Sangiran Early Man Site

Not sticking around in Jogja for long, although it's a nice city! Had a hurried breakfast since the guys in the kitchen were very relaxed, then walked up to the station to get tickets for Surakarta aka Solo, the next city on our itinerary. Although I'd read online that you could buy train tickets only within three hours of the train leaving, it turned out that was actually 24 hours - though only Indonesians can buy them that early (it's an online process requiring an Indonesian phone # and credit card).

And of course, the train we wanted was sold out. So was the next one! Our train wasn't for nearly 2 hours! We ended up buying tickets, but just getting on the 9am train we wanted anyway, since it wasn't reserved seating. Eventually our tickets got checked by an inspector who politely but firmly insisted we have to get off the train at the next stop, despite our dumb tourist routine. So we spent just under 2 hours at Klaten station, possibly the only white people to have been there in years!

Quite a long time when you don't have wifi or phone data. Eventually our actual train turned up and we got on for the remaining 30 minutes to Solo. Grabbed some lunch of CFC at the station (it's like KFC, just .. not), then figured out how we were going to get to the Sangiran museum outside of town. We'd hoped to get a Grab and bribe him into waiting around for the return leg, but with no data and no wifi to be found a Grab wasn't possible.

Eventually we got a local taxi driver to take us - he originally wanted 400,000 rupiah ($40), but we eventually settled on 200k + petrol. I'm fairly sure he filled his tank as it was 60,000 for that, way more than he would've used on the 30 minute trip to the museum, but oh well.

The museum was pretty crap, sadly. 95% of the information was in Indonesian, which I'm not complaining about, but when there's no context to anything you're seeing it's a bit hard to enjoy.

Sangiran is listed because this is where examples of Java Man have been found - Homo erectus, the precursor species to Homo sapiens. Stone tool fossils reveal evidence of hominid occupation in the area from 1.6 million years ago, and human skull fragments found here have been dated to around 700,000 - 1 million years BP. Pretty insane to consider, especially compared to the "ancient" we've sometimes visited here that are a scant thousand years old.

But ultimately, it's an odd category of site: something important happened or was found here, but is no longer here, and now there is very little to see. Oh well, another tick for the list.

Back to the taxi where the guy informed us that because of waiting it was now an extra 50,000. Great. And to make things worse he was comfortably the most insane driver we've ever had - flying down the wrong side of the road towards oncoming traffic, driving in the dirt on the side of the road etc. We read later that Surakarta drivers are considered aggressive and reckless even by Indonesian standards, and that was definitely true in our experience!

When we arrived at the hotel we got our stuff out of the car and I just gave him the initial agreed-upon amount. Shandos had thought that amount included the petrol (I was fairly sure it didn't), and we started arguing. Eventually the guy just drove off without insisting on his extra money, so at least we know for next time how to get rid of scammers!

At least the hotel was nice - a Red Planet chain hotel which we've stayed at in other places. Stayed in for a few hours before going out for dinner: we found a millenial-targeted cafe with reasonable food and prices. Even ended up having a pisang goreng for dessert (fried banana).Read more