Manohara Hotel Yogyakarta

... After a crazy looking stare to make sure we weren’t cops he told us to hop on his motorbike with him. So three of us proceeded down the back alley neighborhood on one bike. You heard that correctly. 3 on 1 bike. Pretty weird for me but nothing for them. We pulled up to a very small neighborhood market were there were two girls ...

... invasive when we noticed they were both taking clandestine camera phone pictures of us. This was my introduction to Indonesian people's obsession with Westerners, something which I was to taste first hand to a ridiculous extent the very next day.<br><br>After being stalked, we walked back up the obscenely-crowded streets to the backpacker area, and went to a little bar for a few beers. We were starting early; it was only 5.30pm. An hour or ...

... br><br>We took the local bus out to the village and that was quite interesting in itself! We thought Malaysian buses were a bit rickety, well that was nothing compared to Indonesian ones and of course there&#8217;s all sorts of passengers including &#8220;chicken in a basket&#8221;!<br><br>It was a short walk from the bus station to the hotel, which had a big sweeping driveway and security gates &#8211; not our usual ...

... We gradually make our way to Borobodur for the final, walking through the complex as the rain eases off. Completely lost we meet one guide who points to where we should be at 7pm. Excellent, day at leisure now (3pm). We plan on spending the rest of the day in the complex walls of the temples (compared to Angkor Wat but not that close I think) but this is p'd on from a great height when we find the one day of the year it is closed is.....today ...

... with their 200 pounds of rocks on their shoulders. I finally reached the bottom, where the sulfur mining was being conducted amongst the smoking vents. It really was a scene straight out of Dante's inferno and I felt like I had stepped maybe not onto another planet but maybe into another reality, where people farmed the sludge that oozed out of the earth while trying to fight through clouds of poisonous gas. It was amazing and saddening all at the ...

... 1970) and caught up on some blogging. Experiencing a Little Hindu Culture, Javanese Style One of the big tourist attractions in Yogyakarta is to see the Ramayana Ballet. While most of the citizens of the town are now Muslim, there was a significant Hindu influence in the 8th century that brought the architectural, religious and mythological traditions over from India. One of the great Hindu epics is the Ramayana ...

... wie ich gechattet habe. 4 Stück diesmal, alle im Rollstuhl und haben sich mit mir unt**halten. Od** zumindest v**sucht, zwischenzeitlich wollte ich schon gehen, weil ich dachte: ok, die machen sich ja doch nur üb** dich lustig, weil du nix v**stehst. Ab** dann dachte, ich - na, und? - was solls und hab einfach mit gelacht und es war eigentlich echt lustig, wir haben bestimmt üb** eine halbe Stunde geschnackt. Bin zurück zu d** Volontäre hi** bei d** ich wohne und 10min ...

... We found ourselves quickly attached to by a new "friend" in arrivals who was dead set on taking us to Bandung in his taxi for 120US... Only problem was Kate had told us that a taxi should be 40 or 45 max... and that's where the first bargaining of the trip started! We ended up in the parking lot surrounded by 10 Indo dudes in the hot sun all punchy from no sleep. Despite the adverse conditions, i was able to haggle him down to 48 which seemed relatively ...