11th to 14th November 2019
I appreciate this lacklustre approach to blogging means that at this point, locations are all out of kilter with any reasonable timeline (we haven’t been going around in circles in our various places). To try and make some sense of time we are going through and including dates with locations.
Now, storytime…
Our journey to Yogyakarta was long, having set off from the jungle area of Bukit Luwang in the early hours (around 6 am) for a four-hour trip to Medan Airport. Again, with poor road conditions and traffic all over the show, it was near impossible to catch any shut-eye. Instead, I stuck in the headphones and listened to the latest edition of the Economist (the app lets you download the magazine in audio form which I have found excellent for travelling).
We got to the airport with four hours to spare, so we sat in departures and tucked into a breakfast of….noodles and fried rice! How original and different! Feeling tired, we stumbled around the airport a bit until we were allowed to board our flight.
A short flight later we arrived into Yogyakarta. No taxi rank to be seen we had to embrace our upcoming battle with the hoards of men (genuinely not seen a female cab driver to this point) who yell taxi and wholly made-up fare amounts in the hope you’ll pick their car. Katy had read previously that the journey should cost around 50,000 IDR (about £2.50). The first rank we got to offered a price of 120,000 IDR and dropped to 100,000. At this point, I had lost any interest in bartering (I was too tired and grumpy from lack of sleep), so I said let’s just pay. I had taken the wind out of the sails of Katy the budding marketeer, which earned me stern looks. I promised next time we wouldn’t give in so easy.
Arriving at our hotel, we were shown to our lovely little room and an outdoor pool. Given we had spent most of our day travelling, we were keen to get out and get some dinner. We headed to the nearby market area of Malioboro. This area is a hive of buzzing activity. No prices to be seen and people haggling for all kinds of wares, we walked along and took it all in. Along our walk we also encountered the railway line, so cue a railway photo…
It didn’t take long for our tourist looking magnetism to have a three toothed gentleman spot his next customers. Keen to show us an exhibition of Batik paintings from apparently local artists, he headed us to a back alley shop with lots of lovely pictures on the wall.
I’ll stop here a mo. You can probably see where this goes, and if not, a quick google search of the main words above will give you all the information you need. These people basically take your foreign naivety to exploit outrageous prices for their art which comes with all the great moments you’ll expect from any typical con seller (think timeshare level spiel).
Anyway! Not wanting to walk immediately away, I listened for a bit and then was given his offer of a small painting for 1.4 million rupias (around £80). Quite frankly this man must’ve taken me as prime A grade mug!
About to walk away, I did consider that this would make a beautiful gift and thought I’d try for a lower price. I thought I’d happily pay a sum of X for this (nowhere near the original amount offered, think less than a 1/4) of the price. A small uplift from that and we traded money and art.
Now I appreciate this may well be a fake, and I probably paid more than I needed to. But in looking in other stores later during our travel, I realised that most pieces went for similar sums even at more honest shops. Lesson learned, always go REALLY low on bartering and have a pre amount you’re happy to pay. If you paid more than you should have it won’t matter than as you paid what you believed the item to be worth. The exception if this ever happens when I’m buying some luxury like a watch I’ll probably lose my lid.
After some tasty street food dinner (Rice and Noodles, the only nutrition my body gets these days) it was back to bed down.
Another side note: we had initially thought about doing a sunrise tour at 4 am the next day. We decided to cancel on account of “cantbearsed-itus.”
Day two started with a lovely breakfast on the patio of our room. We relaxed a little and made our plan for the day. We had decided to go to a temple in the middle of town. Have a wander around and take it slow before meeting Zara (Katy’s friend who was coming to join us on this part of our tour).
The temple had entrance packages to suit all kinds of social media stars. General entry was VERY cheap (13,000 IDR per person, less than £1). However, fancy upgrading to the “solo” photography special package? For only 500,000 IDR you can have pictures taken while other people are shooed away to make you look extravagant in what would look like an empty post-apocalyptic backdrop. Given my status of Non-Celebrity, the cheapskate package suited me fine.
The temple is stunning. Most of it is in ruins. Now and then a building has made it through the earthquakes that have crumbled their brethren to stand proud. We spent a great deal of time trying to get into the very aptly named “hidden temple”.
Eventually, we resorted to using a YouTube video where someone uploaded their entire exploration of the temple to gain visual clues as to how to get in. I used to think that people who walk around filming every aspect of their life to be weird, and I still believe this, but I will admit their online presence obsession did get us out of this pickle. Once inside, it was unique and striking. We could see how it does lend itself to social media photos. We took our own photos (hypocrisy, I know) and headed back to the airport.
In the cab, Katy ran out to meet Zara and bring her back so we could use the same taxi to get back to our hotel. However, the driver seemed to believe I was, in fact, having the least romantic goodbye of all time as he started to drive off as soon at Katy had gotten out. Saying stop and wait a few times seemed to work his charm as my charades appeared to have informed him we were picking someone up.
We made our way back to the hotel to welcome Zara into our lives. We also welcomed her into our room, something that, in any other situation, would look like she was our child!
We were keen to show Zara the delights of the Malioboro market and got a taxi straight there. Over dinner and drinks and batik music (imagine an Indonesian pipe and high pitched string jazz ensemble, complete with a chaotic beat) we had a good catch up. After dinner, we hit the high street and tried our hand at some bartering under which I picked up a very snazzy, not acting my age, hippie turtle trousers. Done for our first night and in prep for our second day, we went to bed (at a nonsensible time).
Day three was off to a flying start with our 4 am pick up from the hotel. We grabbed some breakfast bags the hotel had made for prepared for us, and we met our driver for the day; Sugi G! (The last letter may be made up). Driving a newish SUV, he navigated the streets his own way. With constant indicating and overtaking he made damn sure we arrived at Borobudur in time for sunrise. On the way, he told us that he could get us past any queue and straight into the temple. Not only a driver but well connected, we had it all.
We rocked up and true to his word he walked us straight past…no queue, but he hadn’t charged us any more than we would have to pay anyway. Plus we didn’t have our passports (apparently required to access this one temple, though this didn’t seem to be a requirement anywhere else that we went) which wasn’t an issue as we were with our main man SG!
Sunrise was… underwhelming. The American group near us has the outrageous manners to be optimistic when the sunrise quickly went behind the clouds by saying “hey it was a two for one, sunrise and sunset all in one” (see image below for a description on this). We just wanted to sulk a little that nature had other plans than to entertain us the way we wanted. Still, the experience was good fun, and the temple does provide some great views, as well as a pretty damn good breakfast buffet with very dubious history DVDs selling for 800 US dollars.
How one goes about enjoying a “2-for-1” sunrise and sunset
Dubious: The short clip played to sell the DVDs states that upon landing on the moon, Noel Armstrong noticed a glimmer come from the earth. Scientists apparently tracked this glimmer to have originated from South East Asia, specifically Indonesia. If I’d just landed on the moon, I’d be a bit more overwhelmed by current circumstances that I’m on the moon.
Next stop we hit up volcanic area nearby. The G left us at the jeep depot where we got a ride around the volcanic area and a good history from the driver. For top tourist points we then also accepted the offer to be driven like Billio through some nearby ponds which made for good fun!
Getting wet ‘n’ wild in the Jeep 
The final stop of the day was another temple (honestly, between here and Japan I’ve visited more religious ground than I could have imagined. At this point forward I’m going to start needing more reasons to visit places than “there’s a temple”).
In the boiling sun of 3 pm, we struggled around a bit delirious. We managed to get some band type photos around the temple. However, for the most part, we found shade or had ice cream to cool down before letting our day come to an end. We found a nearby sushi place to check out and then tried to make plans for Malang while being far too tired to make any sense. As the tension rose between us, through tiredness, we decided to call it an evening and head to bed.
Day Four and our last in Jogjakarta. We decided to give Sugi G a message and see if he was free to give us a lift to a place we heard where you could do tubing in caves. In a flash, he was over and raring to go!
An exciting afternoon. The most fun bit was taking turns jumping into the water, both inside and outside of the cave! The tubing ended with us getting caught in a rainstorm (which isn’t the end of the world when already wet but it did get surprisingly cold)!
We headed back into the heart of Jogjakarta and had some epic ice cream from Tempo Gelato. Thanks to Zara being a formidable enabler for the desert and sweet tooth lifestyle, our deserting had upped its game. We enjoyed a happy hour at a nearby bar with some card games to pass away the time in the evening. As night drew in, we had one last trip back to the hotel to pick up all of our bags and get to the station to catch our night train.
Our next destination would be Malang…