I'll Be There Dreckly: Yogya

Yogyakarta, Java island, Indonesia (map)

In this blog: a cultural capital, getting ill, and the world's largest Buddhist temple

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Borobudor temple

Yogyakarta is known as the cultural capital of Indonesia. A city of 400,000 or so people, straight-off its noticeably different from most Indonesian cities I've visited since it's got a bit of history, a little style, less rubbish, some world class attractions, and a noticeable amount of tourists. Ah that T word - after months in more off the beaten track places it was strange to be surrounded by other travellers and for a few days anyway, a pleasant change.

Rene and I took the train from Malang, a form of travel I greatly favour after months of bad roads and uncomfortable buses. Flat rice fields and rice terraces lined the track most of the way with a few plantations of tapioca or sugarcane. Homes were sometimes built dangerously close to the tracks and we passed a big dam and hydro project, as well as numerous young kids waving at the train often hanging out with gran or granddad. It seems Indonesia must has massive issues with fare jumpers though, as the ticket inspector came through the carriage with an assistant as well as a security guard each side! Yyyyyes guv'nor!

Arriving at Yogyakarta we were seemingly spoilt for choice on the accommodation front and initially it seemed there was just too much choice to decide, but after enquiring in seven or eight places we actually struggled to find something half decent and at midnight just gave up and picked one that just did the job. The hotel lobby was all I saw the next day since I had big plans to make, as time on my Indonesian visa is running out it was soon time to move on. I won't reveal my exciting plans quite yet, but it took six very stressful hours that day finding three flights that linked together on the right days with the right price, and even then some prices were going up before my eyes, whilst other flights sold out and new ones appeared. With what was left with the day I did something very different and turned into an electronics engineer of sorts. There's dust in my camera which shows up on a lot of pics, and since Rene had the same problem recently and successfully stripped his down and cleaned it, I thought I'd try the same with his help. YouTube is fantastic for showing you exactly what to do, and I got quite a way into stripping it apart whilst following a video, before I ran out of tools and decided to put it back together. It was a little intimidating at first, but quite a fun learning experience and I'll finish the job properly sometime.

Water palace and around

One thing that makes Yogyakarta interesting is that it's still headed by a sultan and hence has a special political status. Sultans have ruled the city for hundreds of years, and the visible remains of this is the Kraton - the palace compound. On our first day wandering about we looked at some of the old buildings outside the palace boundaries, an abandoned house, a very fancy well accessible by an underground passage, some gatehouses and so on. The most interesting was the Water Palace, a complex of pools, buildings and sculptures one of the old sultans had built and still in very good condition. He allegedly killed off his architect after construction was complete, since he was the only one who knew the existence of some secret pleasure rooms. Harsh times.

The water palace

Ramadan had started the day before - the annual Muslim religious festival a little like lent, and Muslims aren't allowed to eat or drink (and some other things) during daylight hours for a few weeks. This therefore meant that very very few cafés or restaurants were officially open, and by 2pm along with the fact it was a hot day, Rene and I were zonked. It took a lot of slow walking and looking to find a little street food stall open down an alleyway, hidden partly by a tarp and was a very welcome find. Fortunately in the days that followed we also managed to find the odd open place so didn't suffer too much thereafter. To finish the day we looked around the huge city market, a fairly interesting if slightly grim dirty concrete building, part full of fresh produce and part clothing. We happened upon an Italian travel documentary being filmed, and watched and chuckled at the presenter grimacing as he ate a cooked bird foetus, one of many being sold by an old lady supposedly for medicinal purposes.

That evening the effects from lunchtime lived on and by late evening I felt like crap, drained of energy and aching so took an early night. I struggled to sleep though and spent the night tossing and turning with alternating sweats and chills. The next morning I still felt bad, but decided to go out for the day anyway and just take it easy. We took a cycle rickshaw across town to go inside the Kraton - the sultans palace, and had a good look around for a couple of hours. It was a strange sort of place, more a collection of old buildings within a large walled courtyard than a actual palace, and whilst some of the buildings were highly decorative and of architectural merit, some was pretty tatty and rubbish and the exhibits inside plain boring. I still couldn't work out where the sultan himself lived, but since the place shut down at 1.30pm I guessed maybe he was in there somewhere and just got up late when everyone had gone.

The Kraton - the Sultan's palace

A few miles away we visited Pasar Ngasem, the city's outdoor pet market. A guy just inside the gates was selling fighting fish in one litre glass bottles which have to be separated to stop them killing each other, and I accidentally managed to knock a couple of bottles over with my bag, but the guy was very relaxed about it and we chatted away afterwards. He took interest in our travels before telling us about his life as a school teacher and his families speciality coffee business on their plantation, whereby mongoose (which have a good sense of smell) roam the grounds eating only the best coffee beans, which they then poo out whole and get collected by staff, washed, dried and sold as an expensive premium coffee! He's not the only producer and I've heard about this before but forget the proper name for it. Elsewhere in the market we saw the usual cats, dogs, baby snakes, gerbils and rabbits, as well as a wide variety of birds; canaries and suchlike seem to be very popular on Java. Of most interest for sale were some chameleons, mongoose, owls, a the biggest snake I've ever seen in the flesh, so big it looked liked it'd just devoured a small child. Maybe it had.

Back at the hotel I was feeling little better so decided to take a trip to the doctor since the symptoms of flu and malaria are very similar. It was easy to find a doc nearby with a practice within a pharmacy and he was helpful and willing, eventually surprising me by saying he thought it was a common cold, and presented a bill for £3.75 including vitamins and paracetamol, not bad at all! After another somewhat sleepless night I awoke worse the next day with a fever, and spent most of the day barely able to get out of bed. I was well and truly floored by it, and even a fifty metre lunchtime walk to get food just about finished me off. But by evening after some sleep I felt a little on the mend and felt the next day might be salvageable.

Borobudor

Our time in Indonesia was running out. Whilst I probably should have rested again I'm not a big fan of sitting around doing nothing, and I also felt guilty for Rene who had patiently sat around the previous day. So the next morning I felt significantly better, enough for a gentle trip out to one of the main attractions in the area, the ancient temple of Borobudor; the largest Buddhist temple on the world. There seems to be this thing in Indonesia about seeing everything at sunrise and Borobudor was the next on the list, requiring a 4.30am alarm call. We'd reluctantly decided to book a package tour since local transport was too much hassle and along with a pleasant Dutch girl from the hotel called Lonika and a couple of strangers (though never for long) we headed off. Considering the time of day, the city was surprisingly busy, since many people wake up at 3am through Ramadan to pray and eat breakfast before dawn and the day's fasting. The kids were no exception, playing on the streets and setting off firecrackers whilst the mosques were full of worshipers in special white robes.

We reached Borobudor just after dawn, finding it indeed to be a beautiful time of day to be there and also meant we missed the huge crowds since this is Indonesia's most popular tourist attraction. It was built sometime between 750 and 850AD at a time when Buddhism was practiced on Java (it's not now), and forgotten about for many years, and is built a bit like a wedding cake, with many tiered natural stone layers of carved reliefs depicting scenes. I found most tourist climbed straight to the top without really looking at it a lot of it, making it especially peaceful to wander around. The whole complex was impressive and occasionally worthy of a wow, but didn't move me like Ankor Wat in Cambodia did a few years ago, a similar type of setup. In fact by being impressed but not amazed at this, then raising a brow at the erratic driving on the way back whilst the girls were shocked, I realised I'm getting a bit jaded.

Get me out of here

Back in Yogyakarta, Rene and I decided we'd seen all we wanted around the city and it was time to move on. Even though I still wasn't feeling perfect I'd managed the day so far without problem, but the next step was a whole different ball game. We were heading to hike Mt Merapi, Indonesia's most active volcano.