Stir-fried morning glory.

At the moment I’m sitting on my hotel bed in Jakarta, typing up my ‘memoirs’ and checking my emails whilst feeling very content after an amazing meal in the hotel restaurant and a post-meal swim/sauna/steam-room session. The flight from Gatwick to Dubai resulted in a giddily exuberant Southampton University foursome on account of the in flight entertainment system (films/music/games/front and ground facing cameras etc etc), and the discovery of being permitted as much on-board alcohol as we desired. However, due to flying with Emirates and not wanting to offend any of the Arabian flight crew or passengers we limited consumption to a (hopefully) modest two cans of beer, small bottle of wine and a vodka-coke over the 7 hour flight. The in-flight food was quite good, for in-flight food. As usual it was far too salty and made you thirsty as hell but it certainly beat easyjet and ryanair’s offerings.

After arriving in Dubai, we had the problem of obtaining Indonesian Rupiah (12,000 rupiah’s to £1) which we need to pay for various things on site. This is where I discovered how enormous Dubai airport is. To find a bureau de change that exchanged in rupiah’s required a 15 minute walk from terminal 2 to the nearest edge of terminal 1, which itself takes a further 15/20 minutes to walk through. There appeared to be 3 terminals in all, of which terminal 3 was recently purpose built for Emirates flights only. Cue a short wait in the departure lounge and the world’s most expensive frappuccino (£5 for a small!!), and we were on our way to Jakarta by 4am GMT!

If I thought I would get some half-decent sleep on the Dubai - Jakarta leg of the journey I was severely mistaken. Screaming children, loud air conditioning fans and a family of unabashed Americans guffawing loudly at Chris Tucker's racial abuse of Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 3 meant my time in the land of nod was not to be. After an extremely smooth landing in Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta airport (34°C and cloudy!!) we got through Indonesian customs without a hitch, met our guide Acho from Losari Tours and made our way to the ‘Resort Hotel’, arriving by 5.30pm GMT+7, having been awake for over 24 hours. A quick dip in the hotel pool was followed by a fantastic dinner with Rosie, Louise, Jess, and Lottie where we decided to get an assortment of local dishes to share. The stand out dishes were ‘Ayam Panggang Ala Thai’ which was BBQ chicken with Thai sour & spicy sauce, ‘Nasi Lemak’ which was Malaysian style coconut rice served with cucumber, chicken curry, sambal bilis and peanut (very good) and finally ‘Cah Kangkung Seafood’ which was unnervingly translated as ‘stir-fried morning glory with prawns’.

Another paddle in the pool followed along with stretches in the steam room, sauna, ice bath and jacuzzi, which seemed to cause an acute bout of dizziness, presumably from dehydration.

However, I am now fully rehydrated and have been up for a little over 32 hours, so it’s time for bed. Next stop is an 8am flight to Kendari tomorrow morning. Will update when I next get the opportunity, which will presumably be tomorrow night in Kendari or at the weekend once I’m on Hoga.

The website for the hotel I'm staying in at the moment is www.fm7hotel.com.