Day 21: Prambanan

After all the build-up of Ramadan, today was actually the day of Idul Fitri so basically everything outside was closed. As it was our last day in Jogja we decided we had to go and see Prambanan temple complex. Since Jogja is at sea-level but inland it gets very hot during the day, so we opted for a sunset trip out to Prambanan.

This meant that we didn't do much with the morning other than a lie-in and lazy breakfast, followed by a wander around to get lucky and find a burger restaurant that was actually open! Unfortunately the burgers were fairly average, but alas.

Our driver picked us up from the hotel at 2pm, and to our surprise it was the same driver who'd taken us to Borobudur yesterday! This time we were accompanied by an Italian couple in the back who we exchanged pleasantries with, but seemed to be in the midst of a heated discussion so we left them alone. The ride out to Prambanan took a bit longer than expected - it's a lot closer to the city than Borobudur but the drive seemed almost as long. Worse traffic I suppose!

Prambanan is actually a complex of many temples - the largest of which is Hindu, and is the largest Hindu temple in Indonesia. Built in the 9th century, it stands nearly 50m high and was surrounded by 240 small temples (most of which are now destroyed). And it's part of a larger complex of several hundred temples, the majority of which are actually Buddhist, so it's a very interesting site.

We arrived and had a look around the main Hindu temple, but the place was absolutely crawling with local tourists and the position of the sun relative to the main buildings made it very difficult to get good photos, so we decided to wander around the rest of the site. About 200m away in the park is one of the larger mostly-ruined Buddhist temples which was quite impressive.

Then we pressed on for another few hundred metres and came to the largest Buddhist temple on the site, Candi Siwu. This temple is more dome-shaped Buddhist rather than the pinnacles of Hindu architecture, and felt like it was probably 75% of the size of the main Hindu buildings. But what really struck both of us was that there were basically no tourists at this temple, and the ones that were here were almost entirely Westerners. None of the Indonesian tourists come a few hundred metres down the road to see temples that are almost as impressive, which struck me as very strange.

Since we had the site basically to ourselves and the sun was starting to set, we got some great photos and had a really thorough look at all the carvings, reliefs and so on. As with the main Hindu building here, the large central temple was surrounded by hundreds of small shrines, most of which have sadly been destroyed and are just piles of rubble. Lots of looters over the years means that a sizable percentage of the original bricks are gone, and the government isn't inclined to restore with different masonry - and fair enough I think.

Back to the main Hindu buildings where the crowds had thinned out thankfully, so we indulged in watching the sun dip into the horizon haze, though the temple buildings never quite caught the sun the way we were hoping for. Still a beautiful site, very impressive architecture, and we were both very glad we came. Decided against paying $30 to watch a 4 hour ballet performance with the temples as a backdrop - it's apparently very good but neither of us was particularly in the mood, so back to the hotel it was.

Tired and overheated we opted for a hotel restaurant dinner which was actually delicious. I had an Indonesian beef soup which I loved, and Shandos was very taken with her curry as well. It's quite interesting actually - Indonesian curries so far seem to just be lots of curry powder rather than the Thai-style curries we normally get in Australia that are very heavy on the coconut milk. Off to bed for an early-ish start tomorrow - a long train journey to Jakarta awaits!Read more