Never Ending Asia...

...is the motto of Jogjakarta and I'll be completely honest, I haven't the slightest idea what it means. We took a 8 hour train ride from Jakarta to Jogjakarta in an executive class cabin which was quite nice. The train was air conditioned, had ample leg room and my chair reclined to nearly horizontal (unfortunately the button was stuck down for all 8 hours so I had no choice). We had initially planned on taking an overnight train to this town, but due to the circumstances mentioned before we had to take a day train. It turned out to be an awesome experience. The train hummed along at roughly 50 MPH through ghettos, rice patties, hills, fields and everything in between. I really got a wonderful preview of the areas of Indonesia less frequently visited. I took a ton of 10 second clips throughout the voyage and once I am back in Singapore with my laptop I'll put them together and upload it.

We arrived in Jogjakarta at around 4pm. The weather had been pleasantly sunny through out the ride, but began to drizzle as we pulled up to the station. Within minutes the drizzle turned into rain, then a down pour and finally it appeared Poseidon himself had unleashed the Indian Ocean upon us. I've never seen it rain so hard before, here is a short clip...




It lasted about 30 minutes and then the sun came out again... apparently that's the trend aroudn here. We "happened" to bump into a friendly local who helped us get oriented with the town (I say town in comparison to Jakarta, but Jogja still has a population of 800,000). He "conveniently" happen to work for a tourism company. We never questioned why he was just hanging out at a train station... He showed us to a nice hotel which just so happened to be next to his office. The place was clean and at $10 a night, the price was right.

We dropped off our stuff, took a quick shower and hit the town for a bit to eat. Jogja has a main strip full of sidewalk venders, knockoff name brand stores and art galleries selling "authentic" batik art (more about the art later). We found a small restaurant which overlooked the main drag and ordered.


I went with a traditional Indonesian dish known as Mie Gorang which is essentially fried noodles with chicken and two fried eggs on top... delicious. KC thought the fried chicken sounded nice and went with that. Now, in America when you order fried chicken you expect to receive pieces of chicken which have been maticulously removed, cleaned, lightly battered and then fried. This is not the case in Indonesia. It's hard to tell what they do, but i'm willing to say they follow this cooking protocol:

1. Raise chicken
2. Remove feathers
3. Fry

See for yourself:

(Yes, head an beak still intact.)

Despite the presentation, the chicken was quite good and that fact that it cost $3.00 made it even more mouthwatering. We headed back to the hotel, but stopped off a small bar right out front. It seemed to be a popular backpackers joint and had a excellent cover band which played American pop and rock songs with amazingly accuracy. They were followed by a Bob Marley cover band which was also quite good. The audience turned from westerners to Rastafarian locals. Five or Six Bintangs later we hit the sack. We would be waking up at 5:00am to watch the sunrise over Borobudur, one of the (if not THE) largest buddhist monuments in the world.