SAMARANG, JAVA ISLAND, INDONESIA

March 5, 2023

Our last stop in Indonesia was in Semarang, an industrial and exporting city, the fourth largest city on Java Island.   Java Island, about the size of Alabama in land mass, is the most populated of the Indonesian Islands with some 130 million residents.   It’s hard to get ones head around a population density like that.   Many live in and around Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, on the west end of the island.  It is the first place we’ve seen where there is a lot of litter/roadside dumping, which was disappointing.


Our  excursion took us to an agricultural region about 1-1/2 hour bus ride from the port.   We visited a coffee and rubber plantation and got an interesting tour of the facility and grounds.   The small latex processing operation was very interesting.   Our guide was very knowledgeable especially about the trees and fruits grown in the area:  mahogany, teak, rubber, banana, coffee, cinnamon, papaya, coconut, and many others that we didn’t know existed.   Our impression was that if humans vacated the island it would soon be overgrown into a dense jungle of exotic plants.   


From the town where the plantation was located we took a nineteenth century train to a nearby village about 10 miles away.  The ancient engine was powered by steam generated by burning wood.   The ride was probably the high point of the day as we got a glimpse of how folks live in the area.   We passed by vast acreage of rice paddies along a large lake where it seemed all the locals in the area were having a good day fishing.  The locals all stopped to wave at us as we lumbered by. 


We are now heading north into the South China Sea on our way to Viet Nam.   We crossed the equator last evening and only felt a small bump as we entered the Northern Hemisphere. (That was our captain’s joke, one he has probably used many times.)


                                                  From the bus, a mosque

                                       From the bus....a community market


                                                       Coffee bean plants are raised in the shade of larger trees.


                                             Coffee beans being roasted

                                             Sheets of rubber from the sap of rubber trees.   

                                            Cinnamon tree. The cinnamon comes from the bark

Old workhorse that we rode in: 19th century steam engine



                                                     Firing up the boiler using firewood

                                              Rice paddies

                                              The only mechanization we saw in the rice fields
                                             One of many shacks on the edge of the lake

                                              Lone fisherman

                                             Hundreds of folks fishing on a Sunday afternoon

                    Not sure what advantage the perch gives the fisherman and not sure how he got up there


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