Yogyakarta - cultural center of java

After the almost ten hour bus drive to Yogyakarta I arrived at Laura’s Backpackers hostel. Went to see the Malioboro Street in the evening (of course it was raining) - so many people in the street were trying to convince me to come to „an extraordinary exhibition“ or an „awesome art gallery“. Luckily I was told that this was going to happen, unfortunately it is very common in Yogya that people are trying to scam you. It is the cultural art center of java, the place where Batik art has its origin and some people take advantage of it. They bring tourists to questionable places where they talk them into buying batik art (or even force them to).

At the free dinner in my hostel I got to know Denise from Austria, we started talking and she asked me whether I want to join her to visit Borobudur Candi (temple) next day. In the end one of the Indonesian tour guides „Wanwan“ asked us whether we want to book a tour with him to see some more things than only the Borobudur temple on the next day. We convinced also Zoé and Jonas to join us and so we got up at 3:45 am next day to start our tour and to see the sunrise at a view point where you are supposed to see two vulcanos. Unfortunately it was too cloudy to see any of the sunrise 😃 but at least we saw the vulcanos after a while. Went to see the ancient buddhist temple Borobudur, which was build in the 9th century. The temple is designed in a way that you can only go up the temple but not inside and at the moment it is unfortunately not even allowed to go on top of the temple. But still I found it very impressing to see how they built the temple (especially the background information a local tour guide gave us about the diffrent floors of the temple).

Our next stop was Chicken Church - a building (in a shape of a 🐔) which was originally built for people with diffrent religions to pray together, but it is unfortunately not used for praying and now more of a tourist attraction than a religious building. But we had a nice view (out of the beak of the chicken haha).

One hour later we arrived at the waterfall we wanted to visit. We were so happy that Wanwan drove us with the car because it was raining sooo much all the way and also when we arrived there. Because of flooding we couldn‘t walk to the waterfall and could only see it from a viewpoint (where you are also supposed to see a vulcano in the background, but it was too cloudy 😞).

Very hungry, even a little bit cold and to be honest also frustrated we went to a nice restaurant, which had so many variations of mushrooms instead of meat (reminded me of the amazing food at the teacher Training in Thailand 😍). Best thing for me was to try the mushroom Sate with peanut sauce - which is originally from indonesia, but naturally made out of chicken.もっと詳しく