F&G: Yogyakarta

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Fritz, John, and I arrived in Yogyakarta on time Sunday afternoon after a very pleasant seven hour train ride in the rain. We passed by many rice paddies and mountains in the distance. Yoygakarta/Jogjakarta is a university city of almost 400,000 people and feels noticeably more rural than Jakarta. We arrived to Via Via’s guesthouse in Yogya around 4pm, dropped off our luggage, and walked ½ k or so to meet up with Fritz’s Madison-Java friends: Steve, another UW ethnomusicologist currently completing research in Java, and his wife, Sakti, who grew up a few hours from Yogya and is great tour guide of the area, along with Claire, an anthropologist also here for research whom Fritz met two summers ago during his Tagalog classes at SEASSI. We had a great time over dinner telling stories from our shared Madison and Southeast Asia experiences. Steve and Sakti live in Surabaya but took the train down to Yogya to overlap with our visit. We met up with Steve and Sakti Monday morning to visit the Sultan’s Palace or Kraton. We arrived in time to catch part of a very traditional gamelan concert, which we broke up with a tour through the palace’s museum (video 1, video 2, video 3). Sakti found us an Indonesian restaurant for lunch located inside of an enormous family home. The owner of the home is brothers with the current sultan of Yogya. Yogya is known for tempe and we enjoyed a few different varieties of it with our meal, our favorite being the darker variety. After lunch we set out for some intense batik shopping. Sakti took us first to a less expensive batik market/department store, where we felt completely overwhelmed by the choices available. After an hour browsing we moved onto an upscale batik boutique (fun to say outloud) where the price was a bit higher, but the batik of a much better quality…and many fewer options. Fritz bought two attractive batik shirts and a nice batik tie—not to be worn together—and we called it a day. We took a brief break at our guest house and met back up with the full Madison-Java crew again for dinner at nearby touristy place named Hani’s, which had some of the best dense bread we’ve been able to find since Manila. It feels like we keep mentioning bread, or the lack of it, in our posts, but we really do miss it.

Dinner didn’t run too late as we had scheduled our driver for Borobudur to pick us up at 5am this morning, which you can read about here and here. We were on the road by 5:15 and the sun was already starting to rise. We were told Borobudur looks especially beautiful in the light at sunrise and sunset. The sun had already risen fully by the time we entered the temple complex around 6:30am. Visitors are encouraged to wind up the temple clockwise before reaching the grand stupa at the top. The temple was built in the eight century and we were impressed not only by the level of detail in the stone blocks, but also that each heavy stone piece was put in place by hand.

After napping back at ViaVia we had lunch at Hani’s and then set out to Super Indo for some fruit. We were excited to find lanzones—no longer in season in Manila—and more mangosteens. We devoured all of the lanzones and mangosteens back at ViaVia. We don’t have too much planned for tomorrow morning and will catch our plane for Bali at 4pm later on in the day.