Batu, Indonesia: Gone Paragliding!

Indonesia has become my favourite South East Asia country after several trips there recently. It's so close to Singapore and so diverse! Mountains, beaches, volcanoes, history, city life... you name it, Indonesia has it!

On my first trip to Indonesia, we touched down in Surabaya but instead of staying in Surabaya, we headed straight to Batu. We had to take a bus to the bus station from the airport then a bus to Malang before a taxi to our accommodation in Batu. So we basically spent the whole day travelling. Batu is a small town located to the South of Surabaya. It's known as a vacation city and it reminded us a lot of Genting. We decided to stay in Batu instead of Surabaya was because we wanted to get away from the big city and also because there's paragliding there!

We checked into our dorm in a villa, our jaws dropped at how beautiful our accommodation was given that it was really cheap. It looked more like a villa than a dorm. After a good night's sleep and a hilarious conversation with the hotel staff using Google Translate, we were off for paragliding!

We were drive up a winding road until we reached the top of a hill. We got our gears and waited for our turn. There was nothing that I had to do, I just had to sit back and let the instructor do all the work. It was SUPER fun and not scary at all! There's no sudden drop but you'll experience a lift when you 'jump' off the cliff. Then you float all the way down with a gorgeous view right in front of you.

Batu is also famous for her apples so we visited an apple and guava farm. We picked our own fruits and had apple fried rice at the farm. The apples were organically grown so they weren't too big. We also visited a pasar malam (night market) where there were a lot of roadside game stalls, ate some food at an organic farm fair and popped by a small amusement park.

The next day, we took the local van-bus back to Malang. We had to change a grand total of 4 different coloured van-buses before we reached the Malang bus interchange where we took the taxi the day before. The colours represent different routes so we asked around for directions using our trusty Google Translate again. :D Then we took a super long bus ride to Probolinggo where we hired a taxi/van up to our accommodation near Mount Bromo. I'll save that for another post. Till then!