Today we set out for a waterfall called Maribaya with our friends Jason and Robyn. We decided to take a dirt road near our house. But after only about 50 meters, Hugo and I wiped out in the mud and I had to go home and change and we decided to take the regular roads there. I have to say that once we got off the main road, the small road, while asphalt, was bad enough. There were many potholes and huge speed bumps and it climbed and curved rather steeply. But we made it there without incident, thankfully. I was hanging on pretty tight there. We paid to enter the parking lot with our bikes and then we had to pay again to walk the trail. There were signs around saying that you had to have a guide go with you. During the course of our walk, we discovered that it is only foreigners who need a guide. We first hiked to the falls and crossed on the yellow bridge. It was a little freaky. The water is brown and disgusting and there is lots of garbage floating at the bottom. Indonesians really know how to ruin their own tourist sights. On our way walking we passed by a lot of little warungs (shops) selling drinks and food. Everyone tried to sell us stuff at very high prices. After looking at the waterfall, we decided to walk to caves that were built by the Dutch and some others built by the Japanese during the occupation of Indonesia. On our way there, about a 45 minute walk on a trail made of cement bricks, we met up with a dutch woman and her Indonesian husband. They live in Holland but were here on holidays. We had a little chat with them. Then we checked out the caves. If you can, try to read the writing on the green sign, very funny English. The Dutch caves were very well made and quite large. The Japanese ones were smaller as they probably had a lot less time to make them. They gave us flashlights to use for 3,000 rups each. Pretty good business for them. After that we went to a museum with an interesting assortment of items on display. There were war medals from a number of countries, some stuffed birds, some photographs and some fossils, arrowheads and rocks. On our way back we met the Dutch woman again. She was having some trouble as the guys that acted as their “guides” were asking for 50,000 rupiahs, a fortune for a half hour of work. Unfortunately the dutch woman only had a 50,000 rupiah bill and nothing smaller. We changed it for her and told the guy that they were only going to pay 20,000 rups and nothing more. They tried to get more and her Indonesian husband was rather unsure of things, but in the end she gave them 20,000 rupiahs and walked off thanking us profusely. At the end of our walk, our guide asked us for 100,000 rups! A fortune! Our mistake was not negotiating the price up front but we gave him 50,000 rups and said thank-you and walked off. Sometimes it sucks to have white skin here, there’s this idea that we are swimming in money and have nothing better to do than get rid of it. After that we went to a tea house and had some lunch. See photo… We were pretty tuckered out after all that walking, but it was a nice time.