It took us quite a while to figure out the actual name of this city.  I have seen it variously spelled Yogyakarta, Jogyakarta, and Jogjakarta.  It made it pretty difficult to figure out how to buy our departing plane ticket.  The airport code is JOG if anyone is interested.  Anyway, Yogyakarta, is a big university town in central Java and it is most famous for being the closest city to Borobudur which is the biggest Buddhist temple in the world.  We didn’t realize that it is also near Parambanan which is one of the biggest Hindu temples in the world.   There are a lot of other sights to see, but unfortunately our time was limited so we only went to those two temples.  My original plan was to wake in time for the sunrise, but after three days with almost no sleep, we decided to sleep in a bit until 6am, catch quick breakfast, and then head to the temple for the morning.

Borobudur was pretty crazy because we were treated like celebrities there.  There were hundreds of teenage school children walking around and every single one of them wanted to take pictures with us!  As we walked around we would continually see the nervous eyes of a 13 year old girl follow us until her friends were able to provoke here into running up and asking to take a picture on her phone for “FB”.  As soon as the first girl would break the ice, then a dozen other girls, boys, and even the teachers would run up waving their phones, taking turns for their picture.  For the first couple dozen it was novel and funny.  For the third dozen it was a bit tiring.  But by the fourth dozen, we were getting low on time so we started avoiding all eye contact so we could explore the temple.  There was a Buddhist tradition where you are supposed to go around the temple three times to show your respect before ascending.   Even with all the stops, we did make it, but by the time we finished, the sun was fully up and the hordes of tour busses were starting to arrive.

We rushed back to our hotel to check out, jumped back in our taxi and went to Parambanan (Hindu temple).  We met a nice student guide who showed us around for free because he wanted to practice English.  Then unfortunately, we had to cut it short so we could get to the airport and take our $20 Air Asia flight to the Indonesia capital, Jakarta.