
Here’s another day in China where we were searching for our homestay in the dark and rain.
As expected, despite being part of a chain, the room was fairly shabby, and there wasn’t any WiFi available either. After chilling for a bit, and when the rain had stopped, we went out for some food. There wasn’t much on offer to be honest in the area, so we settled for a small shack. We just had some simple fried rice and a drink, pretty nice and tasty. Even better because it was only 15k IDR, less than £1. I used a little Bahasa Indonesia that I’d learned and was able to pay for the meal. It wasn’t much, but I was pretty chuffed with myself for understanding. Afterwards, we went back to the hostel and chilled for the rest of the night.
