Indonesia and Friends

Prambanan

If there's one travel advice I would give you, it is to travel with a local, and if you can, travel with a local friend.

That's what I did when I visited Indonesia last week.




I made a lot of Indonesian friends when I was studying in Tokyo. I guess it is because even though our religions were different, us Filipino students could relate the most with them. My Indonesian friends were funny, loud, loved food, music, and were always smiling --- and I imagine they would say the same exact thing about us Filipinos.

So I really had two reasons why I wanted to visit Indonesia: to see the sites and my friends. I was able to do both, and thanks to Nia and Himawan who took time off from their busy schedule to tour me around Yogyakarta for a week (a week!), I was able to see and experience this country like a local, or as I told anyone who asked, an Indonesian from Northern Sumatra. If it weren't for them, my friends (who also decided to tag along) and I would not have been able to eat at restaurants where there were no other foreigners but us. We would have spent three times more on the batik we bought if we shopped at the mall and not the market, where prices were not only much, much lower, but you could haggle as well. We would not have tried (or I guess even known about) the Masangin Purity Test. And while my friends constantly said that they were bad at Indonesian history, we were still able to get a much deeper understanding of the place and its people (did you know, for example, that Yogyakarta has a Sultan and that he serves as the province's governor?). I guess traveling with a local with almost zero knowledge of history is still better than not having a local guide, eh?

Prambanan

One of Borobudur's many, many Buddhas

Borobudur's famous stuppas

Taman Sari bathhouse

Taman Sari underground mosque

Yogyakarta's sand dunes