And here we're on our way to the first destination...
(Not following the series? Read the last post here.)
Along the way, our driver took the smaller roads across the farms and the people's houses as shortcuts, and that's part of the reason we are able to see these paddy fields. They are almost everywhere! According to our driver, although these paddy fields don't give enough for the farmers to sell them, they give enough for the farmer's family themselves so that they don't need to spend much on food. Along some other way, we also see farms of other things (common ones are corns, chilli and tobacco leaves) and the driver told us that the families of these farms will normally exchange the harvested results with each other so that everyone has some...definitely feels like what you can expect from a friendly village :)
A bigger paddy field, this time with something on them.
(It's really not easy to take photos on a bumpy road.)
Didn't really took us too long to reach at Pinus Pengger, a pine forest as our first attraction :) This place is also known as Hutan Pinus Dingo, but I think we recognize it as "a pine forest with nice photo spots" (at least that is what my mum will recognize it as...). Personally I'm not too attracted towards the photo spots (which you can see here at point 42), but the environment of being in a pine tree forest...wow.
It's just as breathtaking as it gets.
I should have made a GIF of this, looking at the waving trees right from the bottom is as truly beautiful and mesmerizing.
Paths to walk in the forest towards each attraction spots. Kudos to the maintainers for building them in a way that does not distract the forest's beauty! Although they are not really well-lit and when the sky turns dark we often find ourselves walking outside of them for whatever reason...lol.
View from up there! And the sky sure turned dark really quickly...
It took us some time to get convinced that we didn't get the wrong time on our phones, because that's only around 6pm for their time! A little weird that Yogyakarta's location gives them a local time of GMT+7 but I guess time zones are always that weird...
For dinner, we asked the driver to drop us at some restaurant (my mum wants a clean place), so he found us a Raminten's Kitchen that is pretty famous for their decent food and student-friendly price (and hence making them popular among students!).
...and without spending much time, we have an empty table...no one even cared to took pictures of the food because everyone's so hungry, lol.
Maybe more food photos for the next day...
This ends the first day of the trip...simple? I really enjoyed the scenery and food. Especially how they dealt with the chilli. Fried rice with chilli cooked with the rice together is brilliant, the aroma and the taste is unique and amazing compared to just adding them in after preparing the rice, or maybe even better than just adding related sauces in when cooking. Now I'm home, if it's not that I have an ulcer in my mouth now, I would try to cook something like that right in my kitchen...
Now, look forward to the second day of the trip (next post)...with more scenery and food!
See you around :)
--Lilacse
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