22 Apr 2023
This tour started poorly. We waited our guide on our hotel lobby for 30 minutes and then tried to call him, but the number was wrong. Then this one guy, who didn´t look like the guides we had had on our previous tours, asked my name and he was the guide. He had just sat in the hotel lobby for 30 minutes, looking at his phone and didn´t make any effort asking if we were his clients. We were so angry about how the whole day started. Also be very careful what the tour includes, because our "guide" was only a driver and he didn´t go to these places with us, he just drove us there, and he spoke english guite poorly, which created some difficulties during the day. First we drove to Lempuyang Temple. We hadn´t realised what kind of place this was. We got a que number, which was 334. We were told that we had to wait for our turn to take pictures at the Gate of Heaven for about 2-3 hours. Our driver said many times that we should have come here at 6 am to get the best pictures. Well, that was not even an aption on this tour. We were there at 11 am. When we got to the Gate of Heaven waiting area, it was a disapointment. The beautiful pictures from the gate are a scam. They make the reflection with a mirror under your phone. They were taking pictures for number 150 when we arrived. We waited for 2 hours and the number was still only 190 something. And it started to rain. We decided to take our own pictures from the side of the Gate and leave like so many other people did. It just wasn´t worth of waiting. I think it would have been our turn to take the official pictures at the gate some time in the evening after several hours of waiting and we wouldn´t have had time to see anything else. When we decided to leave it started to rain very heavily and it rained pretty much the rest of the day. Tirtta Gangga and Ujung Water Palace were very beautiful places, but couldn´t really enjoy it, because of the thunderstorm and lightnings. I don´t know if our driver knew that we were supposed to go also to Asah Hill and White Sand beach, because he didn´t mention these places during the day, but I made sure we would go there also, because that was mentioned in the tour. First the driver said they were closed already, but then they were suddenly open, so we went to Asah Hill (so that we wouldn´t complein about him). He would have taken us also to the beach, but it was getting dark and we had been in the rain for hours and were so tired and soking wet, so we skipped the beach and started our long way back to hour hotel. Not a very nice experiense overall.