Actually, the temples that are a big part of the tourist draw to Yogyakarta (or Yogja as it’s known by the locals) are located, like it turns out is the case of everything in Indonesia, a fair way out of the city!!
However, wherever they are, after the snorkeling and such like, it was time for a bit of culture! And hence we arrived in Yogya after a short flight from Bali (good job it was short as, I never did mention it to Richard, the only airline flying the route was one that I promised myself before the trip we would not use! Anyway, it was absolutely fine, so hopefully Richard will forgive me when he reads this!!).
First impressions after getting off the train from the airport (which, I must say, was very efficient ) was that we’d arrived in a big hot busy smoggy city – things were not looking promising! However, we also found that we were only staying a short walk from the Indonesian equivalent of the hipster area of town and so we were at least easily able to find a cafe serving a cold beer, and so all was well! (Admin – I see a theme here. Your lives revolve around getting a beer or a coffee)
On our first full day we decided to visit one of the two main tourist attractions, Prambanan Temple. You can do this as part of a tour (often on the same day as Borobodur Temple), but we decided just to catch a ‘Grab’ (the South East Asian equivalent of Uber) and got to the temple about 45 minutes later. Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex (with Java being a majority Muslim island) comprising of c.240 individual temple structures (of which only about 18 remain in tact due to earthquakes etc), dedicated to the three main Hindu gods, Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu and is set in large park-like grounds).
As we arrived about midday, ahead of the afternoon tours, it was pretty quiet, which suited us and we had a really good couple of hours mosying around the temple complex and taking dozens of photos of the various temples and the intricate reliefs carved into them.
The following day we decided to take a city walking tour, as we’d enjoyed these several times in South America. It was just us on the tour and our host was great, showing us the (relatively few!) key points of the city and its history (mainly involving a Sultan trying to oust the Dutch colonialists), and sampling various local snacks, including some kind of chinese-indonesian fusion cake thing with all sorts of fillings, from chocolate to smelly durian fruit to cheese (and yes, it was like cheddar, not cream cheese!!). Anyway, whilst they may sound odd, they were nice enough (not the cheese ones – uurgh) to buy some to bring home.
On our last day in Yogja we took a tour to Borobodur. Apparently if tourists only do one of the temples they tend to do Borobodur, but we much preferred Prambanan. Whilst Borobodur was still impressive, the carvings were not nearly as intricate or varied and you had to go with a tour group if you wanted to walk up the structure itself, which is fine, but sometimes we like to explore by ourselves. Also, it turns out to be impossible to get out of the darned place after you’ve finished the tour, because a maze of market stalls lie between you and the exit, which you can tantalising see but never actually reach! On the plus side, Borobodur is surrounded by some beautiful scenery and you get free slippers with your tour (Admin – yes, that wasn’t a typo, she did say slippers!).
And that was it for Yogja. It’s time to move on and start to make our way back towards Jakarta.
Sloth Journeys 