Plantation Visit (Java Tour 7)

In the morning we visited the Bu Hani plantation, which gives visitors an insight into the many different fruits cultivated in Indonesia.

Some of the things we had only known as finished products from the supermarket, we could now discover in their origin.

For example, we saw a nutmeg tree and its fruits from which the nutmegs originate. In the morning, we had already eaten nutmeg jam for breakfast, which is made from the flesh that surrounds the nut.

There were also various coffee plants, from which we later had a taste of the beans.

Of course, there were also many coconut palms. We saw their flowers and closed fruit. If you tap the closed fruit, you can obtain palm wine. From this, palm sugar can be produced.

An employee climbed a coconut palm and got fresh palm wine for the tourists, which we could taste.

We also tried the flesh of unripe coconuts and their coconut water directly from the fruit. Both tasted completely different from the coconut flavor we know from home.

Many plants do not grow independently, but need a tree as support, such as pepper, dragon fruit or vanilla. When we smelled the dried vanilla pods on the tree, they emitted a strong fragrance.

We had bark cut from the cinnamon tree so that we could smell it. Normally, the bark is peeled off and then dried, which creates the typical rolled shape of the cinnamon we buy in our supermarkets.

At the rubber tree, we saw how the bark is cut to extract the resin from the tree. A strip of bark was also cut for us, which we could stretch like a rubber band.

After a small refreshment, we drove to the east coast of Java, from where we could already see Bali. It took us about 2 hours for these last 60 km, which corresponded to the usual average speed of our trips here. Most of the time, this was not due to the bad roads, but to the heavy traffic. On some stretches, we had the feeling that the cities extended over 100 km: the places often seamlessly merged into one another and we did not know where one village began and the other ended.

Rice field