Days 15, 16, & 17: Welcome to Jogja!

On Friday, we hopped on a plane from Jakarta to Yogyakarta.  Yogyakarta sits in the central eastern part of the island Java at about 3,000 feet.  The city of 3 million people is nestled between huge active volcanoes and sits on a major faultline (Daddy, the elevation is for you J).  After landing, we went directly to Prambanan Temple.  Prambanan is a hindu temple or rather a grouping of many Hindu temples that are dedicated to different Hindu gods and goddesses.  Rebecca and I were mobbed by a group of 20 or so Indonesian middle-schoolers who were so excited about our fair skin that they wanted to take a million pictures with us.  We finally had to tell them we couldn’t take any more pictures with them because we had to rejoin our group.  I’m sure it was a sight to behold.

This is a picture of Julia, Me, Laura, and Rebecca sitting on a ledge of one of the temples:

            After enjoying the temple, we went to a small house that had been converted into a stage where we watched a leather puppet show.  If you’ve ever seen the movie, Year of Living Dangerously, then you may remember the shadow puppets that are used to tell stories.  We watched a religious story of the Ramayana, which is a Hindu epic.  It would be the equivalent of seeing a puppet show of the Odyssey for us in the western culture.  We quickly learned that leather puppeteering is really an artform.  There was traditional Indonesian music that has that quintessential eastern sound and involves many drums and gongs.  We were captivated by the intricacies of the shadows and the cultural importance of this art form.  Islam was spread to Indonesia mainly through the use of puppeteering.  We then walked across the dirt street, being careful to not collide with the wild chickens running around, and we walked through a labyrinthine passageway.  We arrived at a back porch of a house where a meal of traditional Indonesian food was laid out.  We were among palm trees, salamanders, and hand-carved wood.  It was one of my favorite meals.  After such a delicious meal, we checked into the Hyatt where we were greeted with guava juice and fresh jasmine garlands.  We took a quick swim before falling into bed because we had to rise early. Below is Julia with one of the leather puppets (Julia was my roommate for the Indonesia leg of our trip):

            We got up at 3:30am so we could arrive at Borobudur before dawn.  We walked up to the Buddhist temple in the dark with flashlights and climbed up to the fourth level to watch a glorious Indonesian sunrise over the volcanoes.  It was an incredible experience.  It was an incredible experience that I can’t really put into words so forgive my attempt to do the sunrise justice.  The night turned from twinkling stars to watercolor splashes of pink.  The pink gave way to molten-red rays and eventually to a brilliant orange-yellow.  A dense fog settled upon the trees in the valley below the temple. You can see the progression below:

This is Amy and Me.  We wore sarongs as we walked around the temple and marveled at the intricacy of the carving work and how the stones fit together tongue and groove:

Borobudur is seven levels.  As you can see below, the first four are rectangular and the next three are circular.  Within each little bell shaped part of the temple on the last three levels there is a praying Buddha.  Two of them have been exposed; below is an example of one of the exposed Buddhas:

After exploring Borobudur, we had a lovely traditional Yogyakarta breakfast in the hotel right next to it.  We then hopped back onto the bus where we slept until we arrived at a Batik factory.  Batik is a technique of dying and decorating fabric that is very famous in Indonesia.  Batik is truly an art form.  An average piece of Batik work takes over a month with multiple people working on it.  Batik is created by pressing or painting wax onto fabric, dipping the wax covered fabric into dye and repeating this multiple times until you have an intricate design.  

After finishing at the Batik factory, we went to the Tembi house of culture in a more rural part of Jogja where we went into a local museum of Yogyakarta art and culture.  We also hopped up on a Javanese Andong, a traditional horse cart.  The horses took us through a village of dirt and cobble stone streets.  We watched as the locals tended to rice patties and waved to us with smiling faces.

Later that evening, as we enjoyed a delicious dinner, we watched the Ramayana story again (same as the leather puppet show) but this time it was a dance.  The dancers danced among the tables and by the hotel pool.  We really felt like we were part of the story!

On Sunday, we got up early to catch an early flight from Yogyakarta to Kuala Lampur Malaysia.  We flew Air Asia, a budget carrier with seats where barely I could fit.  So you can imagine how much complaining our 6’3” and 6’5” classmates did!  Fortunately, we got to Kuala Lampur in one piece where we were anticipating spending an 8 hour plus layover.  Our administrative assistant, Chris, was able to rebook our next flight to leave much sooner but it involved us running through the Kuala Lampur airport to catch our flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

For some unknown reason Air Asia has an Oakland Raiders plane so this one's for you Dee:

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, which is the new name for Saigon.  As Professor Maillet described it, the name change would be akin to renaming Richmond, Virginia Lincolnville after the south lost the civil war.  It was incredibly hot and we were exhausted so we made our way to the Intercontinental and had a quick dinner of Pho (a traditional Vietnamese soup) before hitting the hay.   

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get these out but things have been really busy here in Siagon.

Thanks for sticking with me,

Love you guys,
Maddy