After 'narrowly' avoiding the nasty earthquake in Pedang (laziness meant we hadn't made it there yet) we decided to catch a flight out of Sumatra and into Java where we avoided Jakarta and headed straight for Yogjakarta and the Buddhist Temple at Borobudur.

Borobudur was ok, although a bit pricey at $12 each given there was only one temple to see. For our bucks though we did get to walk through the VIP entrance and get a free cup of tea, a luxury not afforded the locals who only paid £1 to get in and had to go through a shoddy looking turnstyle. The perks of being a Westerner! As we rested at the top and enjoyed the view we became somewhat of a tourist attraction in our own right with a steady flow of locals wanting their photos taken with us. Finally one of those annoying Facebook friend collectors that get everywhere collared us and we knew it was time to leave. Buddhist karma perhaps for all our tomfoolery with the Buddha statues on the climb up.

We headed off to Surabaya hoping to catch one of the famed bull races on a nearby island but it wasn't to be. Somewhere along the way we caught something which was to keep both of us bedridden for the best part of two weeks. Convinced it was Malaria or Dengue, Sam dragged me to the hospital. One blood test later and half an hour with a doctor who spoke no English (and was very bad at Charades) we had established it was flu. Not that kind of 'cold masquerading as flu' which gets you a couple of days off work but that 'cant actually stand up without passing out' kind of flu. Within a day Sam was ill too and we were trapped in our room, barely able to crawl from our beds to the bathroom. Even worse the TV in our room only had 6 channels all in Indonesian, it was like our own personal Hell! Neither of us could ever remember being quite so ill, I honestly thought at one point my head was going to fall off! Eventually though the worst passed and our strength began to return. Having lost so much time and in an attempt to escape the heat and shake off our lethargy, we decided (in our infinite wisdom) to climb a volcano. Well isn't that what you are supposed to do when recovering from the flu?

Mt Bromo is, in all fairness, a bit of a baby when it comes to volcanoes. It is active but it's really only dinky so on a good day it wouldn't have been much of a challenge. As it was the first thing we noticed was the cold, pleasant at first after the sweatyness of Surabaya but vicious at night, especially on our still achy limbs. We looked a sight. Rarely without our woolly hats and looking haggard and pale we stumbled around the tiny village looking for anything vaguely decent to eat, it seemed a tall order! Even worse, in near freezing temperatures the owners of the guesthouse we were staying at had, for reasons known only to themselves, installed outside cold showers. One look at the townsfolk and you could tell showering was not a regular occurrence and we didn't blame them. It is the first time on our trip we have opted not to have a shower when one was available, hypothermia was a real possibility! 

First thing the following day we tackled Mt Bromo and it's rather dusty plains. As volcanoes go (my first and Sam's second) it wasn't bad. It belched a bit of sulphurous gas at us and of course provided the prerequisite landscape views but disappointingly there wasn't a drop of lava to be seen. The search for the red stuff goes on!

We returned to our room, took the worlds coldest shower and made a somewhat rash decision to leave Bromo that second. What we really needed was somewhere to convalesce properly. We had planned another volcano, fleeting visits to Bali and Lombok, and a trip to Komodo, home of the dragons that go by the same name before we fell ill but this just seemed too much for us to do. So we dropped everything and immediately after slogging our way up and down Mt Bromo we embarked, in a somewhat dazed state, on a 24 hour journey to Gili Trawangan (nothing like taking things easy!). It was what we needed though, a tropical island with white beaches and plenty of package holiday tourists which meant only one thing - western grub.

Apart from the occasional annoying local under the misconception that everyone from England wants to be talked to with an appallingly bad cockney accent, Gili Trawangan was everything we needed. Once a backpacker haunt nearly all the basic accommodation has been replaced by luxurious (read expensive) bungalows, however we managed to find a nice, cheap, quiet place where the friendly owner brought breakfast to our room every morning. We whiled away 2 weeks eating, snorkeling and sunbathing before we felt back to our old selves and headed to Kuta in Bali for a couple of days. After watching a lot of wannabe surfers strutting around the beach trying to look cool or falling off waves (we guessed the real surfers were elsewhere away from the crowds) we boarded our flight back to Kuala Lumpur. From there we caught two more flights which whisked us back to civilisation, well America anyway, the land of the free........and more importantly real pork hotdogs....