After the nightmare of Probo Lingo, things could only get better. We took a 10 hour minivan ride to Yoyakarta, it was unremarkable. We found our hotel at around 5:00 a.m. and settled in. It had aircon, as was sealed from mosquitos. It was divine. The next few days we spent in a much needed relaxing fashion. We ate good food, had coffee, read some fiction, and generally took it easy.
During this time I reflected on how much focus was placed on the idea of "transport" in Indonesia. Every single Indonesian related to tourism asks you "Hello! Where are you going? Transport?"
I have heard "where are you going?" enough times to last a lifetime. The food vendors are for some reason passive, but anyone related to transportation are very enthused about getting your business.
We went on a tour to see some famous Hindu ruins and a very large buddhist temple one day. To describe them whould take too many words, but we took pictures worth tens of thousands. It was a good experience. It was the first tour I had been on, and it was pretty good. It saved on stress for finding our own transportation. I don't think tours are always the right way to go, but in that case it was.
Our last day there we went to a government school of artwork to pick up some "batik" art. It is a very complex dying process and the end result are elaborate pictures on thin fabric. When put on a window to catch sunlight some of them are quite pretty. We picked up a few of them, and Anita got an expensive one. Our last night we saw the Hindu opera "Ramayana", a heroic romance play. It was okay but didn't hold a candle to the one we saw in Ubud on Bali. Its interesting to see how dated the ethics are in the play. In the last scene, the "princess" was rescued from her captors, however our fair prince Rama was not sure of her purity. He thought she might had got it on with her captor and didn't want used goods. So, she threw herself into a fire. Luckily, the god Brahma knew she was pure, so put out the fire. And they lived happily ever after. Hehe.
After Indonesia we spent a day in Singapore, then took a bus to Kuala Lumpur.
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