Surabaya Bamboo Forest

Bamboo Forest

The Bamboo Forest

Surabaya is huge, so I thought. My five years stay in this city led me to the discoveries of many interesting places. It's a metropolitan city and the 2nd largest city in Indonesia. But for me, it's more than a city, it's a home, a friendly city to live in. The city offers more than tall buildings and malls for middle -up class to shop. On some part of the city, we can still see natural beauties such as the mangrove forest on the north tip of the city. The city is also known as the Green City since the current City Major, Mrs.Risma, has been developing many green parks in every corner of the city and in the middle of the road itself.

One of the newly discovered attraction in Surabaya is the Bamboo Forest in Keputih, Sukolilo sub-district, Surabaya, which I just visited this morning. Not that I really want to go there, it's only to fill up my curiosity because my friend recommended me not long ago. The location is about 5 km away from the downtown, more to rural area of Surabaya, and it took about half an hour from the place where I live in.

I was imagining myself to be in scene of the Japan's famous Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto. But no, it wasn't like that. The so called Bamboo Forest covers only around 100 x 15 m, will be so small if we compare to the one in Japan. Anyway, it's still a good place to take picture for some people I saw there. Most of the visitors are young people, either a love couple or a group of friends. And of course I heard most of them speaks in Madurese, since there are a lot of Madurese living in the area. You see, they are everywhere, in the traditional markets we'll see them as a merchant, on the roadside we see them as parking person, not too far from the road we'll see them as pedicab drivers. They are literally everywhere in town. 

Ok, let's not talk about them anymore. Once you arrive on the site, you will have to park your vehicle, in my case is my motorcycle, on the side of the forest which is separated by small smelly canal. Once you've parked, you can just walk into the Bamboo Forest. It's quite crowded when me and my friend walked in. Most of them were hunting a good scene for the photos. I even saw a couple doing their Pre-wedd photo session. "Not bad..." I said to myself, I saw many Bamboo trees compound along the area which are arranged in a good shape. There are 3 major pathways through this micro forest. Just like I saw on many pictures on Instagram. 

The crowd makes me hard to find a good spot to take pictures. We had to go further to find spot with less people in it, so that I could get a good lonely picture in the middle of the Bamboo pathway. Me and my friend managed to take some good pictures of ours. Well, since I am not a model, my pose will always look the same and boring, for most people. But I'm okay, maybe my friend's picture will look better on the screen.

There's nothing more to do here beside taking pictures, well, isn't that our main purpose of having the trip? Maybe we can just sit around under the shade of the bamboo trees and have a chat with our friends with nice soft drinks we brought our self, or looking at our pictures we took before.

I asked my friend where else do we want to go after this, I quickly replied myself, "How about going to Taman Bunga?" "yes.." he replied. Without knowing the location of the place, I spontaneously check the location on Waze app. And it shows that the location is just on the other side of the road. We walked to the Flower Garden, and it's hot. Not much to see here, since the flower they plant are the same that we see on the roadside of the city. So we just took a few photos and go home not long after. 

Anyway, if you stay in Surabaya and it's weekend, not a bad idea to visit such a place like the Bamboo Forest in Kaputih, Surabaya. Have fun there with your friends and upload some great pictures of yours on Instagram, so that the world would know that Surabaya has a good place to chill like The Bamboo Forest.