Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia – 2026 – Part 3

The beautiful Borobudur Buddhist temple dates from the 8th and 9th centuries. It’s built in 3 tiers; a pyramidal base with 5 concentric square terraces, the trunk with 3 circular platforms and a monumental stupa at the top. There are 72 openwork stupas on the circular platforms and each has a Buddha statue inside. They did a huge restoration in the 1970’s of this complex. I for one am glad they take the time and money to keep these buildings alive. It’s part of history and once gone, something we can’t get back. (A stupa is a dome shaped monument built to hold relics or statues.)

There were well over a hundred steps and some were quite narrow. I also noticed that at a lot of these temples, the stairs are not the same. Some are close together and some you have to have truly long legs to get to the next step, no consistency. It was so hot the day we were there, unbelievably hot! It’s a good thing that Clint and I like the heat.

  • Walking up to the complex
  • It’s amazing to me how these places have survived, some with some help, for hundreds of years
  • Clint up at the top
  • View from afar

One evening we went to a lovely buffet and for some reason I have no photos! Our guide bought us all a drink and we had a great meal, so many different choices of traditional food and North American food. After the dinner we walked across the street to an Indonesian ballet. It was very well done even though it was done in their language and we weren’t always 100% certain what was going on! But we enjoyed it nonetheless.

We left that area and headed to the Puri Asri Magelang Hotel which was such a neat place albeit in the middle of nowhere !

  • Walking to our room
  • Our room
  • Beautiful verandah outside the restaurant where Clint and I had our dinner and perhaps a beer or two….

Until next time !

17 thoughts on “Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia – 2026 – Part 3”

      3. Domino’s corporate offices are in Ann Arbor, Michigan not super far from where I lived in Michigan. I have read that they are closing stores due to finance issues…

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  2. That’s a great picture of you and Clint. It’s nice when you have tour members to take pictures of the two of you. I always appreciated that as a solo traveler so I could get my photo in front of the places I’d read about for years. The temple and statuary are amazing. Wow, all the steps, which sounds pretty rigorous to navigate, let along in the heat. Your accommodations always look nice and the pizza looks delicious.

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    1. Yes it was nice to have others there to do that and actually we were the only couple on the last two weeks in Indonesia and also when we were in Japan. I would say 85% of the people in all three countries were single. Our guide was really great at getting photos of everyone together.

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      1. That’s nice of people to do that. I traveled solo in several tour groups and I always found the rest of the group members, especially the married couples, to be welcoming, asking you to sit at their table, sit beside them on buses, trains, planes, etc. I kept in touch with many of them after returning home, but that was before social media, so after exchanging photos and a few Christmas cards, that was it unfortunately.

        Funny story – there was a nice, older couple from Texas named Millie and Phil on my Scandinavian/USSR tour and I was toting around my 35mm camera with three different lenses, lugging it all in a camera bag and/or the camera around my neck. Phil had just bought a compact camera, which was supposed to be comparable to the quality of a 35 mm photos, just a zoom lens, kind of like a digital compact, only this was many years before digital cameras came on the scene. He kept it in his shirt pocket and he made a friendly bet with me that his new state-of-the-art camera would take comparable pics to my 35mm equipment I was toting. He and Millie took several pics of me with their camera and mine so I could compare them at home and I took pics of them posing in front of tourist attractions with their camera and mine. We exchanged all the pics of each other – sure enough, that camera took excellent pics, just as good as mine. It made me wonder why I went through all the hassle.

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      2. I usually keep in touch with people from our trips but I didn’t this time. We didn’t form any great connections for some reason and I usually do. I just took a very small point and shoot camera this trip, I left my “good” camera stuff at home. We were gone two months and moving a lot and I didn’t feel like lugging it around. Besides there were no moose lol
        Some of those small cameras can take great photos. That’s a cute story Linda 😊

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      3. After the “high” from a nice tour/trip is over and you really don’t have anything else in common, it can be like that and back then with no social media, you had to pay for extra prints, then mailers, then postage to mail them. Yes, Millie and Phil were great and he was right about the camera. He’d see me lugging stuff around and point at his shirt pocket and pat it and smile. 🙂 Sometimes it’s just easier than messing with the big cameras/accessories and two months away is a long time, especially if you’re “mooseless”! I may take out the DSLR before it gets cold again – first time this year. I took 165 pics today just walking around the riverfront and through Wyandotte.

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