Trawas: land right below the clouds

Hello everyone, 

You guys might never heard of this place I'm going to talk about. It is one of the most magical and beautiful place I have ever been to. This place is called Trawas, a land right below the clouds. It offers us a life we can't find in the city. I got the chance to visit it last April with my friends (It was a Community Study Week). We did some traditional stuffs, we learned about old Javanese cultures, and we also got the chance to live RIGHT in the middle of nowhere, like seriously, nowhere. We encountered some troubles like no signals (we couldn't communicate with our parents in Jakarta, which made them kinda worried and mad), no water heater, bugs and insects everywhere (even in the bathroom), minimum amount of bathroom stalls, cold and rainy weather, etc etc, but most of us enjoyed it! It gave us cool experiences and moral lessons (which I'm obviously not going to talk about it). 

Now, I'm going to talk about all the fun stuffs we did. First up, exploring! We were splits into 5 groups consisting of 10-11 members each. The facilitator gave us a piece of paper with a clue on it, so it's basically like a treasure hunt or something like that, and they told us to find the other clues. And one thing for sure, no supervision! (for your information, that place was freaking big). They gave us 30 minutes to explore. It was such a fun orientation day, but that's not the only fun we had!

Another thing we did was hiking and rain forest exploration. And by hiking, I mean "mud-and-water-soaked-shoes-and-wet-bags-because-of-rain-and-losing-our-balance-while-we-crossed-a-river" type of hiking. It was such a fun hike until the path we're crossing started to drove us crazy. Here are the comparison. This is how it looks like when we started:

And this is how it looks like when we finished:

and

Yeap. We came out wet and dirty and made our bus's seat wet, but we enjoyed it.

Next up, we did a CnS (Community 'n Service), where we pretty much serves people in need. This time, we went to a local elementary school near our "base camp". My group choose to serves 2nd grade students by teaching them simple English vocabularies through story telling and how to make origami frog. But before that, I represented my group to go shopping for our CnS materials. Me and several other group members got the chance to spend the whole evening wandering around the city, but it was freaking hot, which kinda bothered us. 

Last thing, we got to do some traditional Javanese thing like cooking traditional food in traditional way (which i accidentally cut my finger and bleed pretty badly), learned how to play Javanese musical instruments, dressed in a traditional peasants outfit and reenact a scene where there was a conflict between two villages in an ancient kingdom and stay up late eating instant noodles and wandered around. 

I learned so much from this Trawas trip (which, again, I'm not going to talk about) and I miss that freaking place so much I could probably cry out loud and shit my pants off at the same time when I think about it (which happened to me, but i didn't shit my pants off). To me, Trawas is like a place I would never dare to forget. That place is full of sweet memories, friendship, and togetherness. I totally recommend this place. If you get a chance to go there, make sure:

1. You stay in UTC (Ubaya Training Centre), but you have to come in big groups of at least 20 people.
2. You go hiking and explore the rain forest (with experts guides, of course)
3. You visit the Majapahit museum and candi Bojong Ratu.

I hope you guys find this post interesting and useful for you. I'll see you very very soon!

Nisa