City Traveling

Some travel and tourism activities in Indonesia are visiting natural attractive place, such as beach, waterfall, valley, mountain and high terrain, island, cave, forest, and sea. The other activity is visit Indonesian heritage which consist of culture, building or temple, and dance.

Indonesia is big country that consist of thousands islands, 33 provinces, and hundreds cities. Some islands like Bali and Borneo are popular, but only a few cities are known by tourists. Indonesia are not only Jakarta and Denpasar, but also Medan, Padang, Surabaya, Makassar, Ambon, and hundreds another cities. Almost all of province capital city have airport, so we can visit easily.

Indonesia are consist of many ethnic, culture, geographic condition, climate and history. These makes one city is different with the others. Every city has their special characteristic. If you want to know Indonesia well, you must visit all cities in Indonesia. So, city traveling is important and interesting. By city traveling you will safer because facilities, transportation, accommodation, entertainment, public information are relatively more complete than in village or natural tourism spot.

If we have short time to visit a city, how to make us feel this city well?

We could try the unique food, walk around by public transport, meet and talk with the people, visiting landmark, and buy some merchandises or souvenirs.

For example, if you go to Yogyakarta, you could eat Gudeg, walk around by becak, visiting Keraton and Prambanan Temple, and buy silver accessories. If you go to Palembang, we could eat empek-empek, visiting Ampera Brigde and great Musi River by traditional boat, watch manufacturing process of traditional clothes Songket Palembang and bring it as souvenir. Of course, in Jakarta we could eat Kerak telur, riding bajay, visiting Old City and many museums.

Maybe little bit difficult to talk to people we meet because not all Indonesian peoples could speak English. But if you look their behavior, you will see the people characteristics in each city. Culture and history really makes every city in Indonesia have their unique characteristic.

City traveling is one of best choice for recreation or tourism activities because we can visit in short time (two days or less), we don’t need to worry because public facilities and accommodation are suitable for visitor, easy to meet people with national and international language capability, and international or standard food available.

So let’s visit cities in Indonesia as we could and discover how rich Indonesian cultures are. If we sort cities from the biggest, the cities in Indonesia that easy enough for city traveling are : Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan, Bandung, Jogyakarta, Makassar, Balikpapan, Denpasar, Padang, Semarang, Solo, Palembang, Pekanbaru, Menado, Samarinda, Banjarmasin, Pontianak, Jambi, Banda Aceh, Ambon, Mataram, Lampung, Palangkaraya, Malang, Kupang, Bengkulu, Kendari, Palu, Jayapura, Gorontalo. Of course, these cities are only small amount of all Indonesian cities. All of cities above have airport with regular flight.

If we want to visit cities in Java Island, we also can use train or bus as transportation. Off course some cities need more time. For illustration, if we depart from Jakarta to Semarang in Central Java, we need about 6 hours by train. From Jakarta to Bandung in West Java is just two hours by car. From Jakarta to Surabaya in East Java is about 10 hours by train. But if we already at Semarang, we need just two hours to Solo and three hours to Yogya by car which have many traditional heritage and tourism destination.

So, where we could go if we want to exit for a while from stressed Jakarta activities in weekend and limited budget? I suggest Bandung, Bogor, and Cirebon. Bandung and Bogor are just only two hours by car and Cirebon is just only three hours by train. We can go at Friday night or Saturday morning and return at Sunday afternoon. Because many peoples in Jakarta have same idea, its will be better if we reserves (booking) train ticket and hotel room first.