The best laid plans...

...never go the way you plan them so why lay plans in the first place,I always say?!?! Well, I painstakingly (though I do love it) sat in the Internet cafe with our Lonely Planet book in hand making a lengthy and somewhat detailed plan for the remaining 8 days in Java,Indonesia and plotted not only the route, but locations and types of transportation we will use...I was so proud of myself and then we left on our first leg of the plan...catch a pre-booked bus from Bali to Proboloinggo where travellers stop to catch smaller mini-vans to a few different towns surrounding the rim of Mt Bromo, a trekkers paradise for paths that you can navigate on your own up and down and all around the volcano, which is described as the place where postcard pictures are taken. How delicious, though I am not sure how we will make it there now after our adventure of last night...
So we got on the bus that we eventually figured out you ride for about 4 hours stopping briefly to pick up some very sugary snack boxes and again stopping for some dinner) then we embark a ferry, while still on the bus for a very hot and rocky 45 minute ferry ride followed by a further 8 hour bus ride to our destination, but of course, this is Mel and Al and that means a twist on the plan and that twist is named Natalie. She is a 30-year-old Javanese woman who spent 7 years studying IT in Australia and speaks fluent English. She is obsessed and totally pre-occupied with finding a rich, old, white (preferably Italian) husband and has moved to Bali to do this, though she has told us that she only moved there for work and practice her English. When she found out what our plan was (to go to Probolinggo and then make our way to a smaller town to hike Mt Bromo), she refused to allow us to go and had a discussion with the driver so that we could ride the bus longer and get off at her house to stay. Her father would then schlep us around to and from the Mountain and to a big city called Surabaya for site seeing as well...wow, what a treat we thought, through our memories of the night with Pawan's family in India did make us have a few second and third thoughts. However,just like in India, when someone invites you to their house, you go and you cannot refuse or get out of it in any way. A few pros to this plan we have been forced into: 1) she has her own house with air conditioning and we have our own room, 2) her family and friends are very accommodating and all we do is eat and drink extremely salty foods and sugary drinks so we will either be stricken with diabetes or high blond pressure or both, 3) she is taking us all around and her father is also taking us all around to places we would have never seen and just being with an Indonesian family in their home is a truly amazing experience, 4) getting to know Natalie and her family is a very interesting experience and makes for a very entertaining story to tell all you gorgeous folks at home and 5) this is all for free so we are saving a lot of money! Now for the cons: 1) we are well and truly stuck here, 2) we are the local show and tell and have been paraded all over this town like freaks for all to see, 3) we really don't want to have diabetes or high blood pressure, 4) we area doubling as relationship therapists and travellers for Natalie's ever game-playing and ridiculous relationship with her 54-year-old sugar daddy named Joe from Italy, 5) it is very difficult to keep tight lipped about her less than desirable form of parenting, but we are beginning to become a bit more relaxed about kids having no bed time and eating and drinking only sugar enriched foods and also having two complete strangers (me and Al) babysit for all of the family's children, as they know us so well!
Natalie is a very interesting and feisty girl. She loves to cuss and use very disturbing words for vagina. She is very hard and likes to play games with older men, such as 'hard-to-get' and 'I will not have sex with you until you marry me.' The ironic thing is that she loves this Joe man and wants to text him and be with him and wants to believe the things he says to her...she really has a tender soft underbelly when you get down to it. She does not mix well with her family...she is very close with her father, but not so much her mother. She was married to another Javanese boy while she was living in Australia and he beat her senseless so she divorced him after having her very cute, yet somewhat overweight son, Nathan. She paid 3 judges a lot of money to ensure that she would be divorced as quickly as possible (within 3 months) and from what we have learned from Natalie, paying off people in power is just a way of life here. She moved back to Java and then recently to Bali to work and find a husband. She has been almost raped 3 times by a Canadian man, a French man and a Balinese man and she says that her vagina (please insert an explicative) is shut down. She met this man, Joe, and he says he wants to marry her in December, but has recently told her that he is moving his ex-partner and mother of one of his two children to Bali for a year and Natalie is not having any of this so commence game playing. I swear it is like being in 8th grade/year 9 all over again...all we do is talk about this and what she should do and what does this text message mean and should she block him from her Facebook. In between these discussions, we are taken to and from her family and friend's homes to take pictures and eat more and get fatter and become more inflicted with non-curable degenerative diseases such as diabetes. She is quite sweet in her own way and has been very accommodating to us, but she is also majorly attention seeking and loves all the attention and focus she gets from having tow travellers with her at all times. Nathan is a very pudgy and cute 6 year-old. He is very comfortable in strangers' company and he has been left with us on numerous occasions during our 24 hour stay so far. This is concerning a bit, as Natalie has met many older men that have stayed in her home with her son and this just does not sit well with two seasoned social worker types like us. She does make us laugh when talking about Nathan, though she can be somewhat negative towards him especially about his weight and his attainment in school. So here we are, stuck...again...trying to plot our escape, though we are quite comfortable considering so watch this space to see how we finagle our way out of this one folks...