(From On the Road Asia)
My Thai bank cards were useless outside of Thailand so we’d booked a flight via an agent on Gili Air from Lombok to Java with Lion Air for 1.2 million Rupiah (plus 15% agent commission). The ride to the airport took under an hour and by early afternoon we’d landed in a very wet and very traffic clogged Surabaya.
There was little else to do for the rest of the day but edit photos and crack on with the trip report; our hotel, and it seemed the entire city, was dry so I couldn’t even grab a cold one. The incessant wail of the muezzin from what sounded like every second building in the city at 5pm was enough to wake the dead – luckily the rooms were sound proofed!
Surabaya doesn’t really have anything to offer the traveler aside from being a stopover point for trips to Mount Bromo. Our only day there was spent booking the rail ticket, which took half of it, and walking around the Tunjungan Plaza for some rest bite in the a/c and a kebab at the food court. We also discovered it has some interesting wall art, a roof top half-pipe and a submarine. Read more