Yogya

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Our train ride from Bandung was horrible. The 8 hours trip began at 8pm, which meant we arrived in Yogya at 4am after a sleepless night. Unsurprisingly, as it was 4am, the town was still asleep so we decided to try our luck and turn up at the hotel we had booked. Fortunately two of the three rooms we had reserved were available so we all crawled into bed and finally got some sleep.

We spent our first day touring the sites of Yogya. We had a relatively slow start after getting up at about 10am however after breakfast we caught a taxi to the Kraton, the huge walled city in the centre of Yogya, and went straight to the Sultan’s Palace. The entry fee includes a guide, which was lucky because otherwise the palace would have seemed even more unimpressive than it did. Our guide was insane and completely obsessed with sex and seemed to think that just about every element of the palace was some kind of sexual imagery. At first we were a little unsure of what he was saying...but after we figured it out we all struggled not to laugh. His tag line was “it’s not porno, its nature”...hmmm. He also said that the 9th sultan was the most important because you have 9 holes in your body...”2 eye, 2 ear, 2 nose, 1 mouth, 1 genital and 1 anus...” whilst pointing to all of them as he said it. Odd man.

Following the Kraton we walked to the Water Palace, which was decidedly lacking in water, but would have been quite nice when it was full and clean. A local guy tagged along and pointed out lots of stuff to us and then walked us to the bird market and gave us a tour. The bird market was cool. It was very loud and filled with birds of all different colours as well as a few other odd and not so odd animals. Along with birds we saw cats, dogs, flying foxes (which are apparently a cure for asthma - not sure what you do with them for them to be a cure..), owls, brightly coloured chickens, squirrels, mongoose, snakes, lizards and some weird animal with the strangest eyes. Unsurprisingly our friendly local then asked for money for the impromptu tour. I would much prefer that they are just upfront about it rather than just tagging along when you aren’t really keen for them too because you know they will want to be paid and you haven’t had a chance to agree on a reasonable price beforehand.

For dinner we headed to one of the restaurants on a street near us. Unfortunately Yogya is slightly more touristy than Bandung, which means that food is easier to find and internet is widely available but you lose some of the appeal because you see so many western tourists. At dinner, Omar and I ordered the same thing (soto ayam - chicken noodle soup/broth) which turned out to be a very very bad idea....

The following day Omar and I both vomited for a large part of the day. Food poisoning is never fun but it was a lot easier to deal with than last time when I had to catch two flights! It’s much nicer just to be able to lie in bed and feel sorry for yourself! Scott went to the pharmacist and got us both the antibiotics I had last time so that we didn’t end up with a lingering bacterial infection like I did last time and that was basically the extent of his Yogya exploration for the day. Kat and Andrew went to a museum, a puppet show and explored the central market while the three of us hung around the hotel.

The following day Omar and I were feeling much better although we were both exhausted so we had a pretty quiet day although we did venture out of our rooms! That night we all headed off to see a Ramayana dance concert. Ramayana is the style of ballet which is famous in Yogya. We were all expecting great things from the show as it had been running every night for 29 years or something insane like that. The show was horrible. It was ridiculously touristy and to call it dancing is a massive stretch. The performers posed and walked around with for two hours and it seemed very amateur. It probably would have done them good to have a night off and actually rehearse the show and fix their timing and add some dancing. I’m sure that other Ramayana troupes are really good however we lucked out with the one we chose. The only amusing/slight cringe worthy part was the 4 year old performer who had forgotten to take her Ritalin! She had so so much energy and ran around the stage in her monkey costume while other performers grabbed her ankle, arm, hand, waist...anything to stop her from running where she wasn’t supposed to!

For our final day in Yogya we booked ourselves into a 12 hour tour of Borobudur, Prambanan and XXX, the viewing point for Mt Merapi. Our first stop was Borobudur. The temple was really impressive and had been restored really well. We were basically the only western tourists which made us a real novelty. Scott, Kat and I were sitting on a ledge when two ladies who were probably about 40 rushed up and sat beside us and posed for a photo and then ran off again. There was a school group of children aged about 14 years who took a real liking to Omar and all the girls wanted photos with him. It started off as big group photos, and then the girls got braver and asked for single photos just with Omar which was quite amusing.

Eventually it started pouring rain so everyone quickly made their way out of the temple, Omar’s school girls were giggling, turning around and pointing as they walked ahead of us. After Borobudur we hopped back into the minibus and set off for Kaliurang, which is a viewing point for Mt Merapi. Unfortunately it was really cloudy so the view wasn’t very good so we didn’t spend long there. We basically just climbed up to the viewing deck, had a look at the clouds and then went back down and got into the bus again and set off for Prambanan.

Omar was thrilled to once again see his school girl lovers at Prambanan. They took more photos with him before we had even made it into the temple area. Once we reached the ruins (which are fenced off following the 2006 earthquake) we sat down on a seat and watched a group of young school children approach. These kids were probably about 8 - 10 years old and Scott announced that “these ones won’t be as forward as the others, they will just point and giggle..” Famous last words! We were ambushed by little school girls (the boys seemed very uninterested) and ended up signing autographs, being videoed by the teachers and having lots of photos taken. Omar’s teenage school girls walked past as we were doing the celebrity thing and giggled some more. Eventually the younger children were led away by their teachers and we set off to look at the temples.

There were only a few of the ruins that you could actually get close to because the majority of the complex is fenced off pending restoration. The temples were so badly damaged by the earthquake, however it seems like the damage has been recorded pretty well and eventually they should be pieced back together so that you can enjoy them all again. Our celebrity status continued the whole time we were there with locals trying to discretely take photos of us for the remainder of our time there.

The following morning we got up nice and early and climbed onto a mini bus for the long long trip to Mt. Bromo.

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