Weekend in Yogyakarta - day 1!

This nice December weekend was reserved for a little trip to Yogyakarta with my faithful travel buddy Catharina. Yogyakarta is said to be the cultural capital of Indonesia and since we already in September found quite cheap AirAsia flights there, we of course wanted to see the place.
Yogyakarta, or "Yogya" in Indonesia, is close to the southern coast of central Java and a one hour flight from Jakarta. There are also very cheap night trains there, but as we only had the weekend off, flying was more realistic.

Friday the 18th December was Muslim New Year and a public holiday, so we arrived in Yogya already at 7 AM. We had a booking in Green Garden Bed & Breakfast which was recommended by our friends and had got so excellent reviews in the web that we of course took it. A driver from the bed and breakfast was welcoming us at the airport and drove us immeadiately around the city showing us some important places. He spoke only in Indonesian to us, and we were happy to realise that we actually understood everything! There are many more tourists in Yogya than in Jakarta and that's why many people speak good English there. But our driver warned us that there is a mafia in the city which is only after our money. Ah, we know Indonesia already, this was no news. He said that if people with amazingly good English start talking to us, soon they will take us to some kind of art exhibition or gallery which has total rip-off prices. And indeed, during that day in Yogya, three men tried this trick on us. They come to you and try to start a friendly conversation, always with "oh where are you from!" but after a few of those questions you just get too tired to even chat with them. For the first time in my life, one vendor actually thought I'm from the Czech Republic, which was quite surprising.

Anyway, after our little driving tour we were taken to our bed & breakfast a bit outside the city. It is such a lovely place! It is a big house, a family-run business, with a huge living room downstairs and some bedrooms upstairs. In the living room there are couches and a huge Christmas tree and Christmas music playing all the time :) I felt instantly like home. The place is run by a Dutch/Indonesian couple and they welcomed us very warmly. Because there was a lot of breakfast still on the table, they asked us to join the breakfast session right away.

Our nice breakfast table

On the dinner table they have the flags of nationalities currently present in the house, and the Finnish and Danish flags were instantly added to the group. The Dutch man showed us around the house and he showed us our room - we have a cute little double bed and even a computer with internet in our room! And then he told us what we can do in the city. For going to the city, he offered we can borrow their bikes, even if it is a service normally only granted for those staying a minimum of three nights. It has to be admitted though, that it is a little expensive for Indonesian standards (12,50 eur/person/night), but it was really worth it.

So off we went to try our luck with bikes in Indonesian traffic. Whatever you buy in Indonesia is always bad quality, and this applied to our bikes too, but when we got used to the fact that our seats are moving about and same with the handles, we managed just fine. The roads are in bad condition and the cars and motorbikes are a true stress factor here, but we managed just fine and all the locals were cheering us happily. And when Catharina removed her long-sleeved shirt and only wore her little top, she heard even more greetings and quite some "I love you"s :D If anyone thinks that Asians are shy and introvert people, Indonesia will prove them wrong ;)

Organised motorbike-park on the main shopping street Jalan Malioboro

Yogya is a special place in Indonesia because it is kind of an autonomy and is ruled by a sultan. And indeed you can see many differences to Jakarta there. It is as if there is some organisation in this city, there's for example a bicycle lane!!! And transporting anybody on your motorcycle is illegal, so no ojeks in Yogya. There are also normal traffic lights instead of police officers stopping the cars so that pedestrians can cross. We arrived to the main shopping street Malioboro and parked our bikes in a designated motorcycle + bike parking area which is supervised by guys in orange vests. We received parking tickets and would need to pay them 1000 rupiahs (around 0,08 euros) for looking after our vehicles. During the following three hours we walked around the entire shopping street and listened again to numerous annoying "miss! miss! cheap price! have a look!"-speeches.

Markets

We also discovered soon that the whole city is all about Batik. Batik is a traditional Javanese textile with certain colours and figures. Actually, Batik is a really big deal in Indonesia. It is the official wear at pretty much any occasions, for example weddings, and for example at our office, Friday is a Batik day and my male colleagues usually wear Batik then. Indonesia is extremely proud of its Batik especially because in October this year, UNESCO designated it as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Everything for sale was something out of Batik and sorry Indonesians but I don't really like it, so this time I could save my money. However Catharina is totally into Batik and she made many good deals, she bought for example a little batik dress for her cousin, a batik computer bag, batik fabric for having something made out of it later, two batik purses and whatnot.

Food warungs along the street. You will get a meal for less than 0,40 euros,
but you may also get a disease...

Walking around in a huge crowd, in this extreme heat, listening to all the sellers is extremely exhausting and we both were nearly collapsing but we still wanted to see the bird market and the so called water temple before heading back to our accommodation, so we managed to go there with our very last energy, and when we finally reached the bird market and saw not only the birds and hen but also the rabbits, cats, dogs, lizards and maany other animals in their cages there, it suddenly hit me that Indonesia is the biggest bird flu country in the world and authorities warn especially about bird markets and about close contact with any birds, so I literally ran out of the market. With my health problems in this country I sure would get the bird flu if it was present in this market, and bird flu is serious because it usually leads to death :/

Animals for sale at the bird market. It was hard to leave this cute kitten behind.

So we decided to see the water castle instead. There's a little hill behind the bird market with ruins of a castle on it. Somewhere downhill from the castle there's supposed to be some kind of pools but we never found them, so we just checked out the castle ruins instead which however were very nice and the first kind of "historical" thing I have seen in this country. At the castle we met the three most adorable little girls ever, they wanted to take photos with us and after having seen the photo, they all kissed me on the hand :)

Visiting the Water Castle of Yogyakarta

By that time we were probably at least 5 kms away from our bike park and were too tired to take any more steps, so we decided to get public transportation back to our bikes. In Yogya, the most typical kind of public transportation is becak - a bike which has a seat for two (two Asians - or one decent size westerner) in front of it, and the idea is that you sit on the seat and the bike driver takes you where you want for the price you manage to negotiate. Of course these becaks are everywhere and the drivers annoy people all the time by trying to get customers. We told one driver we'd like to have a ride to our bike park and he asked around 1,30 euros for the two of us, and even if that was twice as much as we'd heard it should be, we took the offer anyway. The seat was quite small for the two of us but we managed to fit somehow, and the poor man started biking. Based on the way he was trying to catch his breath and how he had to actually walk and push us sometimes, we came to the conclusion that he probably charged us more because he saw that we will require some more work :D and very unfortunately for the man, the whole way was uphill. But it was a really nice little bike ride. When we were halfway to our destination, we spotted a massage place and asked our driver to leave us there.

Yogyakarta street and becaks

It was the first massage of my life. We both really needed it because our feet were aching from all the walking and we dead tired. A 1,5 hour massage cost only 2,5 euros so we also got body scrubs for around 2 euros each. And what a lovely experience it was! Two Indonesian girls massaged our feet, legs, hands, arms, back, neck, head and face. It was sometimes hard for me because I tickle so much and sometimes it even hurt but all in all it was truly wonderful. She even massaged my every single toe, then cracked them all, then she cracked my every single finger and my back. When the time was up we didn't even want to leave. But it really was a relaxing experience and I will definitely try to lure Rob to come to a massage with me in Thailand ;)

Before heading back to our accommodation we went to have dinner in a German restaurant called Bladok and even if it cost 5 euros (veeery expensive for a meal here), I took mashed potatoes and Norwegian salmon and can't get over of how good it was! After the dinner we biked back to our little bed & breakfast on the dark streets. We had only slept around 3 hours the night before because our wake up for our early flight was already 3 AM, so we were very exhausted and despite some party invitations from Catharina's Indonesian friend who happened to be in town at the same time, we went to bed early. To be continued!