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Published: September 5th 2008
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Choosing who to fly with in Indonesia is not exactly an enviable task as Indonesia's safety record is so bad that no national airline is allowed to fly to the European Union. With that in mind we ignored the low budget options like lion air, adam air, mediocair and coming up for air and boarded a Garuda plane in Denpasar bound for Yogyakarta, Java - our airline decision having been made on the basis of most successful poster campaign on South Bali roadside sites (told you advertising works!!). In the end the most dangerous part of the trip was the inflight meal - simply unidentifyable.
Yogyakarta, or Yogya, pronounced Jogya makes Bali look like a sleepy country town - trafficwise - there are just a mind-numbing amount of people and various types of transport (mainly motorbikes, rickshaws, horse drawn carts and bicycles plus the odd car or two). It is reputedly Java's cultural heart and a centre for students, art, dance and music. It is also home to the fabulous temples of Borobodur and Prambanan which we were there to see but first... shopping..
Woweee - think Oxford street where all the shops also take up half the pavement..
and it is about 20 degrees hotter... and there are a hundred different smells travelling past your nose... and every single shop owner is asking you to come into their shop..and you feel like you are hallucinating because there are just so many patterns and colours everywhere... that's shopping in Yogya. Though this didn't stop us, we did our bit for the Javanese economy let's put it that way, including a trip to Lana Art Gallery where the delightful owners couldn't have been more kind and pleasant in helping us spend our money, including taking me by motorbike to the local hotel to pay for our picture... Silversmiths, batik factories, secret batik shops in peoples houses, puppet workshops, local markets - nothing escaped us..
We also nearly fell for the local "scam" where you get befriended by, in our case various, blokes pretending to be guides and before you know it you are being persuaded to go to the local "art centre" where an internationally renowned exhibition is taking place charging 50 times the price of other places. Needless to say this is a collective and all the blokes actually work for the shop acting as the "art centre".
Our waiter at the 369 restaurant (which aforementioned blokes had all told us to go to) also tried on the art centre scam - he wasn't shy of making himself at home either, sitting down and lighting up as he took our order and then again as we were tucking into our fried rice (nasi goreng) with obligatory fried egg and optional flies.
We met the most unfortunate rickshaw (they call them becaks) driver in the world, unlucky because he weighed about 7 stone and had to drive Nige and I in this tiny, puny becak all round town. Throughout our ride he was taunted by other becak drivers, other becak passengers, anyone at the traffic lights, small children and then finally the police. This poor guy had to stop and push at every slight hill, we couldn't even get out to help we were so wedged into this thing clearly designed for small framed asian bodies and not sturdy European types - crowbar please anyone? Anyway we tipped heavily when we eventually arrived at our destination though after a while i said to Nige that i had a strange feeling someone was following us and sure enough as
we turned round we saw our rickshaw driver deploying some elementary school surveillance techniques, 3/10 for discretion. Turns out the money was worth the pain as he hung around until we were ready to go home... poor guy then got a flat tyre on return trip, frantically tried pumping it up but European tourist onslaught had done him in - we tipped again and walked home!!
To cut a long story short when we weren't shopping we were looking at temples. We had an inauspicious start to our trip to Borobodur as the sunrise trip we had booked took place after the sun had risen but despite this slight error we were gobsmacked with how wonderful it was. Majestically placed on top of a hill and built from the top down - it was really an incredible site to behold especially when you get close and see the amazing stories, essentially buddist tales, carved into the stone. The fabulous Yun, our guide, and Harry, our driver, more than looked after us at Borobodur and then later on our city tour of Yogya and Prambanan . Prambanan contrasted beautifully with Borobodur in style and content - a compound of many
hindu temples on the ground compared to Borobodur's one large structure on top of a hill. Unfortunately Prambanan was badly hit by the earthquake two years ago, just as the temple had been rebuilt after over 20 years work and the amount of effort it will take to put it all back together is daunting to see. The temples are now surrounded by piles of stone which archeologists are trying to sort out - poor them, it looked like it would take an army of thousands!!
At night Prambanan really came to life as it was lit up and provided the back drop to the Ramayana ballet which we were priveleged enough to see. It was just a wonderful spectacle, intricate dancing, fabulous storytelling, incredible costumes and a fair dose of pyrotechnics made for a memorable night. However should you get carried away by and irrepressible desire for Sprite you will be protected from yourself as all refridgerated soft drinks there come with their own guard (see pic).
Other highlights of our trip to Yogya included the weirdest musical accompaniment to a meal ever- the female lead sounded like Janis Joplin attempting to primal scream. We visited the
sultan's palace and water castle where we learnt that the current sultan's grandad (bear with me) had 21 wives and, wait for it, 78 children!! We also went to the bird market where we saw nearly every conceivable creature caught, caged and condemned to a life of misery no doubt - grim.
Gili Islands next for some R and R...
xx
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