Java the Hut or Mario Kart

Oh what to say about this one. We took off from Denpasar airport in Bali around 6 am. We were some of the first people in the airport and because of that we were witness to a bit of behind the scenes work by some of the lesser known residents of Bali International. As we walked to our gate amongst locked storefronts we were shocked to round a corner and see two very well fed rats in a wresting match between several rows of pre-boarding seating. When they saw us coming they scampered away leaving nothing behind but a trail of bloody little rat prints. Where did they run off to you might be wondering? Well into the wooden floorboards of the airport restaurant of course. Nice. Maybe time to get out of Bali.

This is a nice addition.

We flew into Yogyakarta, the second city of Java, supposed to be the University town, the art and culture center of Java. We gained and hour because we flew back in time and arrived at our hostel only an hour after we left. This meant that we still had a very full days worth of activity ahead of us. There are several very interesting stops to be made in this area and we wanted to get to them before moving on. We found ourselves kindof pressed for time at this point because we only had a 30 day visa and had to be out of country by the 10th of November. We already had our flight out of Jakarta for the 7th and wanted a bit more beach time after that so Jogja (what the locals call it) was to be a quick stop. We found a guy outside of our hostel who had a cart like everyone else except his cart had a motorcycle attached to the back instead of a bike. Sweet ride.

Our driver Mario and his sweet ride fit for a video game.

 We hired him for 50,000rp ($5) for the whole day to go wherever we wanted in town. It was a boon finding this guy cause not only did he know all the hidden gems but he seemed to know all of the people who run the places too. We first went to a batik gallery where students of the art sell their finished products. Batik is an art form on white cotton or silk. They use small tools that deliver precise droplets of wax that infiltrates both sides of the fabric. They then paint dyes onto the cloth. The dye dries and then the cloth is boiled to remove the wax. You then have areas that are dyed and areas that have been protected by wax that are still the original color. This is done a multitude of times until the picture is complete. Very intricate.

A batik artist showing us how the tools work. The silver bowl is full of the wax used for the art but is not heated so it is only a paperweight. Some examples of the batik work behind him.

A wax pen. The liquid wax is poured in the opening on top and slowly drips out of the narrow opening. There are pens with openings of all sizes to allow for different styles of batik.

From here we hopped back on our awesome wheels and headed to the Kraton, the Sultan's Palace. They have different shows every day for the public and this day's happened to be a traditional puppet show. The music was very interesting and the show was bizarre but entertained us for a few.

All of the pots you see are bells for the puppet show music.

Ornate ceiling or sea monster? You decide.

Legolas

We walked around the palace for a bit and then headed to another workshop that BLEW MY MIND!

This city is very attached to the Ramayana which is the Hindu Ballet that portrays a classic love story between fanciful characters and is full of symbolism. The puppet shows and shadow puppet shows around the city are a great source of pride and usually feature characters from this ballet. The sultan has special puppet makers. A single family dedicates all of its time to making the sultan's puppets and for three weeks out of the year they are allowed to show their work and sell to the public. We happened to arrive in the middle of this three weeks. We were very lucky. This family uses sheets of buffalo leather and mallets with myriad punches to create these. It takes about a week for a large one to be finished and then another week to paint. I almost think they are more impressive before being painted. This is the most impressive handiwork I have seen. And then to see how many they are able to faultlessly create is mind boggling. Once painted they become a different picture all together and the amount of symbolic meaning behind each little mark is also a trip. A guy spent 45 minutes going on and on about how every little notch out of the leather and every brush mark means this and that, difficult to follow but still pretty awesome. Once completed they are used as shadow puppets and on sticks as well.

The leather punching tool he is using was fashioned from the spokes of a motorcycle wheel.

The face of the female character from the Ramayana story. This is all hand carved from buffalo leather.

The unpainted but finished puppet with working joints and all.

The Tree of Life.

This is what it looks like once painted and ready to perform.

The following day we had a long one set up to visit two large temple complexes outside of Jogja. A 5:00am pickup was necessary to beat the crowds and hopefully make a sunrise. We didn't make the sunrise. We did however use the hour of traffic and drive time to make friends with another member of this tour group. Chad is a young Major in the Marine Corps stationed in the Philippines. He's a Foreign Area Officer and part of his job is to travel around Asia and learn as much as he can about everything. What a cool gig. He has pretty much been everywhere we plan on and was a wealth of interesting tidbits. We may even go to Manilla now to visit and do some diving. He has lived in Okinawa near where I used to with the fam and his next post is for Yuma so I returned the favor and offered his some info too. Super cool dude.

The first temple was Borobodur and was very impressive. It is a Buddhist site that was covered by volcanic ash from an eruption in 1006 and only rediscovered in 1814. It is pyramidal in shape and quite large. UNESCO deemed it a world heritage site some years back and has done some exhausting overhauls on the area. Once completed a couple of years ago it was almost immediately bombed by local terrorists. Luckily the damage wasn't too extreme and it is still very cool. On the top we were approached by a group of young kids who wanted to practice English with us for school. We chatted for a couple of minutes, but more than that we got to see what an effort is being made by the youth of this country to learn more about the outside world and spread Indonesian flavor beyond their borders.

Our tour group and the young Indonesians we met on top of the temple.

Borobodur

Kelly dorking around. Zoom in and read the sign.

Just a small example of what the temple walls are all covered with.

Kelly looking smoking hot.... You should see the sweat stains.

Next we headed to Prambanan, a Hindu temple. This was cool to get the opportunity to compare two dramatically different styles of architecture from the same era so close to one another. The Hindus and Buddhists coexisted peacefully for eons on Java to the point that they even shared architectural styles for some of the smaller details carved into the stone. Prambanan was amazing. So different from anything I had ever seen in person. We rounded the corner of the park it is set in and the spires of the central temple dedicated to Shiva became visible for the first time and absolutely take your breath away. They seem to erupt from the earth reaching skyward ensconced with such intricately detailed stone carvings that as you approach they seem to be alive with the presence of ancient deities locked in battle or embraces of passion. The Hindu culture is one so far flung from anything we usually get to witness at home that it appears completely alien to our western eyes. We wandered around for a bit seeing the sights and witnessing the destructive power of earthquakes, one of which decimated most of the smaller outer shrines that surround the main spires.

Our fist view of Prambanan.

The Prambanan temple complex and the smaller destroyed temples in the foreground.

Later that evening we had reservations for the Ramayama ballet which as mentioned before is a classic Hindu love story. It was pretty cool to see it all played out before our eyes. The costumes were a sight to see and the music was nice as well. It was performed in an open air amphitheater and is put on every single night. There is no speaking, only motion. We were all provided with a synopsis to allow for our full understanding of the events as they unfolded. Unfortunately we didn't bring our camera because we thought that photography would be frowned upon during the performance.

Ramayana ballet

The next morning we split for a little town called Pangandaran on the southern central coast of Java. This quiet and mostly unheard of town is mainly a weekend getaway for the Javanese locals. It is also a nice place to catch some waves. The hostel was really cool and had some very inviting common areas that gave us ample opportunity to meet other travelers. A Quebecois gentleman was there for his wedding to a local girl he had met a year earlier when he first came to visit the town. A Swiss couple staying at the same hostel had been invited to attend the ceremony after their common French tongue brought the two groups together. These are the sort of things that can happen on trips like this. They had no immediate plans and the Canadian guy needed some familiar faces on his side of the isle. There was also a really gregarious dutch girl staying who had come for 3 days and stayed two weeks. She was learning how to surf and the local guys really liked her company so they convinced her to stay and they would offer free lessons. We formed a scooter gang with a couple from Liverpool when we rented a couple of mo-peds and drove for a very scenic river trip up to a place called Green Canyon known for its emerald waters and vegetated vertical canyon walls. The boat was supposed to take us to a nice pool for diving and swimming before we returned for a scoot home. Unfortunately the monsoons beat us by 1 day and Green Canyon had become brown canyon pretty much marking the end of the season. Bummer.

Not willing to let this put a damper on our day we headed toward the coast and another even smaller beach town called Batu Karas that has a beautiful right point break that when the swell is right would be very similar to Rincon near Carpinteria. Que Lastima, the surf was way too small to allow for such perfection. Still a good place for lunch and we had about an hour and twenty minutes of good quality scootin' to do til we got home so the day was still rad. We had several good surf sessions in Pangandaran and Kelly has shown vast improvement in her gnar shredding too since we've been out.

Our Pangandaran hostel.

Very nice feel to the place.

The Swiss couple had mentioned that they wanted to get into this park that sits on a peninsula very near the town. They had been twice already but were insistent that we should try and get in as early as possible to see the most wildlife. The biggest draw for me, as the title of this blog can tell you, was the giant Raffelisia arnoldii flower. This is the largest in the world at up to a meter across and stinks like rotting flesh to attract flies as pollinators. The problem is that it can be very difficult to find and we weren't going to pay for a guide so a hunting we did go. Three very wet hours later the four of us had spied tons of macaques, found some javanese gibbons, photoed a monitor lizard climbing a tree to get some squirrels, seen flocks of  tropical birds, and encountered porcupines and bats in a cave, but were unsuccessful in the hunt for the giant flower. We even tried to follow the advice of our friendly Fruit Loops toucan and follow our noses but the rain kept us from getting a good whiff.

Javanese Gibbons

Monitor Lizard squirrel hunting.

Spelunking and bat hunting

After four great days in Pangandaran the time for our departure drew near and we needed to get to Jakarta. Now the Lonely Planet guide book is usually very upbeat about every listed destination but in this case it was hard to find the upside. Jakarta is noisy, dirty, smoggy, trafficky, and packed full of people. there are over 14 million living in the city and it suffers because of it. We took what was supposed to be an 8 hour bus ride 342 km to the city that turned into 12 because of traffic and did I mention there are no traffic laws? Yeah, pretty much every person for themselves out there. THE main source of personal transport here is scooters, like fake motorcycles. They are fun but dangerous. As we fly down parts of the highway in the rain in a bus, people are passing on the right (driving is opposite sides here) and even when the highway is undivided going to the far far left beyond the other direction's traffic to get around and then cutting back across just to get ahead. You had better not be prone to carsickness or have a nervous condition when getting into a vehicle around here. It is freaking nuts. Once we arrived in Jakarta we were still quite some distance away from our hostel and had to decipher the bus maps with all our stuff in this Jakarta rush hour. We got a bit of help and two more hours later found ourselves in a relatively seedy section of a city that appears to be made of seed in front of a dilapidated shopping mall with a hostel in it. Its cool its just check in, check out, airport. We still needed to get some grub so after dropping our gear we hit the streets and found a young guy with a food cart which is always the best bet around Indonesia. He had a group of people around eating too so that's a good sign on two fronts- there is a lot of turnover so nothing sits too long and people seem to like it and trust the guy's cooking. We may be safe.

This was our collection of Indo 3-1 coffees. This stuff is everywhere. Coffee, sugar, creamer=delish.

A couple of days earlier back by the beach we discovered an awesome soup called bakso. Let me expound a little on the food here. It is usually pretty awesome. If you have an Indonesian restaurant in your area, you should go. There are a couple of key words that will get you to know almost everything on the basic menu. Mie=noodles, Nasi=rice, Goreng=fried, Ayam=chicken, Soto/Sup=soup, Cap Cay(pronounced Chap Chay)=stir fry veggies, and Gado Gado=Steamed veggies. If you can use these words in any combination you can order almost anything. And then you add Sambal which is spicy or sweet spicy and the only way to fly. Awesome food. So anyhow we ordered up some good Bakso and Nasi Goreng and headed up to watch election results. The coverage here was good and we got CNN so we were able to stay up to date as well as if we were home.
The flight out was painless and the next stop was Kuala Lumpur Malaysia.

Bakso-delicious!