Time to make radical changes to the plan.

We woke to the sound of heavy rain again and thought it’s time to try to get more information on the weather forecast. After a bit of searching the various weather sources, it became very clear that the rain was not going to get better, it was going to get worse. The whole fo Java was expected to get at least 10mm a day for the next week.

Now, I don’t mind a ride in the rain, but it’s true to say, riding in the dry is more fun than riding in the wet… and the other thing our research showed was that it wasn’t the whole of South East Asia that was getting a drenching. Everything north of Singapore seemed to be doing fine.

One family conference over breakfast later, we’d reworked the plan. Let’s get north to Singapore pronto.

How to do it though. Flying with the bikes is a pain, but we weren’t sure whether trains would help us.

First trip after brekkie was to the train station, where we queued up to try to buy a ticket to Yogyakarta. That’s about half way to Jakarta, and sounds like a great place to hang out for a day.

The queue wasn’t too long and we were soon at the front, but not without an excellent bit of queue dodging by a middle aged woman who snuck round us, talking on her phone and then dived in on the teller just as they came free. We had to admire the skill with which she executed her plan.

We did quite well on the ticket ordering. “Tiga orang-orang untuk Yogyakarta” and once we’d added in the extra one-way only information we were sorted. We had our passports with us, tick. Then the curveball, “Dua sepada” - surely the two bicycles just go in the luggage car?

It seemed not.

Many phone calls ensued - with a line behind us growing all the time. In the end it was decided that we should go to the Customer Service desk and sort this out, so off we trotted.

It turned out the Customer Service Desk was a “take a ticket, we’ll call your number” deal, so we settled in for a long wait.

It didn’t actually take too long, and we started to make some progress once we’d explained the bikes did not fold (we hadn’t even mentioned on had two seats, that seemed a complication too many at this point.

Eventually we were told the bikes had to go by an “expedition” company, so we trotted next door to talk to them. With a great deal of help from Google Translate we came to the conclusion that they could get the bikes on the same train that we’d be on, and we could pick them up in the morning, so all seemed good.

Back to the ticket queue to buy the tickets - this time elbows at the ready to stop any incursions and we successfully had our tickets.

We delivered the bikes to the shipping company, which was quite emotional - saying goodbye to our bikes and travelling separately. Would they be there at the other end of the train journey? Would they just stay in the shed and turn up days later? Anyway, we left them and headed off to catch the train.

The train had a lot of space and was very comfortable (we were in Executive Class). There was a trolley that came round to sell us nasi goreng and a nice ticket inspector accompanied by a very military looking guard.

About five hours in, we stopped in Surabaya and a team came round to turn round all the seats as we were continuing in the opposite direction.

Then after nine hours, at about 11:45 at night, we pulled in to Yogyakarta station and gathered up our 10 bags to shuffle off the train.

As we walked towards the exit we could see two bright lights coming from the other end of the platform. It was our bikes being wheeled from the other end of the train. The front lights come on automatically as soon as the front wheel is turning.

Everything seemed safe and well, and each bike had a member of staff to wheel it to the luggage area, so we followed along. We’d been told that we wouldn’t be able to collect the bikes until the next day and had planned to get a taxi to our guesthouse, but we let them know that these were our bikes and soon a guy came up with a chitty to sign and the bikes were ours.

Excellent - no taxi required, we could cycle the short distance to our beds.

Part two of the plan - get to Jakarta, to follow. First - explore Yogyakarta.

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Day 46: Jember to Yogyakarta (by train)