Jakarta - Bandung - Yogyakarta

21/01/13 to 25/01/13 – We landed at Jakarta in the early evening and immediately took a bus east. We’d heard about the floods in Jarkata and decided to avoid it completely, although we did get a view of the skyline from the flyover and sampled the heavy congestion as we got stuck in traffic for the best part of two hours. Finally we arrived in Bandung late at night and immediately found a hotel to crash in. Back to life on the road after the luxury of Singapore, as we spent a good five minutes trying to rid our bathroom of a huge cockroach.
Bandung had lots of big colourful statues of superheroes and fantasy characters outside its shops. We don’t know why, but they added some colour to the place. We went to the train station and after a nice lunch in the centre of town, we took a train as most of the sights we wanted to see were in east Java (and trains were limited and journey times were long). We arrived in Yogyakarta (or Yogya as the locals call it) at midnight and checked into a lovely losmen (hotel) with typical Javanese décor and a lovely pool with lizard mosaics on the bottom.

The next day we took it easy and browsed around the city, taking in the old dutch fort, the palace and browsing around the many shops selling traditional Javanese stuff. We also visited an art group were they were producing traditional Bhatik paintings and we saw the technique for making them.

On advice from a nice local man, we went to the area of Kota Baru (meaning ‘new town’) and ate in a restaurant there. It was very cheap, meaning we could try lots of dishes, including chicken and liver sate (or satay), an unusual beef curry and some interesting drinks (a coffee including kidney beans and an non-alcoholic beer made from Jasmine).
The main reason we came to this part of Java was Borobudur, an ancient temple from the 9th century and even today it’s the largest Buddhist temple in the world (so we are told). We were lucky as we timed our visit perfectly to miss the rain, and although the view of the volcanoes in the distance was obscured by cloud, we were still able to climb the temple and appreciate the stone carvings and the surrounding lush green scenery. The temple had been restored following earthquakes and we could appreciate what a big 3D jigsaw puzzle it must have been to put it back together again.

The following morning we visited the Kratan, the sultan’s palace, before going to another ancient temple, this time a Hindu one, Prambaman. Again we were lucky with the weather for most of the day, and visitied a couple of smaller nearby temples, before the heavens opened and we had to run for cover. We ran under a shack at the side of the road and a women offered us some lychees to buy. We tried them and they were very nice, so we bought a bunch and munched on them why we waited for the rains to subside. Before they did, some security staff offered us a lift on the back of their truck, which had a roof and kept us dry as they gave us a lift back to the main temple. The rains eased a bit and we were able to walk around the (now very wet) temple. We had to wear hard hats for one of the towers as it was only classed as ‘relatively stable’ after previous earthquakes.

That night we were due to take a train, but we had a few hours to kill in the evening so we decided to go to a restaurant where they served snake as we’d wanted to try it for a long time. We ordered barbequed Python and Cobra. It was actually very nice. Python tasted a bit like eel but with a more rubbery texture (similar to that of squid), and Cobra was a bit fiddly due to the bones, but was more flaky in texture like fish.

Then we watched a reggae band that were very good and seemed to have a decent local following before catching our train.