Sleeping through an earthquake in Java

[Travel Newsletter: 3 May 2024] Traveling at the speed of the soul, walking the Wicklow Way, travel to all 50 states as a Lyft driver, living on a train, and more travel reads

Welcome to the Nomadic Notes Travel Newsletter, where I curate the best travel reads of the week.

I have been making my way across Java by rail, starting with the high-speed railway from Jakarta to Bandung, then regular trains to Yogyakarta and Surabaya.

This week has been one of the busiest travel weeks I have had in a while. I am collecting information about transport and urban development stories in the big cities of Java. I have been to all these cities before, otherwise I would not recommend just skimming over them.

Sometimes when I’m travelling at a fast pace I will wake up in a new hotel room and wonder where I am for a few seconds. On my first night in Bandung I woke up doubly confused because I wondered where I was and wondered if I was dreaming that my room was shaking. I remembered that I was in Bandung and fell back to sleep.

The next day I looked at Google Maps and saw there was an Earthquake alert for around the time I woke up. I had forgotten about that, and maybe I would never have known that I slept through an earthquake if I hadn’t seen that alert.

I saw that my friend Ayngelina was in Bandung during the earthquake. She did the sensible thing of getting out of the building! Unfortunately, I didn’t know we were in Bandung at the same time until I left. It’s been a month of missed connections as I have two friends who have been through HCMC while I wasn’t there.

I have a long travel day coming up that will be the hardest section of this Indonesia transport research trip. I will then be in Bali for a week, where I will meet some friends who live there. I will also be looking into the proposed Bali light rail system.

Travel reads

• Traveling at the speed of the soul

“Of the three stages of a pilgrimage — departure, initiation and return — the last is the least examined and perhaps most important.”

• After prison, I went to Miami to reacquaint myself with freedom

“Incarcerated at a facility in the Everglades, I spent years living in the shadow of Miami. Finally, I got to visit.”

• Walking the Wicklow Way, Ireland’s premier long-distance trail

• How a millennial Lyft driver used the gig to travel to all 50 states

• Exploring Blaenavon: A Welsh town that changed the world

• How a football documentary transformed Wrexham, Wales into a new tourist hub

• Inside the tiny corner of Spain that lies in the middle of North Africa

• She left Malaysia to sail the world seeking freedom, adventure – and the ‘soft life’ (archive)

• The real-life island that inspired the world's oldest travel story

🛏️ Accommodation

• What it’s like to stay in a backpacker hostel in one of the most expensive cities in the world

• We're budgeting $400,000 to flip 5 train cars into Airbnbs. It all started with a 1970s caboose we bought on Facebook marketplace.

• Destroyed by cyclones, impacted by climate change and neglected by foreign owners – these abandoned island resorts are now an eyesore

🚆Train travel

• German teen lives on train full-time and travels somewhere new every day

• 29-euro ticket is coming back to Berlin

✈️ Air travel

• Dubai announces $35bn construction of world’s largest airport terminal

• How Ryanair is using social media to keep you coming back for more

“Suvarnabhumi orange cat” goes viral

…

James Clark – Surabaya, Indonesia.