Day 48: Yogyakarta - sickness strikes, and cycling to the temples

It seems that if you spend a few weeks in South East Asia, you’re eventually going to get sick, and Sarina and Tiger were struck down overnight. They were out of action for the day, so I headed out for a cycle.

We are staying in a guesthouse called Omah Konco, which is an old house inside the Sultan’s Palace walls. The owner, Okie (guessing the spelling!) was a keen cyclist and offered to take us for a ride out to some of the temples. As the rest of the family were not available I jumped on Tiger’s bike and Okie and I set off to the east of the city.

Cycling in Jogya was a very pleasant experience. The traffic seemed more calm than I’m used to and very organised. There was still all the usual scooters cutting corners and lots of beeping horns, but everyone kept within a set fo rules and there was no drama. Okie said it’s down to a fundamental respect for others that underlines Javanese society, and I think he may have a point.

After about 15km we were out in the country. First we passed Prambanan Temple. This one is famous and it was starting to receive its daily quota of tourists. It has three tall towers, resembling the construction of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Impressive.

We carried on to a beautiful little temple called Plaosan Temple, a little further down the road. It was almost deserted and I was able to explore and take photos with only one or two other visitors around. This temple was originally Hindu, but had been amended when the Buddhists arrived around 800AD.

A lovely ride back with Okie, surfing the waves of traffic as is only safely possible in Asian countries, it seems.

During the ride, Okie had pointed out that our plan to catch a train to Jakarta and then ferry to Singapore was quite complicated compared to catching a direct flight. He had a point.

A little bit of exploration on the internet and we’d booked three flights to Changi airport, Singapore for Thursday.

In the evening we went to watch a performance of the Indonesian puppet theatre. The usual play would take 10 hours, but they’d divided the story up into smaller pieces to make it more consumable by tourists. The puppets are incredibly detailed, and you can choose to watch from the front and see the puppeteer and gamelan orchestra, or view the shadows from the other side of the screen - which is what we chose.

The puppeteer manages to make the shadows incredibly expressive considering how simple their construction is, with singing, dialogue and sound effects all thrown in.

We must confess we didn’t quite make it to the end of the performance. Over an hour in we’d lost track of the plot a little, all speech being in the local Bahasian dialect, and we made a quiet exit.