Travel woes

Having finished a one-month trip to Southeast Asia, my wife and I were very disappointed with regard to our visit to Java.

We have two main reasons for our dissatisfaction, namely:

* It is most disturbing to always be attacked by all kinds of "service people" when arriving or leaving a railway station or airport, and above all porters and taxi drivers. It should really not be very difficult to organize those people in a proper way. Besides it seems that they take any chance to cheat foreigners unfamiliar with the country/currency as much as possible.

* When making the trip Bandung-Yogyakarta by train we were badly food poisoned and that took us several days to cure. Needless to say, our program in Yogyakarta became just a dream.

We agree as newcomers to Asia you must expect some initial stomach problems but in our case we had already been on our way for more than three weeks.

We understand that the train in question which leaves Bandung at 7:30 in the morning is more or less a "tourist train" which makes it even more remarkable that we should be exposed to poisoning. According to Indonesia Magazine your country will be spending a great deal of effort in order to increase the number of tourists to Java. In our view this is an uncertain investment as long as you cannot meet with basic standards.

JAN RUDSTROM

Sodertalje, Sweden