The City of Culture

Water Castle

Other side of the castle viewed from the tower

Jogjakarta is well known as Indonesia’s cultural city. Indeed, there are many temples, mosques, local music, local art, and food for your enjoyment and consumption. On our first night in our hostel, we met a French couple who had also just arrived in Jogja. They were yet another couple on a long, somewhat endless, South East Asian vacation –but one of the first we were to meet. They had plans for the next day to rent a scooter and drive around the city just seeing what was around, heading in the direction of Prambanan, one of the two major temples of Jogja on every Top 10 list of the area.
We had organised precisely nothing so we decided to tag along.

Batik under construction

Artist and his work

First step was the water castle/palace. I don’t really know any of the history of this palace or what it was about, there were many empty rooms, some of them set up with displays of bedrooms, so I’m not sure who it was for. But it was nice to see and interesting architecture as the whole building was based around 2 or 3 large pools, depending on how you count. The ground also included an art shop and “studio”. The art shop was predominantly batik artworks and hide carvings. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of the completed artworks, but photos of the work in progress were welcomed.

Graphic Tee shop

Small streets of Jogja

In the narrow walking streets outside of the palace we came across an independent graphic t-shirt shop. Many of their designs were pretty cool but the only ones in our sizes were printed on very dark clothing – colours we try to avoid in the heat.

Hole-in-the-ground Mosque

After having a cool drink in the shade, we continued wandering the walking streets to find the “secret” underground mosque. The mosque is not so much underground as it is a hole in the ground with some tunnels leading in to it. It is allegedly one of the or even the oldest mosque in Jogja. I’m not sure if it is still used for organised religious gatherings today, but it is not super well maintained so probably not.

Mimi was thinking of exporting this to China, hence product photo

As we made our way back to our scooters, we began talking to a local art teacher. Every second local you meet in Jogja is an art teacher, and if you tell them you’re from Australia they have a brother or sister in *your mentioned home town*. I’m not sure how this is possible but it didn’t really make sense as a scam (if it was supposed to be a scam it never eventuated), but these art teachers were always friendly and happy to have a chat. This particular guy told us his uncle owns a coffee plantation outside of town and specialises in luwak coffee – the same poo coffee I’ve talked about before. The family run processing plant and café was just around the corner from where we were, and our French compadres hadn’t come across it yet so wanted to have a try. I wasn’t super interested given how bad I realised the last one in Bali was, but maybe this would be different.

Ethical(?) Luwak Coffee Producer

The owner of the coffee plantation was really friendly and seemed to care a lot more than the other plantation about his luwaks. He told us about how much space he has on his land for a limited amount of luwaks, and the only ones in cages at the processing place were there for treatment to stay healthy. I have now researched further and allegedly there is no such thing as ethical or safe luwak coffee. The coffee beans are never the first choice of food for the luwaks and they have to be force fed coffee beans by denying them access to fresh fruit. They get sick without fresh fruit and so the luwaks at the processing station were probably getting treated with fresh fruit as they were sick from the coffee.

Prambanan Temple sticking up above the city

By the time we finished at the luwak coffee cafe, the day was already getting on so we decided to head straight for Prambanan. Prambanan is a large temple complex of very old Hindu temples. As you head towards it, the main temple sticks up out in the air above many buildings, fences, and powerlines as this alien structure off in the distance. There was a major price discrepancy for locals as there is for foreigners, (50 USD for foreigners, less than 5USD for Indonesians) and even separate gates for entry. Unfortunately, the huge price difference didn’t seem to go to anything like proper preservation and restoration of the temples, but instead went to useless things like making an air conditioned building for the foreigners entrance – thereby justifying the huge cost for foreigners.

Mimi at the first temple site we visited

Showcase of Indonesian restoration efforts, glad to see those fees for foreigners put to good use.

Still, the complex was pretty amazing to walk around. It was nice to be in a place where the rubbish was cleaned up and the grounds taken care of. There were four temple sites, each of them slightly different and in various states of array. I believe that all the temples on site have been restored to a large degree, or look like they are in the process of it. It seems that the restoration process is neither art nor science as intricate carved stones were often just replaced with stones cut to a very basic shape, and I think a lot of mixing and matching has gone on as well.

Our crew for the day

Lots of restoration and rebuilding to go here.

Hard to capture how large this last site truly is.

Of the temple sites within the Prambanan grounds, two were smallish temples with 15 to 20 separate buildings within. One was a large temple surrounded by hundreds of small worship altars, mostly in ruins. And the last was finally the enormous temple, most often recognised as "Prambanan", that I mentioned could be seen off in the distance. After having a buffet lunch at the restaurant within the grounds, we walked the ‘regular’ route backwards, starting with the smaller temples and ending with the major temple. I think this was nicer as the smaller temples had almost noone in them; while the major temple was completely crowded with people taking selfies or swarming me for photos with a white man. I try not to care about other people taking selfies all the god damn time, but it really is hard to experience what a place has to offer when everyone is standing in front of the best viewpoints, looking away from the thing you’re trying to see, holding a phone in front of you on a stick. Just my personal opinion.

Golden hour of sunlight.

Unfortunately, the distant ground for afternoon sunlight is inaccessible, resulting in many backlit photos like this.

Ancient and modern

We stayed around at Prambanan until the sunset. We were planning to ride up to the hills to see Prambanan from a distance with the sunset behind it, but we lost each other somewhere in the large temple, so ended up just staying there until dawn. We took a route along small roads back into town, a little worried about driving in the dark. Turns out this smaller road was fine, there was almost noone on it. The real problem was the visor of my helmet was terrible, so I had the choice everything being completely blurry, or constantly getting bugs in my eyes.
The next day we were planning on taking it easy, feeling a little exhausted from moving around so much. Whether we wanted it or not, we ended up being trapped inside as the nearby Mt Merapi had had a minor eruption. The smoking column could be seen off in the distance, and falling ash was visible everywhere you looked. Local authorities had warned that this ash contained silica, and so people should not head outside. So we packed our bags incase things were going to get worse, and waited for things to clear up. Luckily it did not get worse and soon there were reports saying it was okay to be outside provided you wore a dust mask.

One of the late kings many cars, see the white ash on the bonnet

We took the opportunity to head out and went to see the Royal Palace. We did notice that although there was still visible ash falling, locals didn’t seem to care about it and wore no protective gear at all. We hired a guide at the palace, and he told us that 5 years ago the same volcano erupted, but the ash released piled up 50 centimeters high on the ground. He reasoned this was why he and noone else cared about the small amounts of ash falling now.
The tour was short and insightful, but not all too interesting. On display were many different royal garments used for many different occasions and ceremonies. One point of interest was seeing the ceremonial chambers for the circumcisions of the princes and princesses when they came of age. Of course, it was explained how this is somewhat archaic, and so for the women they simply put ginger or other herbs down there to create a tingly feeling, and for the men they use a sharpened piece of bamboo to slice through. Things really have come a long way!

One of the master students at the Royal Art School and his work

One of my favourites in the school's showroom, although not produced through fully traditional methods

Following the tour of the grand palace, we were fortunate to visit on a day that the royal art school display room was open. Here you could see, and purchase, artworks from those studying at the academy funded by the king himself. The artworks are predominantly traditional style batiks, but with more modern and contemporary pieces as well.

Gudeg at the Royal Palace restaurant

My favourite part of visiting the palace, was going to a restaurant within the palace walls. The restaurant is white table cloth dining at a very affordable price, where the kitchen is the same used for food preparation for the royals. Here you can enjoy a meal quite literally fit for a king, and this restaurant was surprisingly empty. We had a serving of gudeg – a very fragrant dish originating in Jogja, along with a soup and traditional cold ginger tea.

Street food: Ronde - a gelatinous ball served in ginger soup

Although it had subsided a lot by that point, we still weren’t super excited by the idea of walking around in volcanic ash and so relaxed back at our hostel for the early afternoon. Soon it had all cleared, and we headed over to one of the well known market streets. This was pretty disappointing over all and although there was some good food around, there wasn’t anything particularly unique to Jogja. The rest of the goods available were the same souvenirs we had seen in every semi-developed tourist area in Indonesia so far.

Borobudur from a distance

The stupas and stupids of Borobudor

Stupas

Our final day in Jogja began with a very early wake up, 4 am! We had booked to join a sunrise tour to Borobudur. Borobudur is a large temple comprised of many stupas and buddha images. According to information on site, the religious group it was built by is unknown along with many other details about its history and origins. Wikipedia disagrees and has a lot more information about the temple than any of the signs around the temple grounds. Nevertheless, it is a very scenic temple, and we paid for the most expensive option to see the sunrise from atop the temple. This was well worth seeing and I think it was a more interesting site than Prambanan in terms of the shape and structure.

The sun rising, Mt Merapi smoking in the distance

What made the sunrise particularly nice for us was that the sun rises over Mount Merapi, and so we could still see it smoking away from its minor eruption a day earlier. After the sun came up and we walked around the different layers of the temple, we explored the rest of the grounds. Here we visited a museum about some of the excavation and restoration of Borobudur. It was interesting to learn that the rediscovery and excavation of Borobudur was by British occupants of Java and Dutch colonists.

Monk's equivalent of flashing

Despite the fact that many buddha statues, relief stones, and other sculptures were “stolen” from the site, it was the British and the Dutch who unearthed, excavated, restored, and guarded the site. I dare say that the temple would not be anywhere near its current condition if it weren’t for the work of the historians and engineers present with the Java occupation. The temple is very impressive and was a really nice way to spend the early morning. Many talk about its ancient mystery and mystical feelings at the temple, but this goes away pretty fast when you read about how many times it has been reconstructed and restored in the last 100 years.

"Special" Breakfast

Our tour of Borobudur ended with a breakfast included with the sunrise entrance ticket. Knowing we would be hungry after getting up so early, we had even paid extra on top of our tour for a ‘special’ breakfast. The special part was a plate of fruit and a plate of very dry pancakes. It was so underwhelming that we didn’t even realise that we had eaten the special breakfast until our driver told us our time was up and we had to go.
We had a very easy afternoon, and decided where to go next. We were planning on having Mt Bromo as our next stop and knew there was a decent way to see it from a town we could take the train to from Jogja. Unfortunately for us another public holiday spoiled those plans and again the train tickets we wanted were sold out. Instead we booked a shared minivan to a town north of Jogja that we knew nothing about called Ambawara. More about that next time.