Indonesia, day 3: Prambanan

For the third day it was time to go see another ancient temple, this time a Hindu temple of Prambanan close to Yogyakarta. We set up early to get there before the scorching heat, but then some folks were late in getting their act together and it didn't end up being early after all. We stopped for lunch in a restaurant that looked lovely with little huts in which you'd eat and a small pond in between, complete with rafts. I guess my friend was right when calling me a fat bastard, for the raft was about to sink when I stepped on it! Fortunately the second one could hold me... barely. There had to be a race then, which we won of course, comfortably.




The premises turned out to be the best part of that restaurant. Some of the food looked good, some even tasted good, but they served us something with shrimp chili despite it being specifically said to them many times it wouldn't be ok, and they didn't even admit doing so afterwards! So, not recommended. Instead, go to Yogyakarta and find a restaurant called Milas... I'll write about that one soon, for day 7.

Well, eventually we got all the way to Prambanan, but the scorching heat of the day was upon us already. The temple was built around 850 AD, but it was damaged in the earthquake of 2006 and some buildings are off limits as they might collapse. There are plenty of rumbles too, but those are results of destruction by president Suharto, if I read the sign correctly. I probably didn't as people laughed at my interpretation. :-P

The temple grounds are large, it consists of eight main shrines of more than 250 shrines overall in the surroundings. There's a motorized "train" that takes you from one to the other, costing 5000 rupiah for a ride including ice tea. You can't buy a ride without ice tea. The nicest part about the big area is that there are animals roaming around, sheep and deer at least.




There was a tale of the place these last pics are from. Apparently a princess was being pressured to marry against her will, and she accepted on the condition that the man would build her a temple with 1000 statues before the sunrise. To her utter shock the man was about to succeed in this task, so she got the roosters to yell so they thought the morning was coming. The man got mad of this trickery and turned her into the last of the statues. I asked in the group which one is this statue then, but the other members of the group denied the whole story and told me another one, that it was just a shrine built for Shiva, and no exciting tales of roosters and marriages. Hmh.

One of the buildings almost collapsed on me, quite a horror there...



Then a bit of the nature... as I said, there are deer on the grounds! Click the pictures to get the bigger ones.







Then it was time for a quick tango class before heading back, via a little vegetarian restaurant in Yogyakarta called Bodhicitta Kafe Daun. The food was simple but good. Heavy rain on the way back, I'm always lucky, it only rains when I'm inside.

Indonesia, day 2: Borobudur

The roosters woke me up after 2 AM or so, and so did the Muslim call for prayer around 4 AM, so it wasn't a problem after all to get up at 5 AM to go to "the river", as my friend mentioned. I was quite excited about the idea and thought I could get a morning swim, maybe even see a beautiful waterfall. The morning was gorgeous, but the river... a tiny little stream, and even that not at natural state, see the left-most picture. The breakfast was to be had from the ladies selling vegetables from baskets, soyabeans, peanuts, corncobs. Very nice, simple and cheap. Do say "monggo" to everyone you pass on the island of Java, that's the local custom. :-)

Before heading off to Borobudur, one of the Seven Wonders, there was a celebration at the temple that we took a look at. Nice chanting and singing, of the speeches I understood nothing. Just signed to get up every once in a while. Fortunately it only lasted for an hour or so as the driver was waiting to take us onwards. We filled in the car and off we went! Fortunately the driver spoke Chinese, so there was another person to talk to in a bit easier way.

Arriving at Borobudur had me facing up the usual thing of tons and tons of people trying to sell all kinds of crap, so many of them that it was pretty difficult to find the way to the ticket office. Indonesia has the same system India and several other countries do, foreigners pay about ten times the price for everything. So my ticket cost more than that of all my travel group put together, and it has to be bought from a different office, using a different entrance.

Here's what none of my group, despite them being local and having Buddhist education, knew: Borobudur was built around 800 AD. It consists of six square platforms topped by three square platforms, and on hot days those are quite sweaty to climb. There are 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues. On the top platform there's a dome surrounded by 72 Buddha statues seated inside stupas. Touching the fingers of one of them is supposed to bring you blessing, I reached it and scratched my hand in the process... I wonder what sort of blessings are coming my way then.

Borobudur is a shrine for Buddha and a place for Buddhist pilgrimage. Fair enough, there was a bunch of monks at the top chanting. Borobudur was abandoned in the 14th century with the Islamic conversion of Java, and rediscovered in 1814 by Sir Thomas Raffles... believe it or not, I think the locals must have known about it before him. It was restored between 1975 and 1982 after becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site. Currently it's the most visited tourist attraction in Indonesia.

















There's a couple of other things to see in the site also, at least some sort of Indonesian version of Guinness world records thing, and a bird park or something of the sort. We skipped them, but got into the strangest one, a shipping museum! What's strange about that is that it's nowhere near the coast. This maritime museum boasted a boat that had sailed from Indonesia to Africa, and this trip had been redone recently in a similar wooden boat which was in display at the museum. Later in Semarang I accidentally ran into someone who had been a member of the crew on this new voyage! Her picture can be found in the description of day 6 later. On the way back we stopped over in Salatiga for a dinner in a tiny little restaurant, nothing fancy, but plenty of tempeh and tofu.

Afterwards we simply headed back to the fantastic housing.

Indonesia, day 1: Arrival

My local vegan friend in Indonesia was about to leave the country, so it was deemed the right time to go see the living conditions of the students there to see if this was a place to build an eco-community as I had been thinking. And since I've been thinking of moving to Singapore next, that should be visited on the way back. I took Singapore Airlines to Jakarta as their online booking thing was broken in that I couldn't get the flight I wanted to Solo City. They had such a fun interactive language learning thing that I almost forgave them for not finding me vegan margarine, especially since they made the funny move of drawing to my patriotism instead by offering me Finnish butter! Anyhow, you get to select a language you speak and something you want to learn, so given the circumstances I wanted to brush up my Indonesian and decided to use German as the one I speak to get it off its rusty stage. It had a dozen other languages too, I could've spent a long time with that thing!

You can't book Indonesian flights from abroad, so the way onwards from Jakarta was uncertain until the very last minute. Eventually a friend of the friend got me a ticket, and she also gave me a very short tour of the city and took me to taste gado-gado. It's a traditional Indonesian dish, basically a salad with peanut sauce (a tad spicy). Do ask for it without egg (tanpa telur) and it should be vegan, although I hear some put fish sauce in it so make sure you don't run into that.

Over in Solo City I got a tropical welcome with a lei (flower necklace, that's the term for the Hawaiian one, not sure if the Indonesian one has a different term) placed around my neck. It was possibly the prettiest airport I've seen anyway, which comes as a benefit of it being tiny. See the picture on the left. Yes, that's the airport. My friend came to meet me up then with a bunch of students who started immediately testing the limits of my Indonesian while pushing their English on the limit also. However, we arrived nicely into the village where I was to stay around a Buddhist temple.

The living conditions left much to be desired, the main thing I desired to be added would've been a shower, as the place to wash was just a tap from which there would come cold and not so clean water, most of the time. Sometimes there was no water. There were no beds either, but a mattress on the floor is good enough for me, at least on the nights that I hadn't just faced a huge cockroach (8 times the size of those in Beijing!) or the rats. The people were fun, however. I got an immediate task of teaching tango to some that very night. I can't sleep on planes so I made it an early night after hanging out with the kids for a while.