Indonesian Experience II - Discover the beauty of Yogyakarta (English/German)

English Version

Hi Everyone,

as all of us are currently very restricted in our travels because of the pandemic or in our case also because of our new family member, my wife and I decided to write up one of our last big trips to Indonesia. So all of you can at least experience some of the beauty of our world at home while we enjoy the memories doing this. 😀

As we spent quite a bit of time in Indonesia for our trip, we will create a series of about 8 different posts over time each with a different focus depending on your interest.

This is post 2 of this series. We recommend starting with Post 1 - Bukit Lawang.

Feel free to "Follow" us if you like this post and want to read about our later adventures in the following posts.

We wanted to keep discovering new places in Indonesia after a fantastic stay in Sumatra. And there is plenty to choose from with the ~17,000 islands the country consists of. We decided to travel to Java and the city Yogyakarta, affectionally called Yogya by her inhabitants.

Yogja is a lively city with a lot of students that successfully blends tradition, history and culture together. The cultural highlights range from Borobodur, which is the biggest buddhist temple in the world, to the old sultans palce of Taman Sari and the biggest hindu temple of indonesia Prambanan. We did not want to miss a single one of these.

Browsing the APP "Withlocals" we found Didot and his wife, who offered us a private day trip through Yogja with all the spots and insights only a local can provide. Exatctly what we had been looking for.

To really capture the beauty of Borobodur it is highly recommended to be there and ready with your cameras for sunrise. Our guide and his driver therefore picked us up around 3am in the morning for the 2h drive to the site.

You might not see it on the pictures, but it was in the middle of the night and it was sooo crowded there. We were so happy to have Didot with us to point out the best spots without all the tourists to take our pictures. It was quite foggy which prevented us from taking the typical spectacular sunrise pictures you find on Google. But we captured some magical moments with the fog nontheless.

After satisfying our need for pictures, our guide took us for a tour through the site and shared his knowledge with us. The temple was allegedly built around 900AD and build time is believed to be around 75 years. But the site was completely abandoned and the location finally lost from memory around 1200 AD. It was not rediscovered until 1900AD, but remained as rumors and hearsay of an abandoned and lost religious site among the population.

Rediscovery of Borobodur is credited to the english Gouvernor of Java of the time in 1814, Thomas Stamford Raffles, who persued to prove the rumors and hearsay either right or wrong after receiving reports of these. It was finally restored to its glory from 1971 to 1984 as true to the original as possible and received UNESCO World heritage status in 1991.

Borobodur is situated on a hill and the temple complex is designed like a nine storeyed ziggurat, which consists of six square floors and 3 circular floors.

This design represents the journey through life from Buddha. Every floor up, is a further step along the evolution of your mind and spirit. There are three main steps: You start at the bottom with the sense world of regular humans. Then follows a space of transition, where you start to disconnect from pure bodily requirements. The final three circular floors are dedicated to pure spiritualism and enlightenment. Here you can find 76 stupas, each with a Buddha statue inside.

After our visit to Borobodur we drove back to Yogya to visit the water garden / remains of the royal garden Taman Sari of the first sultan of Yogya and his family.

Today the park only consists of relics of the former magnificent palace. It's only possible to visit the shimmering pools and the underground mosque, also known as Sumur Gumuling. The rest of the complex has been repurposed.
Apart from the still existing part of Taman Sari, a beautiful little village began to arise between the ruins, where you can stroll around today. Good thing, that we had Didot with us, because those alleys seemed like a big maze to us.

You can see the typical carved shadow figures and Batik art at every corner of the village and watch the production process.

In the late afternoon we drove to the temple complex Prambanan, to capture a couple of equally beautiful sunset pictures.
Prambanan is located within a huge park, where it is much more quiet than at Borobudur because the complex offers a lot more ground to cover.

You can also find the temple "Candi Sewu" in this park, which is the second largest Buddhist temple in Indonesia, Borodudur being the largest. It's quite some distance to walk from Prambanan, therefore there are no tourists and you can enjoy the surroundings all by yourself.

Prambanan consists of eight peaky main temples and a countless number of other smaller temples. The three biggest temples are dedicated to the three gods Shiva the Destroyer, Vishnu the Keeper and Brahma the Creator.
It really is very impressive if you're standing right in front of it.

This temple complex was also built in the 9th century AD, was abandoned and has fallen victim to the reclamation of nature. In the 20th century the reconstruction began. In 2006 the temple complex was hit by a massive earthquake though, so the reconstruction is still continuing. Huge stones are lying everywhere on the ground, waiting to be sorted and allocated to a temple. The whole temple complex has something like a mysterious aura though based on all the stones lying around and the partially finisehd reconstruction.

After our sunset pictues at Prambanan, Didot and his driver brought us back to our hotel. This was a long and exhausting day but equally rewarding. We've seen and learned so much and taken a lot of beautiful pictures. Yogyakarta is absolutely worth a visit.

Thanks for reading and don´t forget to follow us if you want to keep up to date with our write-up.

In the next post of the series we will tell you, how the story continues on the island of Java with the volcano Bromo. Stay tuned 👍