The best and worst of Java

    Sitting in the hotel room in Yogyakarta waiting until it’s time to check out and go to the airport to wait for our flight to Bali. The past two days have been interesting, frustrating and fascinating. We took some time on Thursday to wander around the Malioboro area of the city. This busy street is lined with little shops seemingly all selling the same merchandise and catering to tourists. Incidentally, most of the tourists are other Indonesians. With a population in excess of 230 million, there are a lot of Indonesians on the move. The airports and planes are crowded and the streets are teeming with humanity.
    The sidewalks are crowded with goods, vendors, shoppers/browsers and touts. The streets are crowded with cars, scooters, tik-tiks of every description and buses. Everything is in constant movement. Strolling is a chore and crossing the street is an adventure. Traffic amazes me. For all the crowding and lack of lane discipline, we’ve seen no accidents and no examples of road rage. The city may be grimy but there’s certainly a vibrancy in the streets.
    Yesterday we toured two of the major religious shrines in the area - Borobudur and Prambanan. Borobudur is huge. It starts out as a square with sides measuring 112m and goes up and in. There are four square galleries to start, then three circular ones and the final stupa. The carvings are impressive. It predates Angkor but its bas-reliefs are very similar. We had fun checking out the Buddhas which had been part of an ‘Amazing Race’ challenge. Incidentally, there were originally 504 Buddha statues on the site but some are missing and some are headless.
    We went early (picked up at our hotel at 5 am) but traffic was already a problem at that hour. When we left the site, crowds were still building. As with many tourist sites you exit through the gift shop. In the case of Borobudur, the ‘gift shop’ is a seemingly endless maze of tacky stalls. There didn’t seem to be an alternative exit which would let you by-pass this eyesore. We then stopped briefly at Candi Pawon, a small temple with interesting grounds.
    After a brief stop at a silversmith shop so the driver could see a ‘friend’, we made our way to Prambanan. It is the finest and largest Hindu sanctuary ever built in Indonesia. The style of this complex was more similar to Angkor. There are a series of temples in a vast courtyard. The three large temples in the centre are dedicated to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. By this time, crowds have multiplied and Doreen is having problems with her foot so she decided to imitate Buddha and find a tree to sit under.
    One of the interesting encounters we’ve had the past few days has been participating in a school project. Yesterday, on the street in Yogyakarta and today, at Prambanan, we were approached by groups of students who had been assigned the task of interviewing a foreigner. I wonder how they recognized us as foreigners? The group leader, in each case, had a list of questions (not exactly the same) and recorded our answers. Then they asked to pose for pictures. There were five other people in our tour group and, when we checked later, all had been approached multiple times. The students made a good impression. I hope we did the same.
    The drive back to Yogyakarta was just as bad as the drive from Borobudur to Prambanan. Traffic is horrendous, especially at stop lights. It’s not unusual at a red light to have five cars and eight to ten motorbikes jostling for space and all waiting for the green light to head for the available three lanes of highway. Then, there’s a period of give and take as traffic sorts itself out until the next red light. Of course, some bikes don’t bother waiting for the light to change. Several times our driver used the left turn lane to edge up so that he could make a right turn when the light changed.
    Most of the intersections have timers as well so that traffic knows how long before the lights change. The longest red light we had was 90 seconds and the shortest green light was 16 seconds. I’m not sure the timers have a calming effect on traffic. I’m sure they wouldn’t in Toronto. I can just picture the red light runners looking at the clock counting down and stepping on the gas rather than the brake.