Temples on the Hill

On our last night in Jogjakarta, we booked a so called travel car to an arbitrary place in the direction we wanted to travel – North. The travel car concept was something we learned from a good Samaritan who had previously given us a lift. He gave us magic words in Bahasa Indonesian to type into google to find cheap and direct minivans that would take us from door to door between close but not too close cities. Our destination was Ambarawa, a small village on a large lake almost directly north of Jogja, halfway to the North coast of Java.

We were ready well before our scheduled pick up time, and about an hour after our scheduled pick up time and some very accusatory phone calls between the driver and our hostel hosts, the van came to pick us up. Once we were in the car we made it to the city without a hassle. We’d booked one of the very few accommodations in the town on booking.com for a few nights with little idea of what we could do there.
I don’t have a lot to say about Ambarawa, it was a pretty nice little town, not really all as small as we expected. Much to our delight, the host of the guesthouse we stayed in was extremely friendly, helpful, and accommodating. We had hoped to rent a scooter to look around, but our host Amin told us there were no such hire places nearby and just let us take his. He also gave us a good list of places to see, places we probably wouldn’t have found on our own.

Many colours, no editing needed

Fishing with an air rifle

The first evening we spent down on the lake at an area set up for the local youth to hang out and take photos. The ‘cute place to take photo’ industry is really taking off in Indonesia, it seems every small town you go to at least four exist. Many of these places are extremely gimmicky and literally have no other draw except to go and take photos for likes on social media. In some cases, there is a scenic lookout or recreational area that has these elements added on. But there are many individual operators who just create a nice garden and then hang a bicycle above a platform you can sit on or put a big ribbon around a giant sling shot and a garden chair. The pinnacle of this is the two tourist traps you see in every remotely touristic city in Asia of “upside down world” and “3D trick eye museum”.

The lake at the dock

The lake at the dock (note the heart shape to sit under for photos)

Mimi doesn't need any gimmicks to look good

The place on the lake we went to wasn’t one of these gimmicky places, it was a large dock used by local fisherman that had been painted in nice colours. Fisherman here had two styles of fishing: traditional pole fishing from long boats, and fishing with an air gun, hook and line. This second one was pretty impressive to watch. We watched fisherman and the sunset before heading in for the night.

Swing gimmick

The truth.

What can we do with fake rocks?

Make postcard worthy photos.

Mimi didn't get low enough to get the desired effect from the infinity pool

One of the recommendations from our host Amin was a scenic lookout spot. What we didn’t know was that this spot was one of those gimmicky photo places, but at least this one was actually worth the visit! It’s actual draw being the view, we were pretty happy to go in. The gimmicks this time were fake rocks, swings, and an infinity pool that was actually really good to cool down in.

Part of the fort now in ruins and unused

Delicious Sop Buah, cold sweet fruity dessert

Random dish happened to be delicious, I love it when that works out.

Ambarawa is yet another place in Indonesia where the effect of the Dutch occupation remains strong. An old Dutch army base is still in use by the Indonesian army – I was too scared to take a photo of their impressive line up of tanks. Fort Willem I is a fort that is in ruins in some places, and still stands strong as housing for some locals in others. We tried to get in to the still standing part but we were blocked by an old woman who was trying to make us pay her exorbitant amounts of money for a ticket. She couldn’t show us any ticket book or what ticket we would be given for our money, and every other local we spoke to told us there was no ticket, so that was a little annoying.

Mimi with her new job as train ticket salesman

All aboard!

Along with the Army base and fort, there is also an old out of use rail line that runs through the city. Again built by the Dutch and sadly gone to ruins. An amazing railway museum on the old train station showcases what the railway was like and the effort of mainly volunteer historical organisations to repair and preserve the railways so far. It also has an impressive collection of German, English, and Dutch tank engines from the last 100 years.

Proud Mary

Another unexpected addition to this town is a Catholic presence. This presence is made clear by the biggest statue of the Virgin Mary I have ever seen, along with a park depicting certain bible stories of Jesus Christ such as “Fish again?”, “Jesus Christ, you never help us”, and “Oh my God! Get down from there. I can’t watch!”

I mentioned that in Jakarta we made several visits to various immigration departments of Malaysia in Jakarta so that Mimi could apply for a visa. This was to no avail and the advice from all departments was “apply online”. If you look at the Malaysian immigration website, it does in fact say that Chinese nationals can apply for a tourist eVisa to Malaysia from anywhere in the world. What made us dubious was that when you do this it asks you for your current address, and the only country it lets you select is the one you are in. So for Mimi, she put the address of the hostel we were staying in at the time. Other required documents for an eVisa application are entry and exit flight tickets, along with confirmed accommodation bookings. So on our last night in Ambarawa, we threw away our ferry tickets we had bought for Jakarta to Singapore, threw away our hopes of returning to Jakarta, and took a dive and bought flight tickets out of Indonesia to Kuala Lumpur, still with enough time for us to finish the parts of Java we wanted to see, along with flight tickets from Kuala Lumpur to Krabi, Thailand. Not a super cheap investment to gamble on what had already proven to be a pretty poor immigration system. We entered all these details, paid the mighty fee, and sent it off into the aether, hoping for a good outcome in a few days.

View heading up the mountain

We decided we would go spend a night up a nearby mountain to visit the Gedong Songo temples. In hindsight, we realised we could’ve just done this as a day trip with the scooter, but hindsight is something you don’t have in advance. We called a grab car to take us up to the small village at the base of the Gedong Songo temple complex.

View from our hotel room

It was an easy 30 minute drive, and while driving we tried to explain to the driver that we would give him some extra money if he would take us between a few different hotels so that we could ask for prices and find somewhere decent (there is nothing advertised online). We thought he understood us, but this was evidently not clear when we got to the carpark of the temple and all just sat in the car waiting for something to happen. When it was obvious to the driver that he didn’t understand us, he left the car and soon came back with a woman named Rani who worked in a restaurant on the temple ground who spoke quite good English. She helped explain to the driver what we wanted to do, and then actually came with us to find a hotel. We ended up finding a decent hotel with a spectacular view that might’ve actually been our cheapest stay in Indonesia. We thanked the driver and paid him a little extra, and told Rani we would come find her restaurant at the temple for some food.

The second set of temples

We relaxed a little then walked back up to the temple ground. The restaurants seemed to be situated around the exit of the temple grounds, so we walked in there looking for Rani. We couldn’t find her and before we knew it we had inadvertently entered the temple ground without paying the huge foreigners entrance fee. We figured it was late in the afternoon already and wouldn’t be on the grounds too long, so didn’t feel too bad about paying the ridiculous entrance fee.

The third temple viewed from the fourth temple

Gedong Songo is a series of seven small temples spread out over five sites up a mountain walk. The scenery is spectacular from the bottom and only gets better as you continue your ascent. A relatively easy mountain climb with the paved path but still a walk up the mountain regardless.
I had seen there was one accommodation in this region online, but could find no details about it and it seemed to be located on the temple ground. We didn’t really believe that could be true until we finally saw an advertisement for the accommodation with a price list some way into the temple ground, a ground with a ticketed entrance for foreigners. Probably not the best way to do business but this is Indonesia. We’d already checked into our cheap hotel anyway but we were curious to go and look at this accommodation, particularly since we’d gotten a freebie entrance and hadn’t managed to find Rani yet. So off we went at our decent enough pace on to the accommodation. It was a fair way up but nothing compared to the whole loop.

The final temple

When we got to the accommodation area, we found it was another ticketed area of the ground as it had been set up as a gimmicky photo shoot location. Because of this, the guy at the front wouldn’t let us go in and look at the bungalows on site for fear we might take photos without paying him. We spent a few minutes trying to talk to this gate man and convince him we didn’t want to take gimmicky photos, when who comes running up to us? Rani.
Now Rani wasn’t the most fit of people. Some might even call her fat. This coupled with the fact that she is Muslim and so was wearing jeans, a long shirt, and a headscarf, meant she was huffing and sweating by the time she reached us. She told us she’d seen us walking up and had been trying to catch us for the last 15 minutes. We told her we had been looking for her restaurant and we were just about to head back down. We also knew there was a hot spring at the top of the walk, so wanted to get our swimmers and head up there after eating. In spite of this Rani insisted we do the whole loop right then and eat at her restaurant after and that she would take us to the hot spring tomorrow so that we didn’t have to pay an entrance fee.
We figured she was actually being nice to us and trying to offer us hospitality, so we gave in and did the whole loop. It wasn’t ideal because we were both a bit hungry, and we were also going at a fairly slow pace walking with Rani,  and we would be doing the whole thing again the next day to go to the hot springs, but we enjoyed the walk anyway. Rani told us some information about the temples, including a mysterious ghost temple that only some can see, but she didn’t know a lot. Her entire family lives in the area and we seemed to meet them all along the way, but she and her family are all Muslim now and so their knowledge of the temples and their purposes have vanished.
After the walk we ate some food at Rani’s restaurant, including satay rabbit, and chatted a little. Eventually we began heading back to our hotel before Rani interjected and asked us to come to her house to see her foal. At this stage we felt Rani was legitimately trying to be friendly. We went along and we were eventually invited in for a cup of tea. Finally we left to our hotel and Rani and her daughter invited themselves along with us. Walking and talking, when we got to the hotel Rani asked if she could come up to see what our hotel room was like. Having been already invited into her home, we figured we should oblige the same way, and so continued the conversation upstairs. This didn’t last too long as we indicated we really wanted to have a bit of a rest, and ended with an invitation to dinner at Rani’s house. We didn’t have anything else to do and had no idea where else to find food, so accepted this offer. Dinner was a very simple fried rice with egg. We thought we would be eating with the family but in the end it was only Mimi and me who ate, so we guessed it really was a kind gesture from a person who was obviously not doing great. While there, we spoke of all sorts of things, Rani told us about her deceased sister, her Australian brother-in-law, financial debt, her plans for future business, her plans for more future children. We sat and listened and offered any advice where we could, particularly on how to attract foreign tourists in a business. All in all a decent enough evening. We agreed on a time to meet the next morning to go up to the hot springs, and then headed off to our hotel for a nights rest.

Running ahead for a photo ><

We woke the next morning to a pretty incredible view, which was nice after having had the kind of sleep you expect from the cheapest hotel in Indonesia. We packed our bags ready to check out later and headed up to Rani’s place. When we arrived, Rani didn’t seem to be around. We waited a while and eventually she came out of her front door. A little while later we eventually left.
We were taken along a dirt path used by those who farm the land of the temple, Rani’s way of sneaking us past the ticket office. It was at this moment that the kicker happened. We were walking along when Rani said to me “Alex, I need to go to the market later to buy some food for dinner, can you come and help me out?” We had already talked about going to the local market and we were pretty interested in seeing an actual Indonesian food market rather than the many tourist heavy markets we’d been to. I said something like “sure we can, what do you need us to do?” The answer? “I need money for chicken”.
By this point, Mimi and I had already been discussing with each other that we should give Rani some money, if not for showing us around but at least for dinner. But when she suddenly asked after showing us so much hospitality, we were both in in a bit of shock. I think Rani read this off our reactions and she suddenly got defensive, telling us that because of her we hadn’t paid any ticket and so we should give her the money for the ticket instead. It went on a little until I said something like we’ll see what we can do. We kept walking up to the hot spring where only Mimi and I went for a swim, but the whole relationship now seemed tainted. It was a really sad way for things to turn and we still feel a little used by the whole experience.
After finishing the walk the second time we went back to our hotel with Rani following us telling us we should go to the market with her and that we could drive her motorbike down the big mountain. Eventually she listened to me saying that I didn’t want to do that and she “helped” by telling a guy in a truck who was about to leave from our hotel to give us a lift down to the market. This guy already seemed to be willing to help us out when I spoke to him and before Rani had, but now Rani was telling me that I should be giving him money as well. I gave Rani some amount of money and we jumped in the truck trying to get away as quick as possible.

Exploring the marketplace

How you might look after eating this chicken

Waiter, waiter, there's a fish in my box of flies

When the driver dropped us off at the market, he refused the money that I tried to give him. Thanks for the tip Rani. We ended up wandering the market a bit, even with Rani in tow. When she did buy chicken, she made sure to buy only the amount worth of what I had given her, and then said to me “I hope this will be enough”. We were getting really annoyed so made our way back to the bus station which was thankfully very close to the market, and jumped on the first bus back to Ambarawa. We stayed in Ambarawa one more night at the same guesthouse as before and we were really happy to be back in the company and true hospitality of Amin.

Repaired bicycles

You know a man is serious about work when he's wearing greasy overalls

That last afternoon we spent a bit of time perusing local shops. It was really warming to see many shops selling used goods rather than the usual mentality of ‘throw it out buy it new’ that is bad back home but has plagued Indonesia. There were some very nice bicycles in very good condition for sale. I was more amused by a tech refurbishment shop that had a lot of relics. No only were there plenty of old tape players and walkmans, but there was an impressive collection of cassette tapes including “The Very Best of Kenny Rogers” right along side “Coneheads”.

Refurbished Walkmans

Serious cassette tape collection

What collection could you call complete without these classics?

Oh yeah, when we got back to our hotel we were able to get back online, something we couldn’t do while at Gedong Songo and its surrounds. Mimi opens her email to find an email from the Malaysia eVisa system, asking her to log on to view a message. She logged in to find there were even more required documents to process her application. What did they want this time? A kitas – that is, an Indonesian work visa. The same thing that the various immigration departments we visited in Indonesia required for their system. So, Chinese nationals working in Indonesia have 3 different and distinct avenues to apply for a tourist visa to Malaysia. Tourists in Indonesia have 0 ways of applying for a tourist visa to Malaysia. So Mimi booked a ticket back to China for the same day we had tickets to Indonesia. And that’s why I ended up travelling Malaysia alone.

Coming up next: why you should never go to any place that keeps animals in Indonesia.