Borobudur

Following the same path that Meghan, Liz and I took last year, Martha and I hopped the train to Jogjakarta once our Jakarta adventures were over:

The train ride was (thankfully) uneventful, save for a lot of knitting and a lot of beautiful scenery:

Once the train reached Jogja, we met up with Mr. Tim, who opted to fly, and drove directly out Borobudur, the 9th century Buddhist temple.  

Stumbling out of our hotel room in the early morning dark, we made our way to the temple and hiked up the steep and uneven stairs to see sunrise from the top:

Even though I'd seem the sunrise from the temple once before, it was still pretty beautiful and haunting to see the sun shining through the volcanoes and stupas:

Martha and Tim seemed pretty enchanted, too:

The obligatory sunrise tour sarongs got a nice update the from the brown and black ones they had last year... the new sarongs feature a batik version of Borobudur's iconic stupas:

Stupas, stupas, stupas:

Sigh... so beautiful:

The next four shots are Tim's take on the scene... morning mist, shining sun, Buddha hiding in a stupa, and his masterpiece, Buddha surveying the pastel landscape, for which we awarded him the blue ribbon for best photo of the day:

Here's my less-impressive shot of the same Buddha:

Once the sun was fully up, we wandered around the lower terraces of the temple, checking out the hundreds of bas reliefs:

We (well, Tim) made some friends while looking at the temple from below... Tim was due for his round with the local paparazzi:

 All in all a great trip to Borobudur... I can't recommend the sunrise tour enough!

Heading Southeast

After a day in Jakarta, the ladies and I set off on our cross-Java perjalanan (journey) via Indonesia's rail system.  We left Jakarta's Gambir Station at 8 am, scheduled to arrive at 3 pm in Jogjakarta (or Yogyakarta or Jogja or any number of other interesting spelling options we saw), the cultural heart of Java and purportedly the place "where all the bules love to buy batik" (this according to our driver in Bali).  And buy batik we did... but more on that later.  

On our kereta api (train, but literally "fire cart") was surprisingly on-time, clean and relatively drama-free, save a rambunctious little boy in our eksekutif kelas car and an overly-long, unexplained stop in a random town along the way during which street food vendors repeatedly stuck their heads into the car and yelled to us about tofu and rice cakes and fried chicken and whatnot for an hour.

The best part about the train ride was definitely the scenery... amazing views of rice paddies and other agricultural land being hand-harvested as we chugged along, as well as shots of the volcanoes in the distance as we passed south.  Apparently if you're taking the land route from Jakarta to Jojga, the train is the way to go- it sounds like all the scenery you can see from the road is just shops and shacks, even if the rice paddies are immediately behind them.  

Another highlight of our train ride?  This guy's hat, which reads "Excellent Servant History Maker":

And the lowlight?  A squatty toilet that you were only supposed to use while the train is moving... sigh.  After I braved it, the girls decided that they would rather stop drinking liquids until our arrival in Jojga than face the roller coaster ride that is peeing on an Indonesian train.