Day 104 - Borobudur and Prambanan Temples, Portuguese water palace and bird market

Woke up at 4:30am and waited for the minibus to show up to pick us up to see the sunrise. By 5:15am the minibus still hadn't showed up and the sun had already partially risen. The bus pulled up around 5:30am because the driver was having car troubles. Not to my surprise, this guy drives like a maniac. I'm sure there was something wrong with the gears of the van because everytime he changed gears there was a horrible grinding sound and the van would lurch forward and back. It was a deathly uncomfortable journey at 6 am.

We arrived at Borobudur at 6:30 am and were awaiting the hoards of people. It was obvious that this site was affeced by the earthquake in 2006 as they are still restoring parts of the temple. It was quite beautiful and much of the sculptures and art work looked like what I had seen in Angkor Wat. This place is a lot bigger than I had expected it to be and of course because of the Indonesian holiday it was super crowded. People were pushing and throwing garbage everywhere and children were screaming and running around all over the place. It was only about 8 am and at least 1000 people were either sitting, standing and climbing on everything. It was way too much to deal with.

We needed to change buses to get to our second location. This bus was the filthiest bus I'd ever seen in my whole life. I really didn't want to touch anything inside it. The seats were at one point beige but were now pretty much black. I just tried not to let anything touch my skin it was that dirty. The second stop was to be at Prambanan. Along the way the bus stopped at 2 other temples and a silver factory. God, being through SE Asia I really didn't want to be pressured into buying silver I didn't want so I feel asleep in the bus until everyone returned. Prambanan was way more crowded than Borobudur. There were people everywhere and no one was around to guide them so it was like they were using these culturally protected temples as jungle gyms. There was no one watch anyone. To add to the chaos, there was a playground and amusement park area as well as a train that went though to the temples that were only about a 10 minute walk apart.

The temples at this site were greatly affected by the 2006 earthquake and things were still being repaired. A bunch of the temples were covered in scaffolding and many buildings that could not be entered because they had collapsed in on themselves. Of all the temples in this area Suri was the one that was most affected and looked absolutely nothing like the photos taken before the quake.

The locals really didn't seem to care too much about it. They climbed everything. It was so crowded I could smell other people's BO. I didn't think it was possible for people to smell that bad. It was probably due to the fact that there were people wearing pleather jackets, sweaters and jeans when its 40C outside.

Got back to Yogyakarta at 2 pm and went to go see the well, unimpressive water palace and then to the bird market. Now the bird market was really cool. It's basically small streets lined with vendors of all the bird you can think of. I've never seen roosters as big as some of the ones here. They were also selling dyed baby chicks. There was just a bicycle with cages on the back full of rainbow coloured chicks. Blue, green, pink and orange. It was quite strange but quite a gimmick.

Dinner proved to be quite interesting. I had king cobra. It was stewed in spices over rice. It was surprisingly really good. Need to keep an eye out for more new weird and wonderful things to eat.