Indonesia is a massive country with over sixteen thousand islands and the fourth highest population on the planet. As such there is no shortage of places to visit though some are much easier to visit than others. The destination with the highest level of accessibility is Jakarta, which contains the best connected airport in the entirety of the Asia Pacific region. This is followed by Bali which is incredibly popular with holidaymakers, especially from Australia. I have already written about our feelings regarding Bali (we love it) and they can be found by following this link. Today, however, I want to talk about a less popular destination in Indonesia, which shares the island of Java with Jakarta, Yogyakarta (pronounced Jogjakarta).
When I was planning our first trip to Bali, I had managed to find out about a rather impressive temple on the island of Java that was worth leaving Bali to see. That temple was Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. I found out that the easiest way to get to Borobudur was to fly into Yogyakarta airport. As such, I decided it would be worth spending a couple days in Yogyakarta to see something different to Bali.
Whilst planning these two days, I found out about another quite famous temple complex which was located in Yogyakarta called Prambanan, which is the second largest hindu temple complex in Southeast Asia after Angkor Wat.
Both of these sites were world heritage sites and would be viewable in a single day due to their closeness to Yogyakarta city. As such we booked a couple nights in Yogyakarta and booked a driver to take us on a daytrip to see both sites as well as the Sultan’s palace with plans to explore more of the city the next day.
I can highly recommend both temple complexes. They are breathtaking and neither words nor pictures can do them justice. If you have children then Prambanan also has a herd of Javanese deer which the big kid in me found very cool. One thing we definitely noticed while we were at the temples was that the vast majority of tourists there were from Indonesia rather than elsewhere, which was a nice twist on the usual over abundance of foreign tourists at most attractions.
The sultan’s palace had a really interesting story. The Sultan of Yogyakarta is the only constitutionally recognised Sultan in Indonesia, owing to the Sultanate’s support of the independence movement from the Dutch. Due to this the Sultan is also the governor of the Special Region of Yogyakarta. Little did we know that we would be getting another experience at the palace the next day, that blew this one out of the water.
On our return to our guest house, we found out that it was actually Eid al-Fitr the next day (I wasn’t nearly as good at research back then). This meant that a lot of the things we had been thinking about doing, such as going to a shadow puppet show, would no longer be possible. What we would be able to do however was attend Grebeg Syawal, a yearly celebration held by the sultan to celebrate Eid. Expecting very little, decided we would go into town independently and see what was going on.
This turned out to be a truly excellent decision and gave us one of our favourite travel memories ever. We followed the crowds to the palace, where we saw some other people from our hotel and decided that we would get closer to the palace entrance to get a better view. We were met by hundreds of brightly dressed former soldiers, all marching together and then lining up on either side of the gates.
It was at this point that we spotted the elephants, which we later found out were owned by the sultan, but had been donated to the zoo, they only came out for this annual parade. In terms of things we had expected to see that day, elephants on parade was pretty close to the bottom of the list.
We moved slightly further out and then noticed a smaller group walking out, who were being shown deference by the soldiers. They stopped about 5 people away from us and a kind soldier let us know that this was the sultan and his retinue. On closer look we could see that there was a royal mint carrier as well as a royal fan holder.
The sultan inspected the troops and finally massive offerings were carried out of the palace to be donated at the temple for Eid. This was the end of the ceremony and everyone proceeded back into the palace, starting with the sultan, followed by the troops.
As a completely coincidental event, considering I had chosen a random two day period over the course of our three and a half weeks in Bali to visit Yogyakarta, the serendipity of Eid, being one of those two days and not the day we had chosen to visit the temples is considerably greater than anything else that has ever happened to us while travelling.
We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city and visiting a Batik workshop before we headed back to our guest house for our last night before our flight back to Bali the next day.
My decision to visit Yogyakarta is probably the travel decision I am most pleased about, it isn’t somewhere that most travel agents will tell you about, and it requires a little bit of work, but it is definitely worth it.
Yogyakarta Tips
- If you are already planning on visiting Bali, the easiest way to visit Yogyakarta is a return flight from Denpasar, otherwise the likely route you will take is to connect via Jakarta
- If you are flying from Bali, you will fly over Mount Bromo, so try to get a window seat and to fly during daylight hours.
- The main street in Yogyakarta in Jalan Malioboro. It has malls, street vendors and various shops selling lots of things unique to Yogyakarta, so it is definitely worth checking out. The palace is at one end of it.
- Yogyakarta is a great place to learn about Batik, there are multiple Batik museums and workshops where you can see Batik being made and get information about the process.
