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Yogyakarta the cultural

Yogyakarta the cultural Now that we have tasted Yogyakarta’s amazing food, it was time to visit its incredible cultural heritage. First you need to get there, unfortunately the the two temple we wanted to visited were an hour away from yogyakarta and of course, an hour away in different direction… We could have gone there with a wide range of method but we chose the motorbike way! Cause who does not like to feel the breeze… The nice part about Yogyakarta is that we found a motorbike rental place that delivered the motorbike for a small fee (Cheaper than getting there by grab…) In the morning, with the transportation sorted, we hopped on the bike to our first destination.

The trip to get to Borobudur is more or less an hour long and you need a cooperative copilote (In our case me) that will hold on the phone with google map. Otherwise you will get lost. Fortunately for us at this point in our trip I didn’t need to hold on to Alexis with the full strength of both my arm to feel safe. So I was able to multitask and keep an eye/hand on the phone along the way. After a few missed turn (I may not be the best copilote in history….) we finally arrived in Borobudur. For parking, you need to park in one of the shop along the way… there’s no motorbike parking in the Borobudur compound, but don’t worry you won’t have problem finding a shop that will sell you a parking spot (for pretty cheap normally 2000-5000 IDR) It’s important to mention that there’s two different entrance for the temple. One for tourist/ foreigners and one for locals. The tourist tickets are more expensive but I recommend to take the double ticket which allows you to visit Prambanan (It’s cheaper than buying each ticket individually). It will cost you around 650 000 Rupiah for both temple for one person. In order to visit this temple, you need to be covered (Here’s more information about the dress code in Asia/Indonesia), I was wearing a long dress with a tank top style top and it was fine. Worst case scenario they lend clothing at the temple (for free).

Once you have paid, they give you a water bottle (That you will need!) and you are good to go visit the site. There’s a few temple on the site but the main one is Borobudur. It’s a huge Buddhist temple that date from the 8/9 Century!

Pretty impressive longevity for a temple, more so when you take into account the fact that indonesia have a lot of earthquakes. Most people just go up the stairs to get to the top, but if you take the time to stop at each floor and go around, you will found out that each sides of the walls have engravings and are sculpted magnifically and of course, none of them are the same!

They all picture different fable or story with incredible details and precision. I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to sculpt everything.

An important thing to remember while visiting is that you are exposed to the sun (directly) during the full length of the visite. So you will get dehydrated if you are not careful and you will sweat a lot! Once you get to the top of the temple you will get rewarded with an amazing view and the bell shaped sculpture that characterise this temple.

The temple are even more special once you realised that each of them are hollow and continued a sculpture of a praying monk.
Once we finished visiting all of the compound (around 2h) we decided to go back to the hotel instead of visiting the second temple right away. A lot of website recommend to get up early to see the sunrise at Borobudur and then visit Prambanan in the afternoon. (Entries for the sun rise are more expensive…) But we felt like in order to enjoy our visit of Prambanan, we needed to visit it an another day. (The tickets that we bought were valid for two days anyway…)

The next day came and we biked to Prambanan, which was a little bit closer than Borobudur. 40 minute away! That site has parking for motorbike. Once again, you will need to enter through the foreigner gate and present your ticket to get in. The site is more vast than the first one, but I have to admit, is a little bit less impressive.

The Borobudur is higher and more detailed. But in this hindu temple you have the opportunity to enter in each and every of the smaller temple which is pretty cool. I’m used to canadian or european historical site where you are barely allowed to look at the infrastructure. One thing that surprised us and kind of felt odd, is that in both of the temple there’s big speakers (even inside the temple) broadcasting the muslim prayer. For us it felt odd visiting an hindu temple with another religion in the background but hey, different culture.
Second thing we notice was exiting the sites… If you don’t like obligatory gift shop at the end of a museum, you may dislike the exit doors of those temple... This not a gift shop, but a maze. Hundred of tiny shops with the least instruction possible on how to get out. In the Prambanan temple, we got out through the entrance to avoid a second maze. It literally took us 20 minutes in Borobudur to get out of the vendor maze.
We felt resourced in Yogyakarta with the culture, the food and some time to cool off. We were now ready for the next step in our trip; Probolinggo!