Michael On Everything Else
Yokyakarta
We recently went to Yokyakarta (pronounced Joke-Jakarta, or Joke-ja by the locals) for our first anniversary and it was beautiful.
We stayed at Villa Borobudur in Magelang, which is about an hour and a half north of Yokyakarta but near the Borobudur temple.
On our way from the airport, we stopped at a nearby Hindu temple; Prambanan built in the ninth century.
From Wiki:
The Prambanan temple is the largest Hindu temple of ancient Java, and the first building was completed in the mid-9th century. It was likely started by Rakai Pikatan as the Hindu Sanjaya Dynasty's answer to the Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty's Borobudur and Sewu temples nearby. Historians suggest that the construction of Prambanan probably was meant to mark the return of the Hindu Sanjaya Dynasty to power in Central Java after almost a century of Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty domination. The construction of this massive Hindu temple signifies that the Medang court had shifted its patronage from Mahayana Buddhism to Shivaist Hinduism.
From there we headed to the villas where they had our lunch already prepared and our table set. There are only seven villas on the property, which is nestled in the highlands overlooking Temple Borobudur. Our villa was the highest, whch meant lots of stairs to climb but it also meant we had a fantastic view:
We planned to go to the temple before sunrise so we could watch it from there. Little did we know the sun rises about 5:45 there so we were up at 4:00 to get ready and take a car to the temple. But it was worth it.
