THE DAY in Yogyakarta!
At 6.30am (yes, you got it right, six thirty in the morning!), the Jogja team (Flavia, Karen, Manuel, Nitin, Sergio, Terry, Trupty, and Victor) left the hotel to go to Borobudur, the largest and most famous Buddhist temple in the world.
The temple was built over a period of 75 years in the 8th and 9th centuries by the kingdom of Sailendra, out of an estimated 2 million blocks of stone. It was abandoned in the 14th century for reasons that still remain a mystery and for centuries lay hidden in the jungle under layers of volcanic ash.
The place is impressive. We hired a guide that helped us interpret a fraction of the thousands of symbols represented in the building structure and decorations.
From Borobudur we (well, actually the driver that we hired for the whole day) drove for about an hour to return to downtown Yogyakarta (even if distances are limited, traffic is awful in most Indonesian cities) to visit the Kraton Palace, the residence of the sultan of Yogyakarta (the spiritual leader of the local Muslim community).
He is the first in his dynasty to have had only one wife and no sons (he has 5 daughters).. The tour guide told us that despite the lack of male offspring, the current sultan chose not to marry more than one wife to be an example to his community.
We had lunch in a wonderful restaurant, owned (according to our driver) by a relative of the sultan.
Two kilometers away from the Kraton Palace is the Taman Sari Water Castle, the place where the forefathers of the current sultan were coming - among other reasons - to swim and relax (now is a national monument). There are 3 pools: one was used for the children, one for the wives, and one for the sultan himself (that would choose which of the wives should share the pool with him at any given time). At the beginning of the century the pool had to be fairly busy... Sultan Hamengku Buwono VIII (the grandfather), had 8 wives and 42 children!
On the way to Prambanan we visited a batik factory (and shop!). We experienced first hand the process to create a batik cloth.
First the design is traced onto the fabric:
Then wax is applied over the penciled pattern. Almost always the original cloth is white or beige. The wax will prevent the pattern to be colored. Sometimes the was is applied without any drawing being penciled ahead of time. This of course requires additional expertise...
Sometimes wax is applied using a stamp:
Next, the cloth is dyed in the first dye bath. The area of the cloth where the wax was applied in the previous step will remain white.
The wax is then removed from the fabric by immersing it in boiling water:
The next steps are a repetition of the three previous steps. New wax is applied where color should not affect the fabric in the next dye bath. This can be over white portions remained in the cloth, or on parts of the newly colored cloth. Of course where the wax was never applied the new color will sum up to the previous one (e.g., if the first bath was red and the new bath is blue, the resulting color will be violet).
Then new color is applied, wax is removed, new wax is applied, etc. as many times as required depending on the complexity of the design.
At 4.00pm we left the batik factory/shop to reach Prambanan, the largest and most beautiful Hindu temple complex in Indonesia. 15 km north-east of Yogyakarta, the complex was built in the 9th century and designed as three concentric squares, holding overall 224 temples (most of them were severally damaged by the 2006 earthquake). The inner square contains 16 temples, the most significant being the three temples dedicated to the three great Hindu divinities (Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma) and three small temples dedicated to the animals serving them (Bull for Siva, Eagle for Brahma and Swan for Vishnu). The main temples of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are decorated with reliefs illustrating the Ramayana period (history of the Hindu hero Rama, written around 300).
You would need to spend days in each of these sites to fully appreciate the history carved in these stones. Not having time... what best way to complete this intense day than watching a representation of the Ramayana epic at the Yogyakarta Cultural Center? 
Thank you friends!
Sergio
#ibmcsc Indonesia
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