Off We Go!!!

Off We Go

Today we, that is Miss Cooper, myself, Eric the Echidna and all the other teachers and Principals from the Tallangatta Cluster headed off to Indonesia.  Up early this morning to catch a flight from Albury to Sydney, where we made our way to the international departures area - which was an early lesson on leadership - someone just make a decision and lead the way!!!!!

 

After checking through immigration we made our way to the gate lounge - not before Miss Cooper disappeared to fit in a bit of duty free shopping for all of her friends and family!!!!!!

A long flight; nearly eight hours before we arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia where the temperature was 29 degrees at just on 6:00pm in the evening.what a difference to the weather in Tangambalanga!!  The time difference in Jakarta is 3 hours, so even though we arrived at 6:00pm it was 9:00pm in Tangambalanga. 

 

When we arrived we had to line up and buy a visa into Indonesia, which cost Au$25.49.  Once we had our visa we then had to line up in the Immigration line, which took a bit of time, probably around 30 minutes.  Once through Immigration it was off to collect our bags.

 

 

From there it was a bus ride into central Jakarta with our local guide Ari telling us a huge number of interesting facts about Indonesia like:

 

- There are 33 provinces in Indonesia

- Indonesia has a population of 240 000 000 people - about ten times the population of Australia

- Jakarta, which is the capital city, has a population of around 9.4 million people

- Indonesia has one of the highest population densities - which means that more people live in every square kilometre than in many other countries ( about 132 people per square kilometre)

- The currency of Indonesia is the Rupiah - and at the moment we are getting around 10 000 Rupiah for Au$1.

- The largest island of the nearly 17 000 islands that make up Indonesia is Java, the one that we are on.

- Nearly 6000 of the islands are uninhabited. 

 

Wow!!!!  That was a lot of information on the way from the airport into our hotel.  When we arrived at our hotel we checked in, but by that time it was nearly 11:30pm - Australian time.  What we found out though was that there was a big dinner ready and waiting for us!!!  It was very late at night for us - because we had travelled all day, but not so late for the Indonesians (only - well can you work it out?????)  So we went down and had some of the dinner that was waiting for us. 

 

 

After that we headed up to bed - it had been a very long day for us all.