Yogyakarta
Trip Start
May 19, 2006
1
10
Trip End
Jun 17, 2006
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
We walked down the main shopping drag as the city's residents were heading to work, past lots of street stalls with interesting-looking breakfast foods. Due to Matt's stomach problems, we didn't try any. We went to the Kraton, the palace of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, which was built in the 1700s. Only a few parts are open to visitors under normal circumstances, and some of these had been close due to damage from the earthquake. Still, we had an excellent guide (this time it really was included free with entrance) and learned a lot about the area and the sultan. Actually, our guide was only a "temp;" most of the regular guides lived in the neighborhood of Bantul to the south of the city that had been devastated by the earthquake and were either injured or helping with the earthquake relief. He was a preformer and teacher of gamelan, especially to accompany puppet shows. But the classes were also disrupted by the earthquake, so he was helping out at the palace.
Both our guide and a friendly fellow we met on the street urged us to visit a government-run batik painting gallery to avoid scams and overpricing. They claimed it was only open a few days a week and we should try to catch it this morning. We were a bit suspicious, but figured it was worth a look. The gallery had a staggering number of paintings, ranging from very traditional to very modern or even surreal, and we bought quite a few.
The tourism office had advised us that Monday night was the last performance of the 4-installment Ramayana at Prambanan, so after lunch, we set off with her map and directions to the bus station. The station was very far outside the city and once we arrived it was unclear where we needed to catch the bus we wanted. We managed to get on a bus going past Prambanan that promised to drop us off along the way. This worked, despite our apprehension, although Alison led us on a roundabout approach to the historical site, and by the time we got there, it was getting dark and there was only an hour left before closing. In fact, all of the temples were fenced off due to the earthquake and we could only look on from a distance. And the combination of the time of day and the earthquake meant that we were the only tourists in the entire park - probably a very unusual experience for this world historical site. We did get tickets to the Ramayana performance, which was spectacular against a backdrop of the lit-up Prambanan temples and the full moon.
The next morning we were up early again. We had scheduled transportation to two areas northeast of the city - Dieng Plateau and Borobudur. We spent several hours in a car with another tourist - a nice fellow from Belgium, and our guide, a very interesting local guy called Suggi. The trip was mostly into more rural areas and up, past volcanos and higher into the mountains. The car was going slower and slower on the upgrades ... until the driver decided that something was wrong with the car and it needed to be fixed. We felt as though we had some kind of bad karma in this department, although it was not nearly as worrisome as the trip in Flores. But just as that time, we boarded a public bus with our guide and did the last leg of the trip that way.
Dieng Plateau is a very high plateau, and so cooler than the rest of Java. It can therefore grow many vegetables that don't like the steamier lowland climate, like potatoes, lettuce, etc. Every inch of land that wasn't a 90 degree cliff was under cultivation. The terraces were amazing. But the plateau is more known to tourists for two other things - temples and geothermal activity. The Hindu temples on the plateau are the oldest in Indonesia - dating from the 7th century. They are smaller and less beautiful than those at Prambanan or Borobudur, but we could walk right up to them and see the original carvings from so many centuries ago. After visiting several temples, we headed off to see a caldera. Just looking around the temples, you could see steam vents everywhere and smell a faint sulphorous odor that betrayed the geothermal activity. There are several calderas and volcanic lakes in the region that give you a more intense peek. The area around the caldera had sulphur deposits, bubbling and hissing steam vents, and finally, the caldera itself, a huge crater of boiling mud.
We took a lunch break and then headed to Borobudur - the most famous tourist site in Indonesia. It's an 8th century Buddhist temple - the largest single Buddhist temple in the world. Normally it would be overrun with tourists, but due to the earthquake and the threats of nearby Mt. Merapi's eruption, there were only a dozen or two tourists when we arrived. They were vastly outnumbered by the souvenir sellers who mobbed us when we tried to get out of the car. We hired a guide and had an informative tour of the temple, its history and reconstruction, and lesson about Buddhism. The scale of the building and the elegance of the carvings are impressive. We watched the sun set and returned to Yogya, hoping to catch one of the first World Cup games over dinner, but no one was playing.
