60) Yogyakarta - Indonesia's cultural capital

The train ride from Bandung to Yogyakarta was long and uneventful, it was actually quite boring. What a difference to Indian trains! The train station area was blocked by heavy metal bars, so that people don’t linger around the tracks without a ticket or run across them, it was very effective, maybe people have to be forced into discipline a bit. The train left on time, was very clean for Asia, and everything was well organised, you could rent cushions and vendors were only allowed in at certain moments, in order not to allow too much competition to the official food and drinks sellers. Furthermore, this train was relatively empty, well we drove ‘bisniss’ class because 3rd class which local people mostly use, was not available. We arrived well in Yogyakarta, and also the pick-up service worked out perfectly, about which we were happy, it was already 1 a.m. after all.

We had chosen the area in and around Jalan Prawirotaman, which offers a great selection of middle range accommodation, and stayed at the Hotel Metro, with a swimming pool. For an unknown reason, we opted to indulge in luxury (relatively speaking of course) this time. The Hotel Metro did have a swimming pool but it was not in the annex where we slept but on the other side of the street. In a way we are spoilt Europeans after all, so we did not appreciate crossing the street in our wet swimming costumes and decided to find a more convenient place. Which we found without any problems, at the Hotel Rose in a parallel street but in fact situated behind the Hotel Metro. We got a nice room with hot shower, breakfast included, and a gorgeous huge swimming pool, and all that for only EUR 6. Wonderful affordable luxury! The pool was surrounded by a pretty garden, and on one side it was limited by maybe 30 or more caged singing birds. When we were swimming, we were accompanied by their sweet singing and the cheeky whistling of a beo, which had learned to whistle as a man would after a pretty woman. Hilarious! The breakfast was a bit repetitive but it was ok and filled us up in the morning. For several days we were quite lazy, spending our days swimming, reading, doing some work on the internet and eating in one of the numerous restaurants.

One day we met a Frenchman at the swimming pool, who was married to an Indonesian woman and spent the holidays at her place on the countryside. Already before meeting him, we had noticed that many of the staff in the restaurants spoke very good French. In one restaurant we encountered a high number of Westerners speaking French, not all of them looked like tourists, this place appeared to us like the base for speakers of French, French cuisine was constantly on the menu, as well as Belgian beer and chocolate. It seemed that quite often French tourists fell in love with an Indonesian girl working in a restaurant, we met another one who was going to get married and move to France soon.

This life of luxury and idleness pleased us a lot, but the city of Yogyakarta harbours two very famous cultural sites in its surroundings, so we shook off our lethargy and visited them. Borobudur represents the world’s largest Buddhist stupa, endowed with truly impressive reliefs about the life of the Buddha; Prambanan is a beautiful complex of Hindu temples that brought forth sweet memories of India, there we also watched a fascinating ballet telling the epic Ramayana in the evening. The detailed stories and photos can be found in the following travelblog entries: 61) Prambanan, Indonesia's greatest Hindu monument and 62) Borobudur - the world's largest Buddhist Stupa. But culture has its price, each of the two monuments having a hefty entrance fee of USD 10 for foreigners! Just compare this to the low price we paid for the gorgeous hotel... However, the price did not deter us, and we admit the money spent was a good investment. To our shame we have to confess that we skipped the city’s Kraton, a royal palace, but since we did not read or hear much about it from other travellers and our guidebook was neither very informative, we can only hope that we did not miss yet another fantastic site.

In order to live up to our status of independent travellers, we shunned the organised tours that were offered at literally every place and opted to make it to the destinations by ourselves. It turned out to be very easy, the hotel staff was also very helpful at this. We first took the city bus number 15 to the bus station, a very well organised place. People immediately offered their help and guided us to the right platform, without wanting any money from us directly and we also paid the normal bus fare, so we did not pay them indirectly either. As nice as their help was, it was not really necessary, the bus lanes were very well indicated and it was very easy to find your way. Getting to the monuments was really no problem, getting back was not so straightforward. We missed the last direct bus from Borobudur and had to drive to the next bigger city, from where we got only standing places to Yogyakarta. But we are tough and independent, so this was no problem for us at all. And should a Westerner be lost in Asia, or there is no more public transport available, there is plenty of choice between bicycles, motor bikes and cars which bid to be your means of transport, it’s only a question of money.

Yogyakarta deserves its reputation, the temples of Prambanan and Borobudur are true cultural highlights in Indonesia. It's hard to say which was more amazing, Borobudur or Prambanan. We think that Prambanan is more impressive, visually, but Borobudur is more incredible when you think of the amount of work involved. On the other hand, if all the temples at Prambanan were standing, that would be fairly awesome too...

As so wonderful culture is difficult to top, our next destination was a natural site again. We first considered making the trip with public transport, but were not sure whether we would make it in one day, so eventually we booked a tour to the famous volcano Bromo, which later on took us as far as Bali, on the last leg of our Indonesia trip.

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