Jogja

Yogyakarta or Jogja as the locals call it, proved to be the hardest place to find accommodations during our time in Indonesia. We searched for a couple of hours the night we arrived but had to settle with a real dump. There were a couple cockroaches sharing our room with us; they were so big we named them. After three days there we got lucky when the hotel across the road had a room that freed up. We happily moved into a room with hot water and access to a pool for our last four nights in Jogya. It was twice the price, but well worth it!

Jogja is the cultural capital of Indonesia. We spent our week here checking out all the sites. This included tours of the local spice market and bird market where we saw both live and cooked bats (meant to be good for asthma), snakes, crickets, maggots and an endless variety of spices. 

 

We toured the ruins of the sultan’s old palace, known as the Kraton. It is literally a town within a town where 25,000 people still live today. Our guide was fantastic; he showed us secret tunnels, the underground mosque and the water palace, just to name a few sites. He had toured Prince Charles around the ruins five years earlier, so we felt we were in good hands!  

We also took in the museum of contemporary art as well as a history museum followed by a traditional shadow puppet show just for good measure. 

 

AJ also got a quick crash course in Batik making. It is a traditional way to colour material, either for clothing or art, using different coloured waxes and then boiling them out to keep the colour. 

A couple of days into our stay we visited the real reasons we came to Jogya, the Borobudur and Prambanan temples. Borobudur is one of the grandest Buddhist temples in the world, while Prambanan is one of the largest Hindu temples in South East Asia. Both of the temples were amazing, however the sheer size and number of temples that make up Prambanan made this our personal favourite. 

After visiting the temples and having toured most of the city of Jogya, we rented a motorbike and checked out the surrounding villages. We ended up in Kota Gede, a small village that specializes in making silver. Virtually every second shop in the town sells hand made silver jewellery, statues and other accessories. What was especially interesting was getting a tour of the silver making process: the extraction process, making silver thread, using the thread to make jewellery by hand and then polishing the final products using the juices from a local fruit. AJ had to buy herself some silver earrings for 8$. We also came across a local market selling fresh pastries that locals were buying for when they would break their Ramadan fasts. We ate about half a dozen of them for 3$, it was a delicious and very cheap lunch! While coming back into town, we noticed a barbershop, and since my hair was getting a little long, I went in for a clean up. It was the best $0.80 haircut I had ever had!

We used the motorbike to head back to Prambanan one night to watch their famous Ramayana Ballet set in front of the Prambanan temples. It turned out the story was the same as the play we had seen in Bali, but it was played out in a completely different manner. 

The motorbike ride in heavy traffic over bridges proved to be pretty challenging. Even driving in the city is pretty nuts, there are bicycles, horses, cars, trucks and motorbikes all over the roads and we’re driving on the opposite side of the road to what we’re used to, but its pretty damn fun too! 


Here is a video AJ put together: