Solo life

So, panic over, hopefully; that is, the mild medical panic we had yesterday morning. Mags was feeling a bit off colour overnight, and woke in the morning about five with a raging headache andslight  fever which wouldn't shift. A trip to the emergency department of the local hospital produced a diagnosis of 'common cold', plus a slightly dubious prescription of paracetamol (fair enough, but we'd tried that already), amoxicilin (antibiotic; hmm, maybe) and... prednisolone? A steroiod? As an 'anti-inflammatory'? I was desperately trying to get some alternative medical advice, but it was 0300 in the UK and I couldn't figure out how to get the phone number for the NHS 24 hour hotline as the normal directory enquiries short numbers don't seem to work when you are abroad, and I couldn't leave Mags to go and check online. Then my Indonesian phone ran out of credit...

Eventually we were able to get in touch with some doctor friends in the UK, and also tried adding some ibuprofen and co-codamol into the mix; finally by about 1600 the headache finally abated. So, two tips for travellers, bring emergency medical advice phone numbers with you, and if you want paracetamal/codeine tablets bring them with you as well, 'cos you don't seem to be able to get them over the counter here. Oh, and costs for medical treatment here were very low, to see the emergency doctor was 20,000 IDR (£1.22), the three medicines 50,000 (£3).

Food. On the one hand, you are never more than about five metres away from someone selling food in Solo. All up and down the street you see establishments varying in size from a room with a dozen chairs in it down to two guys with a charcoal brazier, a couple of buckets, and a carpet. Some of the smallest places seem to survive just by cooking one dish, the guys with the charcoal brazier will have chicken on skewers, sate sauce and rice, and nothing else. Slightly larger places the regular deal is they portion you out some rice, and then there are a selection of dishes which, being foreign and all that, you point to.

Before I came here I had read a few reports that the food here was, umm, monotonous? Maybe you just have to know how to order; I do have to say that after a while I'm feeling kind of the same thing. For sure, the best food is to be had at the smaller establishments, paying a bit more for one of the bigger air-conditioned restaurants doesn't seem to add much in the way of variety or quality. Last night on the way home I was tempted into the McDonalds... There are some very nice dishes here, I always get the one with the spicy papaya leaves. Oh, and another huge hit with me is the tea, which is a kind of sweet jasmine-ey flavoured tea served black and generally with sugar, but equally good without. Excellent cold.

Around the corner from Cakra Homestay is the wonderfully named Urgent, a 24/7 store selling drinks, snacks and basic everyday stuff, with about half the space devoted to a bunch of internet booths. The place has got a kind of young feel, the staff all look about nineteen and are perfectly happy to have a go at English. The customers are also young Indonesians, or Westerners like myself. You feel quite trendy in there, drinking a can of iced Nescafe Moccha while the Indonesian pop music blares out. Connection seems pretty much fast and reliable, but no wifi, so you have to use their Windows XP boxes. Very inexpensive in our money, I don't even know how much it is, might be about 4000 IDR per hour, which would be, er, 24 pence!

The other place which looked great at first was blonjokue; aircon, pretty much Western style coffee cakes and snacks menu, plus free wifi for life once they give you the password. Unfortunately, this is often so slow as to be unusable, I think they must be on a dialup or something, plus https doesn't seem to work. The menu must seem absurdly expensive to local people 9000 IDR for a coffee whereas the usual price would be about 2000 IDR. (I must be going native, because 9000 already sounds to me like a crazy price to pay for coffee; 55 pence!?)

And that's another thing; poverty. Gradually I realise more and more that many of these happy, kind and generous people really have very little in the way of material goods or money in comparison to someone like myself. There are a lot of becak drivers here; basically a big Dutch style bicycle with a side-by-side seat for two passengers at the front. For a typical five-minute journey, you might haggle them down to about 7000 IDR from an asking price of 10,000; we're dealing in sums under a pound here.

Gradually I've been realising; these guys sleep in their becaks. Basically, I reckon all they have in the world pretty much is the clothes they stand up in and the bike; and I'm not entirely certain that all of them even own their own bikes.