Yogyakarta & Bali, Indonesia
After flying in to Yogyakarta I headed for Jalan Prawirotaman and found a little place called Sumaryo Guest House. This was fairly basic but adequate for me and a quiet establishment. The rooms were situated around a little garden with a pond and water features and in the mornings there would be three or four employees who would spend hours cleaning the pebbles around the little garden! It is common here for guest houses to leave a flask of black tea and some cakes and pastries outside of your room in the afternoon and I would always look forward to this after being out all morning.
I spent about six weeks in Yogyakarta and scoured all of the back street art galleries looking for some special Batik art rather than that offered by the galleries in the larger shops on the main roads. I managed to track down some of the best artists (Masters of Batik) and commissioned lots of Batik directly from them.
In between finding all this Batik, I went off in search of the culture and there is a lot in Yogyakarta as it is one of the cultural capitals in Java, Solo being the other one. Years ago a Sultan lived in Yogya, so it is possible to visit the old Water Palace and the Sultan's Palace (Kraton) to see how royalty lived back then.
The highlight for me was travelling out to two massive temple sites about 30 minutes from Yogya. Both are over 1200 years old, which predates Angkor Wat by about 300 years and both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Both are stunning and make for great photo opportunities with the very active Mount Merapi Volcano in background.
Borobudur is a Buddhist Temple which had been rediscovered by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in 1814. There are ten tiers to this temple with 2672 Bas Relief panels which tell stories from Buddha's life and parables from Buddhist texts. There are also 72 Stupas and 504 Buddhas. The Buddha statues on the higher levels are enclosed in perforated stupas; one is purposely left incomplete to reveal the Buddha inside. Another is supposed to give good luck if you can touch its hand; it's harder than it looks, as once you stick your arm in, you have no way of seeing the statue inside!
I then went to Prambanan which is a Hindu Temple. It was quite badly damaged by an earthquake a long time ago, but the five main temples have been restored and these are stunning. Originally there were 240 temples at this site. The sheer size and scale of both of these temple sites is mind boggling when you consider they were built over 1200 years ago with no modern machinery and were built to worship two different religions.
I also travelled down to Bali and headed for Ubud which is the cultural capital here. It is inland, so away from the beach resorts, but again, I was looking for more art here and some special sarongs. The place I was looking for sold lots of different Reggae designs of Sarongs that would be hung from walls and other sarongs with designs of God Shiva, Lord Ganesha and Goddess Parvathi.
One thing that I saw in Bali that I had never seen anywhere else was that on the main roads, instead of having road signs advising against speeding and other dangerous driving habits, there were big concrete platforms by the side of the road with wreckages of cars that had been involved in accidents!
In the end I returned to Java another two times and spent approximately three months there in total and I can honestly say I really enjoyed my visits there and met lots of really nice people.