Tanjung Lesung Resort Hotel Java

... and his sweaty friends bounced up and down to Britney Spears remixes and sweated on each other. What’s wrong with this group of English folk, do you ask? Well for one, my friend Amanda described them as “dirty backpackers” -- the girls wear their hair in these gross, ratty topknots that slide down to unattractive side ponytails, and they wear oversized men’s tank tops as dresses. They are also loud, obnoxious, pretentious, and strange. The guys tend to walk ...

... tickets, and not far behind us (about 10 people or so) everyone else was sent away as all the train tickets had run out.
We arrived in Yogyakarta at 4.25am this morning, and managed to get a bed in this pretty cool losmen hotel. We both then fell asleep, woke up at 12.15 - and went to the hindu and budhist temples at prambanan(i think thats how its spelt) which was pretty ace. For the rest of the day we have just explored the town, and i ...

... ascent. Of course the best time to reach the top was the dawn. We left town late evening and from Selo village lying on the slope of the mountain we started climbing up at 1am. We were a group of three, me and a French couple. Our guide didn't speak much English, but it also wasn't necessary. From the beginning we kept slow pace. First part was through the forest, which was gradually disappearing. The last bit was the hardest ...

... and one of very few places open it was able to charge me a somewhat elevated fee of 100k (6 quid). The room was large and even had a toilet but it was full of bugs, and had nowhere to hang my mozzie net. And so, I got undressed, drenched myself from head to toe in DEET and crashed. In the morning I awoke without a single bite and promptly ran out to find somewhere else to stay.
I found a lovely family run hostel (known as a losmen) with a spacious room ...

... temple in the world, which was founded by a civilisation over 1000 years ago, and constructed entirely from volcanic rock. The temple is structured as 9 tiers signifying the different stages of Buddhist life, the top tier representing heaven. Its exterior is constructed from over 1500 handcrafted volcanic rock panels each narrating part of a Buddhist teaching and there are over 500 Buddha statues assembled on the structure too. It was extremely ...

... Yogyakarta - the cultural center of Java. I had been looking forward to this part since we decided to go to Indonesia. On one side of the city is a Buddhist temple and on the other is a Hindu temple - both from the 9th century! I really like my ruins. We decided to explore Prambanan first - it's the Hindu temple. With the help of our Lonely Planet guidebook and the locals, we managed to avoid paying for a ...

... school tour so I had seen enough of the temples then to wander around with the kids answering their questions. Every so ...

... three circular tiered platforms with 72 stupas all around and one massive stupa at the top. It doesn't appear to be 40m high to the naked eye because of the girth of the temple. It is a pyramid that is both steep and covers a lot of surface area on the ground. Once I got inside the temple and walked around (with respect for the Buddhist tradition, a visitor is instructed to walk around each level in a specific ...

... rlich an die Entfernung vom Flughafen und war beruhigt, als sich der Taxifahrer damit zufrieden gegeben hat, als er nach den Kilometern fragte. Als ich mit der Volontärin hier in die Stadt gefahren bin am Montag zum Essen haben wir ein Taxi im Zentrum genommen und sie meinte wieder 13.5 Kilometer auf die Frage des Taxifahrers. Erklärung: Die haben hier keine Hausnummern und die Straße ist ziemlich lang, also machen sie stattdessen Kilometerangaben.... Strange new world!

... the hotel room there was not a lot to see, as there was so much smog.
The following morning we took the train to Bandung. It was a three-hour train ride up into the mountains and through a few villages. The train ride was great. There are scatterings of Dutch bridges, rice fields with people hard at work, small villages and lots of people walking the train lines. We passed through the towns of Bekasi and Cikarang and Karawang, Cikampek ...