Flew from Bali to Yogyakarta on Friday. It was smooth, relatively simple process. We paid a friend of Tirta's brother to drive us to the airpot (it's a 1-2 hour drive from Payangan), got there earlier than expected and were able to check in without a hitch. This is the first time I have been back to Yogya since I lived here as a teenager 40 years ago. I was really eager to see what I could remember and what has changed completely. |
Spent a small fortune (in Rp.) for breakfast at the airport (it's all relative) and admired what a clean, functional place the Ngurah Rai Int'l airport is (much, much nicer than most U.S. airports), then boarded. They told us there were no seats together but both Tim and I were surrounded by empty seats -- go figure. |
Java feels very different from Bali. The drive from the airport to Yogya (1.25 hours) was mostly through small towns and rice paddies with a view of a spine of green, green mountains on one side. It made me realize how tightly packed everywhere we've been in Bali is: there are only a few places with few enough houses that you can see up towards the mountains. All the roads seem to traverse through heavily developed areas.
Yogya itself is busy and crowded but maybe not so much as Denpasar (or I'm just not getting to the same kind of places). Andong (horse-drawn carriages) and becak (carriages on a bike, or more modernly on a motorbike) are still really common on the roads. And the tea! I ordered (my regular) ice tea with dinner our first night and the jasmine hit me like a freight train. I hadn't remembered that it was always jasmine tea when I lived here before until I had a glass of it. In Bali they use regular black tea (which is still delicious, but not memory-calling). Funny how closely memory is to taste and smell. In a small way, it really was like coming home.
Oh, and by the way: the potion worked! There was some sort of mix up with our hotel room and they upgraded us to a suite. I most definetly turned into a princess, not a frog