Off the Beaten Path in Northern Thailand

Koh Kong was the last destination for Anna and me, and when she and I split up, I met Ryan in Bangkok for another month of travel!  After a day of exploring the extremely modern Thai capital, we boarded an overnight train headed north.

Hoping to get off northern Thailand’s very beaten tourist track, we opted to skip Chiang Mai, the hub of tourist activity in the north, and headed to the much smaller and less-known town of Mae Sariang.  While I’m sure Chiang Mai has a lot to offer, we loved our time in the Mae Sarieng, and it felt like we got to see a bit of the ‘real’ Thailand.  Plus, the lack of crowds, English speakers, tourist kitsch, and drunken chaos was very refreshing.

About a 4.5-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, Mae Sariang, located on the Yuam River, is closer to Thailand’s border with Burma.  The Mae Sariang sub-district includes 10,000 people spread over nine villages, and the town itself basically consists of just two main streets connected by a handful of alleyways.  Far removed from the Westernization taking place across much of northern Thailand, the only real inkling of Western influence in Mae Sariang is the lone 7-11 (Thailand has around 6,000 7-11s, I’m not kidding).  Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty quiet place and attracts very few tourists, though we saw a handful of other Westerners (all European, as far as I could tell) during our time there.

We ended up staying at two different hotels in Mae Sariang, both small places with no websites and no English-speaking staff.  All the food in town is Thai, so we had lots of noodles and lots of curries during our time there.

We lucked out, and, on our first night in Mae Sariang, the twice-weekly night market was taking place.  A small side street closes to traffic and vendors line both sides with stalls of clothes and food, including unidentifiable meat, noodle dishes, and ice cream.  At the end of the street, one stall had something rolled up in little pieces of paper, which the vendor told us cost 5 baht (about $0.17) each.  Thinking they might be spring rolls, we bought a couple.  When we opened them up, we found that they weren’t spring rolls, but rather pieces of fry bread drizzled with honey.  They were amazing!

On our first full day in Mae Sariang, we rented a motorcycle so we could explore the surrounding countryside on our own.  After doing a bit of research about the area, we decided to head towards the border, specifically to a tiny village called Mae Sam Laep, about 60 miles from town.  The ride took us through mountains and past several villages, and offered some beautiful scenery.  The road was pretty bad in some places – muddy, steep, and full of potholes – so I’m lucky Ryan’s an experienced rider!  After an hour and a half or so, having not seen any signs (at least none we could read) indicating we were anywhere near Mae Sam Laep, we started to wonder if we were going the right way.  At that point, we had passed the most recent village a ways back, and there really weren’t any people around.  Finally, after about another half hour, we came up a path that split off the main road, and a guy we happened to pass just then pointed us down it.  The path was in even worse condition and seemed more like it might be leading to nowhere – until a cluster of stilted houses appeared.  We had arrived!  Mae Sam Laep is tiny, and we didn’t see any other foreigners in the time we were there.  There’s not much in the town, and it’s really only accessible by motorcycle, so I can’t imagine too many travelers make the journey.  But, again, it felt like we were getting a peak of ‘real’ Thailand, and we loved it.

We parked the bike and strolled through town, taking pictures of the houses, the scenery, and the view of Burma across the river.  Towards the edge of the village, we passed a small shop selling what appeared to be samosas.  As the woman selling them didn’t speak any English, we smiled and handed her 10 baht (about $0.33), thinking that might buy us two samosas.  We watched, shocked, as she filled a little plastic bag with three, four, then five of them.  Apparently they were only 2 baht (about $0.07) apiece.  Since we had no idea what might inside the samosas – liver? brain? some type of critter from the not-very-clean river? – we got a little worried we were going to be stuck with a whole bunch of something we didn’t want at all.  Turned out, they were vegetable samosas – just potato, carrots, and peas – and they were delicious.

After venturing back into the village center of, we stopped at another little shop for a soda, which, though the shop had electricity, were kept in a cooler out front.  As we sat, enjoying our cold drinks, the shop’s owner sat in front of a small laptop, playing Thai karaoke and singing very loudly into a microphone, which broadcasted his singing out into the street.  We couldn’t really tell if other people in town appreciated the singing or were ignoring it.

As Mae Sam Laep wasn’t right on the border as we had expected, we left to go further down the main road, to see what we could see.  Unfortunately, as it was the rainy season, an impassable puddle prevented us from getting much further down the road.  So, we headed back into Mae Sariang – we need to rest for our trek the next day anyway, but more on that next time.

On the Coast in Koh Kong

Our final stop in Cambodia was the small coastal town of Koh Kong, located on the edge of the Cardamom Mountains.  It was peaceful and quiet, felt pretty rural, and made a good last stop.

The Oasis Resort, run by a British guy who’s been in Cambodia for seven years, is probably my favorite hotel we’ve stayed at thus far.  It was $30/night for a triple room, which had really cool poster beds with curtains, air-conditioning, a patio, a TV that got BBC, a refrigerator, and a hot shower – and the shower was even in a sectioned-off area of the bathroom, meaning taking a shower didn’t inevitably soak everything in the entire bathroom, as is the norm in this part of the world, where shower curtains are pretty rare.  On top of that, the hotel had swings, hammocks, and a beautiful pool that looked out onto continuous fields and hills in the distance, with not another building in sight.

The food in Koh Kong, both at our hotel and in town, was wonderful, and included a lot of curry – chicken eggplant curry, vegetarian green curry, red chicken curry – and vegetable cashew stir-fry, as well as toast, yogurt, and chocolate mousse!

The hotel’s owner invites children from a nearby orphanage to use the pool, and there were about twenty kids swimming there the day we arrived.  We swam while the children were there, and, unbelievably (unlike Rwandan children), they didn’t stare at us, laugh at us, point at us, or poke us.  And, when we passed one of the hotel’s inner tubes to a kid when he got back in the pool after a snack break, he even said, “Thank you.”  Amazing.

One of the main attractions in that part of the country is Koh Kong Island, Cambodia’s largest, which is considered to have one of Southeast Asia’s most beautiful beaches.  But, as it’s about a two-hour boat ride from the coast, getting there is only possible when the weather is clear, and the water was unfortunately too rough to make the trip during the time we were there.

We had a successful outing to Tatai waterfall, though, about thirty minutes from town, which was lovely.  It was gorgeous, and the water was clear and great for swimming.  The waterfall was also surprising secluded, and we saw only one other small group of people the whole time we were there.  It was really wonderful to be out in the middle of nowhere and able to enjoy nature.

Throughout the entire trip, Anna and I had been planning what we dubbed “our scooter adventure,” and had been waiting to visit a place with little enough traffic that riding a scooter would actually be feasible for us.  Fortunately, since it was our last stop together, Koh Kong fit the bill – with little traffic in town and several empty country roads near our hotel, it was the best we could hope for.  I should preface this by saying that, with some regularity, Westerners who don’t have the first clue how to ride a motorcycle rent and try to drive them in southeast Asia, and end up in accidents, sometimes serious ones.  Since I have a lot of experience riding as a passenger on motorcycles and a tiny bit of experience learning to drive one, and since we rented a small scooter that was an automatic, I figured it would be pretty easy.  Well, it was definitely more difficult – and less like riding a bike – than I was expecting, and I did sort of crash once, but overall it was great.  It gave us a chance to get out in the countryside on our own, which was beautiful.  Plus, riding was just a lot of fun, and I’m really looking forward to the chance to do it again – maybe in Thailand next week!

In & Around Phnom Penh

After Battambang, we headed for the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, a city of over two million people situated on the Mekong River.  Our first impression of the city was one of surprise – at how big it was, how fancy, how developed.  Given what we’d heard about how much poorer Cambodia is than neighboring countries, we were expecting Phnom Penh to be something along the lines of Kigali or maybe Kampala; we were definitely wrong.  While the city certainly has poor areas, it also has tall buildings, bright lights, nice restaurants, car dealerships, movie theaters, and shopping malls, as well as many beautiful temples.

The Fancy Guesthouse (yes, that’s its actual name), located near the city’s popular Riverside neighborhood, was everything we were hoping it would be after our shoestring-cheap hostel in Battambang – spotless, air-conditioned, and with comfortable beds, hot water, and a refrigerator, at $25/night for a triple room.

Phnom Penh’s culinary scene was also excellent – I realize I’ve said that about every place we’ve been, but this whole region seems to have amazing food everywhere (or maybe I’m just easily impressed)!  It was also cheap – we ate at one street café where every rice- or noodle-based dish on the menu was $1.50.  I also tried the Cambodian Kingdom Pilsner, which, like the other beers I’ve had here, was good.

We also ate at Phnom Penh’s night market one night, where the dining area is comprised of a ring of food stalls with mats on the ground in the middle, allowing customers to eat sitting on the ground, as many Cambodians typically do.  While my friends sampled all sorts of deep-fried unidentifiable meats, I stuck with a vegetarian noodle dish and some vegetable wantons.  Even that was pretty greasy, but dining at the night market was a great experience.

While in Phnom Penh, we visited two of Cambodia’s best-known Khmer Rouge sites, which have been turned into museums detailing the history of the genocide that occurred in Cambodia during the 1970s.  We first went to Tuol Sleng, the site of the infamous S-21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned an estimated 20,000 people between 1975 and 1979.  All but seven of the prisoners held in Tuol Sleng died there or were taken to the nearby killing fields and executed.  The survivors, six men and one woman, were spared because they had skills, such as making art and repairing machines, that the prison commander considered useful.

After visiting Tuol Sleng, we went to Cheong Ek, one of the Khmer Rouge’s 343 killing fields and the spot where most of the S-21 prisoners were executed.  Around 20,000 people are believed to have been killed at Cheong Ek, most of them bludgeoned to death, and thousands of people are buried in mass graves there.  At the center of the memorial is a large Buddhist shrine filled with human skulls and bones, very reminiscent of the genocide memorials in Rwanda.  Today, Cheong Ek feels almost like a big peaceful park outside the city, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine the things that happened there twenty-five years ago.

We couldn’t help but notice that these museums have clearly not had nearly the money poured into them that Kigali’s genocide memorial museum has had, likely because the West doesn’t feel nearly as ashamed of or guilty about what happened there as about the Rwandan genocide.

We also saw some of Phnom Penh’s other major sites, though they weren’t nearly as significant.  The National Museum, Royal Palace, and Silver Pagoda were interesting, but not that amazing.  Mostly, lots and lots of Buddha statues.

One morning, we went on a bike tour through Grasshopper Adventures, a company the conducts bicycle tours all over Southeast Asia.  Like the other bike rides I’ve done during the trip, it was great.  We started in Phnom Penh and took ferries around several islands in the Mekong River.  Though the islands face the city, they were quiet and peaceful, had beautiful scenery, and they felt like they were worlds away from Phnom Penh.  It was about 100 degrees that day, but surprisingly the heat didn’t bother us too much.  During the ride, we stopped at a small silk factory and saw Cambodian women weaving silk on traditional looms.  It takes quite a long time to weave a single scarf or piece of cloth, and requires a lot of coordination (as I realized when I tried it!).  Later, we happened to stop for a short water break near a house where a Cambodian woman was drying mango.  In typical Cambodian fashion, she generously offered some of what she had to the group of strangers.  It was delicious.

Something else I have to mention is the workout fervor among Cambodians in Phnom Penh.  All along the riverfront is public exercise equipment – elliptical machines, stationary bikes, benches, and more.  Not only do people use the equipment, from about 5:00-7:00 in the morning, the entire area is full of people running, walking, playing badminton and hackeysack, and, in groups of probably up to a hundred people, taking tai chi and aerobics classes.  They set up huge loudspeakers for the aerobics classes and blare music through them all morning, and I’m told the classes are taught by the stars of Cambodia’s popular music videos.

Overall, Phnom Penh seems like it would be a great city to live in – it has many modern amenities but still feels a bit like a developing country, and is definitely more manageable than Bangkok.

Another Cambodian Town - Battambang

Since I liked Siem Reap so much, it set the standard pretty high for Cambodia.  Though maybe Battambang, our subsequent destination, wasn’t as cute, it also wasn’t nearly as touristy, and I really enjoyed the chance to see a more typical Cambodian town.

Though Battambang is accessible by public bus, we chose to get there by boat: 9.5 hours across the Tonlé Sap Lake and down the Sangkae River.  Expecting the boat to be a tourist trap, we were surprised to find that it was basically a motorized canoe with a roof, and to realize it was actually a form of local transportation for Cambodians.  In fact, we dubbed it a “floating matutu,” as it stopped quite frequently to let people on and off.  On the boat, we passed through a number of “floating” villages, where many people live on small houseboats or in shacks right on the river’s edge.  About halfway through the trip, we made a pit stop in one of the villages.  The small shop/restaurant we stopped at had one of the most rustic, and least hygienic, toilets I’ve ever used – a building on stilts with a hole in the floor opening straight over the river.  A few hours after the stop, we finally pulled up to the pier in Battambang.

Our hotel there, Hotel Chhaya, was remarkable in that it was $1.50/bed.  That’s right, $1.50.  The three of us shared a four-person dorm with a British guy, and the shared bathroom was just across the hall.  The bathroom was not the cleanest, and the room was pretty hot, despite having a fan.  We also had a couple issues with the staff there giving us bad information about activities and things going on around town.  For $1.50, though, I really can’t complain.

While in Battambang, we had more delicious Cambodian meals, along with a couple of excellent Western things.  We discovered the adorable Gecko Café on our first night in town, and ended up eating there a couple times.  Mediterranean salad, “Cambodian” wantons filled with cream cheese, Oreo milkshakes – it was wonderful!  I also tried Chang beer, a Thai import, which, though some people find it a bit bland, I liked.

Battambang’s claim to fame is its bamboo train, which was originally, like the boat, a form of local transportation that became popular with travelers.  Unlike the boat, though, it’s no longer used by Cambodians and is now just a tourist attraction.  The train’s cars are comprised of two sets of wheels covered by a flat platform made from bamboo.  There’s only one train track, so when two trains going opposite directions meet each other, one train’s passengers get off while the conductors disassemble the train and then reassemble it on the track behind the other car.  Since the train cars are so simple, it only takes a couple minutes.  The train went much faster than expected and felt a little more like a roller coaster than an actual train.  It was fun, though, and the countryside we got to see from it was really pretty.

While in Battambang, we also took a Cambodian cooking class.  Like in the Balinese cooking class we took in Ubud, the food was delicious and, for the most part, not too terribly difficult to make.  We made chicken amok (coconut curry), beef lok lak, and pork spring rolls.  We got a cookbook with these and other recipes, so it looks like I’ll be making vegetarian versions of these dishes for a Balinese-Cambodian feast when I get home!

Cambodian Countryside

Like I mentioned last time, we went to Siem Reap primarily to see Angkor Wat, but getting into the countryside outside of town ended up being my favorite part of our time in the area.  A small tour company called Beyond Unique Escapes offers tours in rural areas near Siem Reap (and in other parts of the country), and we ended up doing two of their tours.  They pride themselves on showing the “real” Cambodia, and, to their credit, we were the only people on both tours and never saw another foreigner during either one.  We definitely got to see places we never would have seen on our own, and got a small taste of what a Cambodian village is like.

Our first outing into the countryside was on a day-long village tour, called A Day in the Life.  Though we only drove about twenty minutes out of Siem Reap, the area felt very rural and like it was worlds away from town.  Suddenly, the roads were dirt, the houses were bamboo, and electric wires were non-existent.  And the scenery was gorgeous, wide-open spaces and very green, with palm trees everywhere.  After stopping to greet the village chief, we set off on an ox-cart ride, which was really fun and allowed us to see houses and fields way off the main path through the village.  We spent the rest of the morning at a family’s house in the village, learning about their daily activities.  First, they taught us how to thatch, and we wove together dried leaves to be used for roofs or walls of the houses.  Thatching was actually easier than I thought it would be, and it was a lot of fun.  Then, we prepared lunch, which took quite awhile.  We started by mixing together some spices and vegetables, but, instead of stirring them together in a bowl, we chopped everything on a cutting board until it was all ground together.  Then we added prahoc, a salty paste made of fermented whole fish (bones, fins, and everything) – prahoc is unique to Cambodia, and probably not something that needs to be exported!  Lastly, we added red ants – yes, ants, a whole pile of them with their legs all tangled together – to the paste.  The ants were alive when we added them, but most got chopped up while mixing them into the paste.  Cambodians eat this fish/ant paste either raw or cooked, and we cooked a portion of it in a banana leaf over charcoal.  Once the cooking was done, we had lunch with the family, eating the paste (full disclosure: I didn’t actually have any, more out of repulsion by the fish paste than the ants) along with rice, chicken, and mango.

After leaving the family’s house, we visited a local monastery, which had beautiful buildings and dozens of small shrines holding the ashes of deceased Buddhists.  We learned a lot about Cambodian Buddhism during the visit.  One of the things I found particularly interesting – while a small number of people become monks for their entire lives, much like Catholic priests in the U.S., most Cambodians stay at a monastery for a week or so as young adults to experience living as a monk.  We ended our time in the village by visiting a primary school nearby.  Most students in rural Cambodia go to school six days a week, for either the morning session (7-11am) or the afternoon session (1-4pm).  Students try to get into the morning session if possible, because everyone knows the afternoon sessions are not as good, since most teachers don’t return from their lunch break on time.  We arrived at the school around 2:00pm, at which point there were no teachers around, and all the children were playing outside.  Seeing this obviously raised the question of how the government or school administration could better motivate teachers to show up on time – but that’s a big question for another time.

The following morning, we set out early on a sunrise bike tour, which offered not only beautiful views but also another chance to see village life.  We left town on our bikes at about 5:00am, and it felt very rural again within about half an hour of riding.  Just outside of town, we stopped to watch the sun come up over a rice field, which was beautiful.  We then climbed to the top of a small hill, considered by Cambodian Buddhists to be sacred, which offered great views of the village below and the lush countryside.  This stop also gave us an opportunity to talk more to our guide, and he told us more about Cambodia’s history and societal norms.  He talked a lot about marriage in Cambodia, and said that arranged marriage exists but is becoming less prevalent, and that dowries are always paid to the woman’s family.  I also found it interesting that, after the wedding, the new groom typically leaves his family and moves in with the bride and her family.

Next, we biked over to a monastery, similar to the one we had visited the previous day, where we met some monks and nuns, who gave us delicious dried mango and told us about life in the monastery.  One of the nuns said she moved to the monastery when she started getting older, as there are no nursing homes in Cambodia, to become a nun and focus on finding enlightenment.  Our last stop on the ride was at a local market, where our guide treated us to a typical Cambodian breakfast of rice pudding, which was pretty good.  It was like a clear porridge with rice and pieces of chicken, as well as chunks of what I thought was tofu covered in something but turned out to be congealed cow blood mixed with an unknown solid.  It was fine as long as you didn’t think too much about what it was.  Regardless, we were pleasantly shocked that, as the only foreigners around, we were able to look around in the market and sit down to eat at a table full of Cambodians without anyone hassling us at all.

Siem Reap & Angkor Wat

After a flight from Jakarta, a day of walking and shopping in Bangkok, and a five-hour bus ride to the border, we arrived in Cambodia!  Our first Cambodian destination was Siem Reap, gateway to the world’s largest religious structure, Angkor Wat.  Going there mainly to see Angkor Wat, I didn’t have any expectations for Siem Reap itself, but it turned out to be a great town.  Getting out of the town and seeing some of the villages in the surrounding countryside, though, turned out to be the highlight of our time in the area, at least for me.

Siem Reap is perhaps Cambodia’s best-known town, home to about 172,000 people.  Parts of the town felt a lot like Europe, particularly in the architecture – leftover French influence, I guess.  (Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953.)  The area of town we stayed in was pretty happening, the streets lined with bars, restaurants, shops, and guesthouses, and filled with both Asians and Westerners.

Our hotel the Mandalay Inn, was great, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.  It was $18/night for a triple room, though it didn’t include breakfast.  We had an attached bathroom with hot water, a fan, AC, and TV (with CNN!), and the hotel even had a little gym on the roof.

Cambodian food is a bit different from Indonesian, but just as good, and everything we had in Siem Reap was delicious.  My favorite Cambodian dish so far is amok, which is a coconut curry-based sauce with vegetables and chicken, beef, or fish, served with rice.  Apparently Cambodians eat amok only with fish, and chicken and beef amok are served only because Cambodians realized foreigners like variety.  I also tried Cambodia’s Angkor beer, which was very good and cost only $0.50 during happy hour.

Another highlight was the night we ate at one of Siem Reap’s several BBQ restaurants.  For $5/person, we cooked noodles and pieces of raw meat and vegetables in extremely hot oil over a little grill at our table.  It was a fun experience, and the food was really good – though we skipped the crocodile and squid options, having just chicken, beef, and pork.

I can’t talk about Siem Reap’s dining scene, though, without talking about the street food: street food in Siem Reap is abundant, diverse, cheap, and delicious.  One of the main street dishes is fried noodles, which we ate one night while sitting on little stools on the curb.  Another staple of Siem Reap’s street food were the banana pancake carts, which were all over.  For $1, the vendor would pull out a lump of pre-made dough, fry it into a thin pancake, cook in some slices of banana, drizzle it with chocolate sauce, and wrap the whole thing in a piece of paper for easy eating on the go.  They were delicious.

Siem Reap also has quite a few very interesting markets, catering to both locals and visitors.  The best-known is the Angkor Night Market, which gets going around 4pm everyday.  It has tons of stalls with vendors selling all sorts of clothes, accessories, and souvenirs, as well as street food carts offering fried noodles, sliced fruit, and banana pancakes.  There were also multiple stalls set up as makeshift spas offering massages and other services.  We went to the same spa-stall for foot massages a couple different times – only $3 for 30 minutes!  There are spas all over Siem Reap, in and out of the market, and they were almost all extremely cheap and pretty nice-looking.

As I said, we went to Siem Reap mainly for the purpose of seeing Angkor Wat.  Originally intending to go back a couple times, we ended up spending only one day at the temples, but it was very interesting.  Part of the world’s largest pre-industrial city, Angkor Wat (literally “City Temple”) is a huge complex of Hindu temples built in the twelfth century, during the Khmer Empire.  Though the name Angkor Wat is now used to refer to the complex as a whole, it is actually just the name of the largest and best-known individual temple, which is an iconic image here.  The Cambodian flag features an image of Angkor Wat, and pictures of it are found in many hotels, restaurants, and shops, as well as on most souvenirs.

The complex also includes Angkor Thom (literally “Great City”), the Khmer Empire’s last capital, which is believed to have had a population of as many as 180,000 people.  Within Angkor Thom are two of the complex’s major temples: Bayon, known for the 200+ faces carved into its stone towers, and Bapuon, a “temple mountain,” designed to represent Mt. Meru (considered by Hindus and Buddhists to be the center of all universes).  Located outside Angkor Thom, another of the best-known temples in the complex is Ta Prohm, which has been largely untouched and now has trees growing out of its ruins.

Though the oldest structures in the complex were originally built as Hindu temples, it shifted to Buddhist use during the late-thirteenth century, and is still used by Buddhists today.  In fact, most visitors to Angkor Wat will see monks and nuns, in orange robes and white gowns respectively, all with their heads shaved, while at the temples.  Because Angkor Wat is still in use, visitors must cover their shoulders and knees in order to enter the temple.

On the day we went to the temples, we left town at about 5am and got to see the sun coming up over the temple of Angkor Wat, which was beautiful.  We visited the other main temples, which were interesting but less awe-inspiring, and then went back to more thoroughly explore Angkor Wat in the afternoon.  The sheer size of it, and the intricacy of the detail, is pretty astonishing.

Getting out into the countryside, away from the town and the tourist attractions, was actually my favorite part of our time in the Siem Reap area, but I’ll get to that later!

Another Side of Indonesia: The Island of Java

After the overnight bus journey from Bali, we arrived in the town of Yogyakarta on the island of Java.  Our hotel in “Yogya,” Venezia Homestay, was about $17/night for a double including breakfast, making it our cheapest place yet.  It wasn’t as nice as our prior hotels, but was a really good value.  We used a shared bathroom with a cold-water shower, and the room, though it had a floor fan, was ungodly hot – especially on the top bunk, where I slept.  The family running the hotel, though, was very nice, and they even let us check in at 6:30am – and gave us a welcome drink!

To be honest, coming from Bali, Yogya itself was a bit underwhelming.  It was a pretty big town, seemed to be largely industrial, and lacked Bali’s interesting architecture and general beauty.  Like parts of Bali, it had Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts – I’m not sure when seeing places like that is going to stop being really strange to me.  As usual, we skipped the American chains, but we did indulge in frozen yogurt at J. CO, the Indonesian equivalent of Bourbon (though J CO. wins, hands down).  It was about $2.20 for a cup of yogurt with strawberries and chocolate chips, and was definitely as good as PinkBerry!  On our first night in Yogya, we had dinner at one of the cheapest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at – I paid about $1.10 for a dish of vegetables and rice with peanut sauce, and it was delicious!

Yogya’s main attractions are the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which we visited, along with the smaller temple of Mendut.  We left town at about 5:00am, to get to the temples before it got too hot (most days this time of year are in the high-90s) and crowded.  Borobudur, Indonesia’s single most-visited tourist attraction, dates from the ninth century.  The world’s largest Buddhist structure, it is huge – essentially a nine-story building – with the six square stories topped by three round ones.  Indonesian Buddhists still use Borobudur for pilgrimages and for celebrating the holiday of Vesak, which commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death.  Prambanan, which also dates from the ninth century, is one of the largest Hindu temples in Southeast Asia.  It is actually a compound of numerous smaller temples, originally a total 240.  Today, the sixteen main structures have been reconstructed, but only two of the original 224 smaller temples are still standing.  Mendut is another Buddhist temple, also built around the ninth century.  It is known primarily for its three large stone statues of Buddha – one each to liberate devotees from bodily karma, from karma of speech, and from karma of thought.  Like Borobudur, Buddhists in Indonesia visit Mendut during celebrations of Vesak.

We also attended a dance performance in Yogya – a ballet, technically, though not a ballet in the Western sense.  Accompanied by traditional gamelan music, the Ramayana Ballet is a dance-drama based on the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, believed to have been written around the fourth century B.C.  The performance was similar to the one we saw in Bali, focusing on slow, deliberate movements and featuring incredibly elaborate costumes and make-up.

The following day, we boarded a second-class train to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.  The train ride took about eight hours and cost $20.  Trains on Java have three classes, known as economy, business, and executive.  We ruled out economy class, having heard horror stories about the number of people that get crammed on each seat, and settled on business, since executive was nearly twice the price.  I guess most foreigners spring for executive, though, as everyone else on the train except one Dutch couple seemed to be Indonesian.  The ride was pretty enjoyable, and the train was much cleaner, less crowded (actually, probably about half the seats were empty), and more comfortable than expected.  Business class doesn’t have air-conditioning, but there was a fan and, with the windows open, it was very comfortable.  People came by every few minutes selling food, drinks, and other random goods including paper fans, flip-flops, and moist towelettes, and also renting pillows to passengers.  Vendors would flood into the aisles at certain stops, stay on the train selling things for a bit, then get off a few stops later.  Sometimes, they would set things down on the tray next to a passenger’s seat, leave it there while they continued to the next car – I guess hoping the passenger would eventually be tempted to buy it – and come back for it a few minutes later.

Unlike the seemingly never-ending sprawl of city we passed on the bus in East Java, the train took us through beautiful rural areas of Central Java.  We passed small towns and villages and rice fields, and saw banana and palm trees right by the tracks and mountains in the distance.  Perhaps another difference between business and executive, our train stopped a lot, often staying stopped for quite awhile.  At some stops, children stood on the platforms of the station begging, and I saw one Indonesian throw a coin through the window onto the ground as his train was pulling away.  The children noticed us, of course, but most of them left more or less immediately after I shook my head.

Late in the afternoon, we arrived in Jakarta, a mega-city of about ten million people.  The urban poverty was visible from our seat on the train, as we saw small shacks, with children playing and women cooking and doing laundry, mere feet from the tracks.  It was also fairly dirty, which I suppose it to be expected in a place housing that many people, with lots of trash on the ground and floating in the waterways.

Our hostel in Jakarta, Six Degrees, was the first place we stayed in a dorm.  As Jakarta is apparently relatively expensive, even compared to Bali, it was $13/night per bed.  Other than not having a hot water shower (which, again, was not needed), Six Degrees felt very much like a European hostel.  It was air-conditioned, immaculately clean, and included sheets, a blanket, and a towel; and, each bed had its own lamp and outlet.  We shared our room with two German guys, a Swiss guy, and an American girl – not only the first American we’d met, but also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Paraguay!

The food in Jakarta was as excellent as it had been everywhere else.  For dinner, I had a particularly delicious gado-gado, a dish of raw vegetables covered in peanut sauce that had become my favorite Indonesian meal, for about $3.  The breakfast at our hostel was equally great, and not only included very legitimate toast, but also had peanut butter!

We only had a few hours in Jakarta before our flight to Bangkok, and we spent it wandering around, trying to see what there was to see.  The traffic was as crazy as any huge developing city, with lots and lots of motorcycles and tuk-tuks, and there were carts and stalls of street food everywhere we looked.  I also have to note that Jakarta has McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Domino’s, as well as, believe it or not, The Cheesecake Factory (five of them, actually).  After an hour-long bus ride from the city to Jakarta’s main airport, it was time to leave Indonesia for a brief stop in Thailand en-route to Cambodia!