Temple Tourism...

Saturday morning I met the wonderful Danielle, a Dutch backpacker, while eating breakfast. We exchanged stories and spent the morning together by the pool talking and reading. Some time after lunch we headed off to do our own thing. I was going to go find an Indonesia mobile phone while she went on a shopping trip.  Before leaving though we decided to sign up for the temple tour that our guesthouse offers. We would be leaving out the next morning at 5 am, visit the Borobudur and Prambanan temples and then be back before the hottest part of the day.

With my sleeping habits still out of whack it was surprisingly easy to get up and ready to go at a quarter till five in the morning.  We were given a packed breakfast by the guesthouse and then jumped into a van with 5 other tourists. Our first stop Borobudur was about 47 km out of town and we spent about an hour and a half getting there. Not surprisingly there was quite a lot of traffic on the road at that time of morning and with all the stop and go it was impossible to sleep. But we arrived at Borobudur at around 8 am and headed in to take a look.

This temple is Indonesia’s most visited tourist attraction, and I thought the more beautiful of the two. It was built during the 9th century and is a Buddhist monument made up for 9 levels. The first six were square and I believe symmetrical while the top three were circular. Danielle and I walked around on some of the lower levels looking at the carvings and statues.  Apparently they tell different Buddhist stories and represent Buddhism by becoming more pure as you reach the higher levels.  

Walking around on the higher levels was a bit of a challenge seeing there were flocks of school children and we were instant celebrities. A wave of small children would follow us around asking to be taken pictures with and in some cases adults would too.  I really felt as if the Indonesian paparazzi were after us!  

Once our time was up we jumped back in the van and set off on what must have been a two-hour drive back and through Yogyakarta and onwards to Prambanan. This temple was also built around the 9th century, but is a Hindu temple. We visited the main temple area, but there were apparently a lot of smaller temples in the area.  We were allowed to enter into some of the "towers," most of them were empty while others had statues within them.  

By this time we were also approaching midday and the heat was unbearable. We practically ran from shady spot to shady spot.  The only problem was that every time you stopped for more then two minutes a crowd of people would start targeting in on you. Wanting to talk a bit and take pictures of you.  Towards the end we started specifying that we would only do group photos and even then we were getting good at catching sight of them and heading in the opposite direction. Finally we met up with some people Danielle knew who were also doing the tour that day. Heading back to the van we joked about what we thought Indonesians do with their pictures of us.  Maybe they show us to their grandchildren and explain that this is tourist #54 from the year 2011 or maybe children collect and trade us like cards.  Who know!  

We had to push start the van to get it started. Thankfully it was only a 30-minute drive back to Prambanan guesthouse and the swimming pool.  I spent the rest of the day by it and went out for dinner with Danielle and a friend of hers.  Lovely day as a celebrity-tourist!