2. 7. 2014

I was considering sleeping over in Jakarta, if only because of shower and doing some laundry, but there was a cheap train to Yogyakarta soon after my arrival, so I went on. While on the station, I found out every Starbucks has the “normal” electric sockets (and later realized the “wrong” ones were perhaps just in Batam as on the train and overall from then on, there were the “right” ones too). So I recharged my poor dying tablet, connected to Internet, found out where to find cheap accommodation in Yogya and next morning checked in there. Went to sleep straight away. Although there was peace and quiet on the night train and it was not full and the sleeping on the floor was all right, a bed is a bed. Sleep was followed by some food, visit of a launderette and a walk around the city centre. Ramadan has started the previous day which doesn’t mean just that there are no food stalls in the streets but also that the sights close earlier. Well, I didn’t really longed for a visit in the sultan’s palace that much. I continued to the crooked lanes behind it instead and it was pretty enough. There are three long, wide and busy roads in Yogya, which might make you think that it is a big city. The reality is that if you turn to any side street and continue in chosen direction, you will find yourself in the middle of a really big but definitely a village. Little family houses with front and back gardens, narrow lanes, cats, dogs, chickens, playing kids, concrete terraces, flowers and the singing of muezzins. At the gate to a water palace, an old man joined me and started showing me around. He was realy very unconspicuous, it took me a while to realize that he will expect me to give him something at the end. So my tour de water palace cost me little bit more in the end than if I had just bought a ticket, but the gentleman was really nice and told me lots of interesting things about a former underground mosque and about sultan’s former baths and local customs et cetera.

On the other hand, I find the never ending whooping of local men and boys really annoying. They don’t even bother to greet you (unless the whole conversation consists of their shouting: “Hello! Hello! HELLO!!!” from across the street and me ignoring them), they start shooting questions at you out of a blue – where am I from, how old am I, if I travel alone (the answer is no, there are three friends with me, unfortunately they happen to be invisible for everyone else but me), what is my name, where am I going, in which hotel am I staying… If I don’t manage to ignore them, which is surprisingly hard, I must be well-raised!, I just explain to them politely that it is none of their business. Sometimes I simply answer, tired by avoiding it – from Checo, it is in Europe, yes, alone, going to the palace. Big mistake! Any answer just provokes more questions. Maybe I can try changing the strategy and start whispering to them conspirationally that it is a secret, all of it.

Come on, I dress properly, according to local customs, trousers and sleeves long, even put a scarf on my head sometimes, but it is all in vain. And moreover, I feel funny next to all those Dutch girls in shorts and sleeveless tops.

I tried to be positive at the beginning, saying to myself that the people here are just so friendly. It is true that women also greet me and sometimes ask the same questions. Perhaps they are genuinely curious. Overall, people live more together here and less next to each other, as we know it from the Western society. But behavior of some of the guys proved me naive. I started thinking about how it is actually supposed to work with those hijabs. Apart from the practical reasons for wearing them like protecting one’s head from the sunrays and all those layers creating cooling sweat, it is meant to prevent men from experiencing lust that might come if they saw a bare knee or shoulder. It seems unfair to both sexes in a way – women needing to dress so the men don’t need to make any effort to control themselves, and with men, it is automatically presumed that they are not capable of such self-control. It is degrading them to little animals and some of them become them indeed. Maybe it is the reason, on the other hand, why men are more masculine in the muslim countries than in Europe, and women haven’t supressed their femininity. Who knows. The problem only starts when the Westerners come to this world, disrespecting local customs, showing bare skin wherever. And after some decades, local men understood it in the way that any foreign female tourist is a whore, no matter how she’s dressed, and they have double standards for their manners. I must repeat. Annoying.

There is one backpackers’ district here, consisting of two narrow lanes, but there is no central place where the tourists could meet and mingle. They would need a Utopia here, too. So one doesn’t really meet other backpackers for a chat or a pool game. Well, I asked two British girls in a restaurant if I could join them and we had a nice evening, but it is not exactly the thing one might expect after Thailand and Laos and Cambodia. So what I was doing in Yogya mostly was walking. A lot. I tried shopping, too. But firstly, I have to watch my budget, and secondly, despite Yogya being the centre of Java’s batik, I was tired of it after first two hours and one purchase. It is very repetitive. On my second day in town, I went for another of those walks, picked up my laundry at 4 p.m. andset of for Borobudur. Wanted to sleep in the eponymous village next to the temple so I could climb it early in the morning and watch the sunrise over nerby volcanoes. It was a mistake. You see, the sun sets at 5.30 p.m. here, so when my bus arrived to the final destination, in the evening that is 7 km from the village, it was already dark and everything got a bit scarier than I expected. Bah, 7 km, I was thinking earlier that day, I will easily walk it! Yeah, but that dark. And those bothersome guys. In the first 5 minutes, about 10 motobike drivers stopped next to me and offered their services. I had to decline each of them about 5463892289292 times so they would finally continue to wherever they were originally going. Most of them turned and went back home. In the end one persuaded me, agreed with a price of 5 000 I offered and I jumped behind him. After some time and all those typical questions, he started with some really weird ones. “Do you like taking pictures?” – I started thinking something about his IQ if he couldn’t think of anything better. But then came my favorite one: “Do you like sex?” I didn’t worry about losing my face or whatever and started screaming at him that what the hell of a question he thought was that. He got silent, then repeated it and after some time stopped in front of a fairly vast complex of empty looking buildings. “This is a school,” he said. Well, that was great, wasn’t it. A school. Thanks. No idea what he meant by that, perhaps that we should go to explore it together or I don’t know. I got off the bike, didn’t give him a penny and crossed the road, fortunately there was a restaurant. I asked the staff if they could be so kind and call some reliable taxi for me, I had no intention of continuing walking any more. They pointed at one guy and told me he would take me there. I was not OK with it until they said it was a husband of one of the girls working in the kitchen. He agreed with the 5 000 I offered the first driver and off we went. He passed me to another guy in Borobudur, ensuring me he was all right. This driver knew the village well and took me to some budget accommodation. Well, not exactly my understanding of a budget accommodation, but whatever. I paid, closed the door of my room in front of the driver’s face and didn’t open them until the next day morning, saying to myself that I can have a dinner some other day. I fell asleep almost immediately. Some banging woke me up in the middle of the night. After a moment, I realized it was on my door, like if someone was trying to knock them. I just manage to breathr out: ” What the hell…?” and that was followed by an apology in a male voice, receding steps and silence. Like what was going on here? Fortunately, I was really tired from all the stress and the travel so I fell asleep again, despite my heart was located somewhere in my trousers at that very hour.

And overslept in the morning so I haven’t seen any sunrise from the top of the biggest buddhist temple in the world. I could have spared myself of all that experience and an expensive sleepover and simply get there with a morning bus and leave with an afternoon. Apart from that, Borobudur was a bit disappointing with a comparison to Angkor. I somehow thought it would be bigger than it actually is. He price (22 $) is imho riddiculously high and the experience is not really worth it. Yup, but you always need to find such things out to know them. Overall, I would gi e the trip 2 stars out of 10, and that just for the elephants on the reliefs. Now seriously – the temple IS in fact pretty and interesting. You climb it in a dextrorotatory spiral along all those terraces (6 square ones and 3 round ones at the top) with 3 stripes of reliefs with the story of Buddha’s life. I suppose each stripe represents one line of the tale. Pity I don’t know it better. And everywhere around there is stunning nature – hills, lush jungle, I even heard some elephants roaring from there. And I was there early in the morning enough so I didn’t need to stumble over hundreds of other tourists. Apart from one super noisy French family, everyone was decent and peaceful, making the moment easy to enjoy. So not too bad.

The Indonesian public bus system is even more funny than the ones in other Asian countries I have visited so far. As apart from a steward and a driver on each bus, there is also another steward on EACH AND EVERY bus stop. This one sells you the ticket, which is eaten by a turniket leading to the bus stop a second later, then the man or lady tells the steward on the bus that you did buy a ticket so everything is allmright and his job is done. Amazing. And I thought we had weird public transport policy in Brno.

I was planning on continuing further to the east after I returned to Yogya that very day but the cheap trains had already gone. That is another interesting system. The price doesn’t depend much on the distance you want to make but rather on the train, what name it bears, if it is a tourist or local train, what time if goes at, what classes it has – if apart from eksekutif and bisnis it has also the ekonomi class. Yes, it is written exactly like that in Bahasa Indonesia, and I love it. “Write what you hear” rule, not like in English or French. So the ticket to Banuywangi costs 50 000 if you go at 7 in the morning but 230 000 if you go at 3 p.m. It also depends which train station you choose. Usually every city has at least two, one is the main one which is used commonly by tourists and locals, and the other is the alternative one, mostly used just by the locals and with trains that take you for way cheaper prices. Also, the Indonesian people working in the stations are somehow missing the combinative thinking so you cannot just ask them: “What is the cheapest way of getting there and there?” but you need to do your research first, find out what could be all the possible ways yourself and then ask them patiently: “How much will it cost if I go first here and then here? Aha, and what if I went first here and then here?” and so on. It is unnecessary to say that it takes five times lomger than if they just took the initiative and that everybody in the queue behind you hates you from the bottom of their hearts.

My cheap train was going the next day at 7 a.m. So I went back to my old hostel, went… yes, for another walk and for a dinner and set off this morning. I originally considerdd going to the Mount Bromo on the way, it is a park with two still active volcanoes which are but not erupting at the moment, and it looks stunning on the pictures. But the train ride there would make the way more expensive and I in the end decided to leave it for the way back, if I will go there at all. So direction Bali. I will perhaps need to sleep over in Banyuwangi, the town at the very eastern end of Java, and tomorrow will find myself already at the Kuta Beach. I am looking forward to being amongst Westerners again, and in a touristic centre where the locals are used to tourists. It feels way safer and I would like to find someone for a chat again. Although there is a nice large family sitting next to me on the train (they are Muslim but they eat and drink normally during the day, like if there has no Ramadan ever existed), we are able to communicate just with facial expressions and gestures, and that mostly just with two about ten years old girls. On the other hand, they are more than excited about that so it’s fun.

It seems that I might have gotten used to the Asian temperatures already. The thermometer on the train station was claiming 42 °C yesterday and I was sweating just normally. So I either sweat too much all the time or my body has aclimatised. I wonder what I will feel like back at home. I worry that the sun there will not feel hot enough any more.