Kalisuci cave tubing

After our trip to Borobudur the day before, we planned to go tubing with Sander and Tamara at Kalisuci Cave Tubing. Not just an ordinary float, this tubing trip promises white-water rapids in a dark cave. Sounded exciting!

We hopped on the motorbikes and drove out of town around 11am. We saw storm clouds ahead but decided it's best to just keep going and see how the weather is when we arrive at the tubing place. Once we hit the actual mountain roads, the rain started coming down. We stopped in a café to try and let the rain pass, but after a half hour's wait we caught up to the rain in less than 5 minutes.

Finally, after a couple more stops to avoid getting pelted by raindrops, we made it to the tubing place... but it was closed! For the first time ever on our trip, a business decided to close down for safety reasons. We were glad they made that choice, but sad we couldn't do the tubing. They told us we could walk down and check out the entrance if we wanted to. We were even more disappointed when we saw what excitement we could have had:

After checking things out, we started our trip back to Yogyakarta. Unfortunately it was raining even harder, but the time of day meant that we had to go back or potentially be driving part of the trip in the dark. So we bought a few cheap ponchos and made the scary, wet, crazy mountain drive back to town.

We ended up being very glad that we'd gotten the ponchos. The rain never let up. Drops stung our face constantly as we sped through the mountains and back into Yogyakarta. But after 90 minutes of teeth-gritting, tense riding that took us within arm's reach of buses, trucks, and other swarms of motorbikes, we finally made it back safely to our hostel.