Indonesia, day 7: Yogyakarta

Day 7 was to be the day to head to Yogyakarta, also known as Jogyakarta and Jogjakarta, don't ask me which one is correct, even the locals don't seem to know. I think Yogyakarta was the most common spelling in road signs, but this built-in spell-checker in Firefox wants me to write it as Jogjakarta. Nah, I tell the machine what to do, not the other way around. :-)

However, leaving from my friend's aunt's was so slow for a while I thought I had got lost to my dad's place, don't know of any other folks as slow in leaving for anywhere! I was up by 6 AM and over there before 7, yet we were almost late from the afternoon bus despite doing nothing all day! Well, not nothing: eating. They brought me plate after plate of local foods. I don't dare to count, I think it must have been at least 7 plates of food. So, sitting, eating, sweating, and wondering if we ever get to leave. At least I showed the earlier pictures with the deer to the kid and she was quite excited about it and wanted a picture with her dog. Ok, I know I'm sounding like an ungrateful bastard. The food was good and the company was nice, even if I had trouble communicating. And very interesting to taste all the local flavours. Of the foods, I don't know of a name for the top left one, the top right is milontong and the bottom one is tofu flower or something, I think I was told the name in Chinese since I don't remember any Indonesian name for it.


Despite the pleasantness of the food, there was too much of it and the weather was too hot, so I was truly delighted when we finally got to leave Semarang behind. The bus ride to Yogyakarta took about 4 hours I think, and they don't tend to make stops, so watch how much you drink beforehand. One irritating part of Joglosemar buses is that they give this package of "refreshments" to every passenger, and the only vegan thing in it is water. I tried refusing the package on every ride, on the first one I even succeeded but on this ride to Yogyakarta the conductor really didn't get it at all. Eventually we gave our packages to a becak (pedicab) driver along the way.

Over in Yogyakarta we found a place to stay at some students' house in a maze of small buildings and took one of them to dinner in this restaurant we heard about very randomly... We had a chat with a Swiss tourist at Prambanan and he mentioned a nice ho(s)tel in Yogyakarta, and in the hostel I ran into a card of this vegetarian restaurant called Milas. What a lucky find it was! The place was totally amazing. The setting was beautiful, these little bamboo huts that they had tables in, with a small fountain in the centre of the courtyard. All very clean and neat, a little handicraft shop and a library were adjunct to it, the food was great, the service good and best of all, it's all non-profit! They put all the profits into promoting vegetarianism and other good causes. The only unfortunate part was that there were a lot of dishes with dairy, eggs or honey in them, but there was ten or so fully vegan dishes also. There'll be more on Milas on day 8, and I'll put their contact details at the end of this blog entry.




After dinner we went to see a ballet performance of a religious story at the site of Prambanan. The performance was... nice. Not spectacular, not great, not amazing, but nice.


Rumah Makan "MILAS"
Jl. Prawirotaman IV 127 B
Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Tel: +62 274 742 33 99