My wife and I just got back from a long delayed honeymoon! Here are a ton of pics and hopefully not too much text.

In the airport, they have a ton of Batik fabrics. It’s cool to see the huge variety. You see people wearing them around.

…there were also ads for Qwen, which is funny, since I was trying to use some local Qwen 3 model on the plane (it was not good).

My wife was coming from a conference in Australia, so we met in the Jakarta airport, and immediately took off to Labuan Bajo.

It’s not a huge destination in itself, but it’s the starting point for boat trips (see below). That said, it’s still very pretty and this view on the way to our hotel was promising for the trip:

We ended up not getting a boat the day we wanted to, so we did a day tour.

They took us to a few places in the area, like Rangko cave. It’s this pretty large cave, right next to the sea, and filled with warm seawater, which you can swim in!

…and they also took us to a popular sunset view:

I’m a pretty big fan of Indonesian food. I love Indian food (our last trip), but it tends to be very light on protein, which Indonesian food is not generally lacking. This Rendang was amazing:

and they do some real magic with tempeh, which I’m not usually a huge fan of:

everything is aggressively alive and growing all over the place:

All aboard the Walenreng

The day tour was fun, but the real reason we were there was to book a “liveaboard”, which is where you live on a boat for a few days, and they take you to a bunch of good sights. I mean, it’s similar to the day trip, but you get to see stuff that’s not as accessible if you only have a single day (there are speedboat day trips that try to bring you to the same places, but from what I’ve heard they’re frantically rushed).

It’s common to do a 3 day, 2 night trip that starts and ends in Labuan Bajo, but we realized the 4D3N one would drop us off in Lombok (the island we wanted to go to next), letting us avoid a trip to the airport. So we signed up for that!

Here’s the route:

It was… a hilarious circus signing up for one. Some people sign up months in advance for nice boats. As usual, we barely did any planning. There were very few that seemed to have spots for, you know, the next day, so we took what we could get… the “Walenreng”.

It didn’t look too bad in the pics, but it was a lot jankier in person. I mean, it was all fine, but they usually advertise these boats as kind of a luxury experience, which this one definitely wasn’t. That said, we were there to see and do things, which it definitely delivered on.

View off the back upper deck:

Off the bow, sunset:

I honestly didn’t get pics of the best activities we did on the boat trip, because they mostly involved being in the water. But some highlights were: snorkeling with incredible fish, snorkeling with enormous manta rays, snorkeling with whale sharks. Really incredible, highly recommend.

On one day, they took us to the village where the boats are made. Seeing it was… interesting, though not exactly inspiring confidence in our boat’s seaworthiness.

Sssss… sssss… this is snek (time):

One of the funnier/less professional things was that I don’t think the crew had been… uhh, informed about western privacy norms. They liked to nap/hang out on their phones in the short alley on the way to our room, so when we used the bathroom, given that the window slats were angled down, well, at least you wouldn’t be lonely:

On the last boat day, they took us to Moyo island. This is one of those things you only do on the 4D3N one, because it’s quite far from Labuan Bajo.

An old lady was selling weird eggs, so I had to try one:

It was actually very good and creamy! Then, a goat came onto the platform we were on and tried to nibble her stuff, so she yelled at it and shooed it away:

Us getting absolutely pummeled by the water!

Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy.

Our last night was… a comical (yet definitely memorable) shitshow. They planned on getting us to the port in Lombok at ~9 PM, where we had a driver waiting for us, to get us to a hotel very late, where we’d start a hike early the next morning.

But poor planning meant we only got there around midnight. Okay, whatever. We’re finally in the harbor, and… we hear a loud crunch, followed by a bunch of shouting in Indonesian, followed by about 20 minutes of engine revving. Apparently, our crew on the budget boat weren’t totally familiar with “tides”, because they had run us aground in the harbor.

They piled our suitcases aboard the little speedboat that took us to land, and we said goodbye to the Walenreng!

the trip to shore was hilarious. They clearly didn’t know where in the (fairly large) harbor they were, and it was night, so they were mostly shining a small flash light around, trying to find some good landing spot. There was definitely a sense of “oh we fucked up” desperation on the part of the crew, but all the passengers seemed to think it was pretty funny. The boat was surrounded by flying fish though, which was cool.

the place on land we hit happened to be in the back parking lot of a mosque in a QUITE dingy neighborhood. Since it wasn’t, you know, an actual dock, we had to jump off the boat and wade through questionable shallow water to shore.

It was a well lit dingy neighborhood, at least, but the constant sound of packs of dogs fighting wasn’t encouraging.

Our driver didn’t speak great English over whatsapp, and we obviously weren’t at the central location we had agreed to meet, so that was a whole kerfuffle. Thankfully he was still around, and another pair of passengers asked their (very kind) driver to talk to ours on the phone, and he dropped us off at a more easily findable place, where our driver (who also very kindly waited hours; don’t worry, we paid him double for his time) could find us.

So we zoomed off and go to the hotel at ~2 AM, in time to wake up at 6 AM, to begin hiking…

Mount Rinjani

Mount Rinjani is in the middle of Lombok island:

we got picked up from our hotel, and then picked up the other hiker, a friendly Australian named Andy, and we all rode in the back of a pickup:

on the way to the trailhead, they first stopped at a little traditional village thing, where they had us put on some… traditional garb thing and an old man put some sort of clay mark on our foreheads. Apparently it’s a thing they do before people hike the mountain 🤷‍♂️

Something we noticed many times on this trip was that AI image models are being used way more often than I’d seen before, for things like store logos/displays/etc, like this display for the village:

the trail begins!

unbelievably lush jungle:

when we got to the first lunch stop, it was nuts. Every trek company hires, in addition to the actual hike guide, a small group of porters who carry your tents, and chairs, and an absurd amount of food to make honestly pretty great meals, at various stages on the mountain. They all stop in the same places, so it’s kind of a zoo:

wild selaginella! just like in my terrarium back home:

the hike went through a wide variety of different and beautiful landscapes:

the top was also a bit of a zoo, which I’d heard. There’s limited real estate and it’s a popular hike, so the rim is packed with tents:

You can do the summit of Mt Rinjani, but it takes a day or two longer, so we instead opted to do the 2D1N “crater rim” hike, which I’d heard was pretty amazing, and… it was!

the peak of Rinjani is the high point at the left there, but you can see that there’s also a caldera, and lake!

There actually used to be a mountain named Samalas, even taller than Rinjani, but there was an absolutely massive eruption in about 1257, creating the caldera, which is now filled in with Lake Segara Anak.

and if you notice in that pic, there’s a mini volcano on the island inside the caldera! That one was formed from more volcanic activity in the 1990s.

the hike was awesome. I can’t say if the summit would’ve been better, but it’s hard to imagine it could be. This hike had it all: jungle! monkeys! fried bananas! dogs! a crater rim overlooking a caldera lake! amazing views!

Gili

After the hefty hike, the plan was to relax for the rest. We took a ferry from the western side of the island to a group of three islands called “the gilis”:

We stayed on “gili T”, i.e., gili Trawangan. The main highlight on the gilis is snorkeling, but whereas often you need to be taken somewhere to snorkel, here it’s RIGHT off the beach, and you’re seeing incredible stuff. Most notably, large sea turtles galore. It was truly magical.

I don’t remember where in the Sony org this department was:

“probably”… I respect that:

Gili is super cute. They banned non-electric motor vehicles, so people mostly use electric scooters, or bicycles, or actually horse drawn carriages:

Bali

Our last stop was Bali. I was a bit hesitant because I’d heard it’s kind of a party zone for Australians, but to be honest, we didn’t see much of that!

We took a ferry from gili T to Bali:

how you know you’ve arrived in Bali:

a water temple, really fun:

the hotel we stayed there was absurdly nice for crazy cheap:

We did a rafting trip through the jungle, which was a blast:

Most drivers you get will offer to take you to a Kopi Luwak coffee farm. We finally said yes to one, and he took us. I… hope they’re treated okay? I think they must be. They weren’t chained up or anything, and mostly sit around sleeping:

My wife correctly insisted that we had to spend at least one night in a treehouse, and, she wasn’t wrong. It was super cool:

it just looks out onto the jungle!

and the bed wheels out onto the deck on rails!

Oh, I’ve gotta mention this:

when we were scootering around in Bali, we saw this monstrosity. In case you can’t tell the scale, it’s about 20 feet tall, on top of a platform above head height, and is very detailed (look at that leg hair!). What the HELL is that?

It’s an Ogoh-ogoh! Their (relatively recent, actually) history is pretty interesting if you read about it there.

of course, what is Bali without a hundred cool temples:

Something very cute is that they leave these little offerings for the gods around everywhere. That’s not atypical though. However, what I like is that the offerings have very… mundane human contents. Like, a banana, some cookies, an orange, etc:

Finally, we flew back to Jakarta, and started the long journey home.

Plants!

So many plants, familiar and not!

anyway that’s all. I think Indonesia was definitely my top trip I’ve ever done. I’ve really only mentioned about 10% of the things we really did. We’re definitely hungry to go back, since we only skimmed a few of the many, maaaaany islands. So, we’ll be back some day, Indonesia. Can’t recommend it enough!