Kaliurang

Near miss this morning. The driver who was supposed to take us to Kaliurang had an accident on his way to pick us up and apparently ended up in hospital (probably not a big deal, he crashed into a motorbike, though we don't know what happened to the motorbike driver). Driving round here is your typical SE Asian driving. It looks chaotic and dangerous but there must be a method to the madness. In fact everybody drives, most buildings are one storey high so everything is really spread apart. You hardly see anyone walking in the streets except at the tourist hotspots.

The hotel sorted us out with a new driver who took us up to Kaliurang. It is at the foot of the Merapi volcano, the most active volcano in Indonesia (which is saying something).

To the kids delight there was a sort of kiddie park just outside the hotel. They must have just reopened, most rides were closed and the paint was still wet in some places (some playground things must have been recycled from a previous park, all rusty and in some cases broken but recently repainted). They had fun though, with some treetop walkways, and Lucas had a great ride on a pretty scary zipline.

Since nobody was going to go trekking at 3am to see the dawn from Mt. Merapi we hired a jeep to take us round tomorrow and see all the sights from there. The kids are really excited they are going to see a real volcano (though we saw plenty in New Zealand, maybe we didn't make enough of a fuss about them, plus this one has smoke coming out of it).