Tour of Temples

Tour of Temples

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Asia

I went on a tour around Yogyakarta today with five other people and our hostel driver Nanda. We got to see so much stuff, It was really incredible. The morning started out with an excellent breakfast at the hostel of toast, cereal, watermelon and orange juice. It might not sound excellent, but when you consider that at most hostels the breakfast is only toast with one kind of jam. That’s all. The fresh fruit and juice and cereal were a nice change.

We headed off in the sweet ass old van, which is 31 years old (seriously!), and headed over to the Hyatt to pick up Valerie and Simon, Vincent’s friends. The rest of the group consisted of Albert (Spain), Adam (England), myself and Nanda. We headed up north to Borobudur but stopped first at a very small temple called Menut. There wasn’t much to it, so we were only there for about 10 minutes to take some pictures and then we got on our way.

We made it to Borobudur and got a guide for the group of us for about $1.50 each. The guide was pretty good, but we didn’t learn all that much about the history of the place. We learned that it was built in 800AD and that it is a Buddhist temple, but not much else. The temple itself was quite impressive, especially when you see the surroundings. It is a beautiful area. It is in the middle of nowhere though. We had about an hour and a half there, and that was plenty of time. You can’t actually go into the temple, only around the outside and you can climb it, but after taking a few pictures, that was all we could do.

We left there and went to lunch at this amazing restaurant that was under a massive marquee. It was beautiful inside and the service was impeccable, and best of all the meals were only about $3 each. I think we were lucky to find this place still open, considering today is the first day of Ramadan and most places are closed until sundown. We all enjoyed our meals, mine was with a local root beer in a cool bottle. It was nice, but a little too sweet for my liking.

We moved on to Merapi volcano from there to try and get a better view of it than last night’s “sunset”. It took a while to get up there, and we were only allowed to drive up about one third of the mountain, but it was a great view from there, definitely worth seeing. It’s amazing to think that this volcano erupted only eight months ago. We saw some of the damage it caused on the way to Borobudur, but this side of the mountain looked less affected.

We moved on from here to Prambanan temple, which is a Hindu temple, rather than the Buddhist temples we’ve seen earlier. I found Prambanan to be more impressive than Borobudur just because there were more temples to see at the same place. The biggest area had nine temples all clustered together, and then there were three subsequent temples in a row after that. You were also permitted to go into these temples, which was pretty cool, although there wasn’t that much to see. It was incredibly dark inside, with no candles or any kind of light source, so it was difficult to see that these temples were built like huge pyramids. Only a picture taken in the dark made that apparent.

We moved on to a small temple, that I never got the name of, to watch the sunset. It was a nice enough little temple, but unfortunately the sunset had a radio tower right in the way, so that wasn’t ideal. Still, I didn’t really need a reason to take more pictures today, I’ve taken over 300. That’s okay though, I’ve seen some pretty awesome things.

We all went back to Depot Bandung for dinner again tonight and it was excellent again. Everything they make is just so fresh, I love it! I asked if they’d be open tomorrow for lunch, but because of Ramadan they won’t open until dinner time. That’s ok, I’ll just have to wait for dinner then. I got back to the hostel after dinner and am just relaxing tonight. There’s not much going on around this area, so I’m just going to chill out with some friends I’ve met at the hostel and look forward to my next few moves.

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