I’m using a pretty broad definition of art in this context, covering everything from fine art to handicrafts to ancient structures. All of that stuff UNESCO crams under the rubric of Tangible Cultural Heritage. And even the performing arts UNESCO considers Intangible Cultural Heritage. Close to our entire purpose in visiting other places is to see how those cultures express ideas about beauty, truth, and history.

I’ve already written about crafts and performance in Java, so for the purposes of this post I’m narrowing my definition of art to museums and galleries. But as you’ll see, that leaves a pretty wide range of expression on the table.

ArtJog

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. Our stay in Bali coincided with their annual arts festival, Pesta Kesenian Bali. That same luck of the calendar delivered us to Yogyakarta during their annual arts festival, ArtJog. Staged at the Jogja National Museum and lasting five weeks, each year’s festival is curated around a theme. This year’s theme is Motif: Amalan, and is incomprehensible even by the standards of ArtSpeak.

To be fair, this morsel was translated from Indonesian (by ArtJog, by the way – I didn’t just run the original through Google Translate), but I really don’t think that’s the problem.

Thankfully, comprehending this year’s motif wasn’t necessary to appreciating the work that their rubric prompted. I’m pretty sure there was work on display that pre-existed, but the vast majority of the work was created for the show. This is a prestigious exhibition, and artists step up to be included.

The entrance to the museum drops you right into it, with a massive piece called Secret of Eden. Tree roots grow out of the ceiling and spotlights cast eerie shadows on the walls. You walk through the door and enter another, alien world. It’s a brilliant way to bring you into the exhibition.

This gives you a real feeling for the overall space.

Once past Secret of Eden, the rest of ArtJog is more traditional arts festival fare: paintings, sculpture, ceramics, kinetic art, multimedia pieces… But the range of expression and the quality of the work was impressive. We actually came back for a second visit, rather than racing through. There was a lot to see.

One of our favorite pieces was called Rupa tan Matra, which roughly translates to Unmeasurable Work, referring to the labor women put into the home. To us, it was the Cotton Kitchen, every item made completely of cotton. We were allowed to enter the room and get up close. The vision and the craftsmanship were perfectly aligned.

Here are some highlights from the rest of the show. We’ll warm you up with some traditional media.

This one needs its own explanation. There were about 8-10 of these in a white room. They all just looked like blurs, but after staring, and some strategic squinting, the underlying images came into soft focus. But they didn’t have any definition until I saw them through the camera lens, which picked up contrasts the human eye couldn’t make out. I always think of cameras as capturing what we see, but it’s clear cameras see differently than we do. This photo is what the camera saw, not what I saw.

And we’ll close out with the installations and oddities.

Sonobudoyo Cultural Museum

We’re always interested in what the kids are up to, but it’s hard to understand the modern context without going back to the source. The new work riffs on traditions, so it’s important to see both sides. The Sonobudoyo’s focus on Indonesia’s rich cultural heritage is the perfect counterpoint to ArtJog’s commitment to the moment.

While we’d seen many of the more modern exhibits, like the masks and puppets, in other contexts, seeing the ancient work, going all the way back to the Neolithic era, was wonderful.

The closest the curators could get to dating the Neolithic pieces was “1st Millennium,” which is pretty loose. You’d hope they could narrow it down a little tighter than a thousand-year window, but this stuff is pretty fucking old, no matter where it falls on that spectrum.

There was also a nice collection of the expected puppets and masks.

We’ll close out our visit to the Sonobudoyo with a random collection of Other Shit.

Wahanarata Royal Carriage Museum

This was a very strange place, and Dorothy and Nef had very different responses to it than I did. They thought it was a museum devoted to a particular slice of vehicular history, and I thought it was a monument to oppression, and couldn’t figure out why Indonesians tolerated its presence. Not that far apart, really.

Admittedly, there were some sharp wheels on display, all from roughly 1900, plus or minus. They were all royal carriages, and they were almost all Dutch, which is the part I struggled with. The Dutch permitted Indonesian royalty to exist only to the extent that they were agreeable puppets. It was easier for the Dutch to stand behind the throne than in front of it, with the Indonesian royal families serving as a wafer-thin fig leaf both concealing and legitimizing Holland’s brutal rule.

As part of this arrangement, the Dutch provided the royal families with carriages, toys intended to make them feel important. Modern. European. In the same way that Western dress infiltrated Indonesian society under Dutch rule. The condescension of the Dutch comes through loud and clear, although I’m less inclined to indict the Indonesians for complicity. Life during wartime…

All of which would have been fine if the carriages had been displayed with any shred of this history attached. They’re not simply artifacts of transportation history, they have meaning and intention. The signage was neutrally informative when it could have provided depth and context to the displays. It seemed like a curiously deliberate omission.

Contrast that with Bali’s Bajra Sandhi Monument in Denpasar, which featured historical vignettes, by way of charming dioramas, of key events in Bali’s history, with plenty of space given over to Dutch fuckery. If you walked into the Wahanarata with no knowledge of Indonesia’s history the displays would leave you with the distinct impression that the Dutch were kindly, generous carriage makers. If I were Indonesian I would want to burn the whole thing down. Or at least guest curate.

But Dorothy and Nef weren’t wrong (even though they deemed me a humorless git who couldn’t just appreciate a nice collection of antiques). There were some outstanding examples of the carriage arts on display. Why not simply enjoy them for what they are, rather than what they mean?

The Sultan’s Palace

A funny thing about the Sultan’s Palace museum is that it’s actually the Sultan’s palace. The current Sultan. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but Yogyakarta is a monarchy, whose Governor is the Sultan. Or whose Sultan is the Governor. The current Sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, wields official state power as payback for the then sultan’s support for independence during the post WWII revolution.

Chunks of the Sultan’s ancestral home have been turned into exhibits and opened to the public. But he still lives there. I said it was a funny thing, but it’s also an interesting thing, with exhibits focused around court life.

Like the illustration of troops, there were also hats and parasols on display that codified fine-grained definitions of role and status in the court. A lot of attention was given to these distinctions, in large part, I think, because it was all the Dutch let them do. They were cosplaying as rulers, making the cosplay itself the only thing they could control.

Every single design element of each of these hats communicated detailed information about the wearer’s position at court and relationship to the Sultan.

The same with the parasols. Color and pattern were an elaborate code, decipherable by every one at court.

Wet Ground

There’s a nimbus of ArtJog-adjacent galleries that pop up with shows coincidental with the main event, and ArtJog publishes a helpful listing of who’s doing what. We went to a popup craft market and found a maker of shagreen leather accessories, we found a gallery with breathtaking modern takes on traditional batik, and we visited Wet Ground, a little gallery with a small but choice smattering of wall art. You know. Art.

Monggo Chocolate Kingdom

If you think this stretches the definition of art to the breaking point, fine. You can just stop reading. I put it at the end on purpose. I think that the crafting of chocolate directly speaks to beauty, truth, and history. Rather than agreeing to disagree, perhaps we can just agree that you’re very narrow-minded.

But lest you think I’m shoehorning a factory and tasting tour into this post, Monggo did start out with a museum. Of chocolate art. Packaging, marketing posters, anything and everything chocolate-related.

The art was swell and the company history was interesting, but the truth is we just love factory tours. There’s something hypnotic about seeing things manufactured, the elegance of the orchestration required to make sure all the moving parts are moving in sequence. I’m hard pressed to imagine what I’d be disinterested in seeing manufactured. Turkey franks? Sure. Hula hoops, toilets, cardboard boxes, tires… Yes, yes, yes, and yes. It’s a human/machine ballet whose choreography never fails to entrance.

But they had a museum of chocolate posters, so it counts for this exercise. Don’t like it? Think I’m willfully blurring taxonomic boundaries? Get your own blog.

Chocolate in Indonesia is a Dutch hangover. Along with the twitching. Cacao itself was brought over by the Spanish in the 1500s, but the Dutch amped that up into large-scale production for export when they took the reins. Meaning that there’s really no historical legacy of chocolate consumption in Indonesia. That said, a handful of entrepreneurs have set their sights on creating modern artisanal chocolate, leveraging Indonesia’s still potent cacao production.

Monggo which means yes, please in Indonesian, is one of those ventures, founded by a Belgian expat in 2005 because he missed the chocolate from home. It’s grown from a one-man business, peddled from the back of a pink Vespa, into a thriving venture. At its pre-pandemic peak, Monggo employed over 160 people and produced 300kg of finished chocolate per day. When they outgrew their modest space in Yogyakarta, they moved to the spacious ‘burbs and christened the compound an entire Chocolate Kingdom.

The Kingdom includes the production facility, all behind glass so you can follow the process, the museum of chocolate art, and a shop/tasting lounge. As part of our modest entrance fee we were assigned a docent who stayed with us the whole way through, helpfully explaining the process and answering questions.

Truthfully, I could watch this all day. I think there’s something wrong with me.

This was followed by mixing and molding and packaging, but there’s nothing quite like seeing raw ingredients transformed, as if by alchemy, into something entirely new.

How did it end? In a potlatch of chocolate, of course. After touring the production facility, we decamped to the shop and tasting lounge where we picked up enough truly excellent chocolate to last the rest of our trip. Our favorites were the mango, unsurprisingly, and the rendang, which caught us by surprise. Rendang is a spice mix used for cooking beef in Indonesia, and we didn’t expect to find it in chocolate. But we’re glad we did.

We enjoyed bowls of their house-made gelato while we waited for our car. You’ll be shocked to hear that the chocolate gelato was very, very, good.

Silver

Kotagede has been a silversmithing center for hundreds of years, dating back to the onset of the Mataram empire in the 16th century. They are known, as they have been all along, for incredibly delicate and detailed filigree work. Impossible to count, and no one seems to have made the effort, but the eyeball test suggests easily more than 100 silversmiths just in Kotagede, let alone the rest of Yogyakarta.

Our first stop was Bagus Silver, a little shop we just wandered into at random. It was the first silver we’d seen, and we were quite taken.

Then we found the big kahuna, HS Silver, a shop that has been operating since the 1950s. Part of their manufacturing operations were onsite, which they walked you through, which was pretty entertaining. But the shop was the highlight. The quality of their fine filigree work was head and shoulders above the other shops we visited.

They’re a nearly vertical operation, short of actually owning a silver mine. The raw silver comes from Western Java, but after that HS does everything else. They smelt it themselves, so they can control the mix, adding just 2% copper into the silver. The highest government designation is .925, but HS silver is 98%.

They cast their own silver bars, and extrude it into the thin sheets they use to create fine wire of different gauges. The frames are slightly heavier than the interiors, and they even use silver powder to solder the joins.

It doesn’t seem like human hands should be able to do anything both this precise and tiny.

Another level of precision that seems ever so slightly inhuman.

The massive showroom, unsurprisingly, was the standout. The range and the quality were truly impressive.

As is well documented by scientists, tourism is an extractive process, and we extracted happily and thoroughly.

The Taman Sari Tourist Village

You can enter the Tourist Village from the street, but the heart of it is right off the Taman Sari Water Palace. It’s a residential complex that has some complex relationship to Yogyakarta’s Sultan that we couldn’t quite tease out. Some people seem to live rent free in exchange for using their homes as shops, and the Sultan wanted to take some of it back to create luxury housing but the peasants revolted. All told to us anecdotally in broken English, so details are hard to pin down. Wikipedia was, sadly, of no use.

Regardless, the village has quite a few little shops spread about, all, for the most part, combination workroom and retail. We got to watch people work and then buy things from them. Buying things is what we do best.

Waroeng Loekis

The very first shop after entering from the Water Palace is Waroeng Loekis, full of outrageous paintings and painted t-shirts from a painter and his wife. Really lovely people, and work that’s whatever the superlative of vibrant is. Vibrating? When I came back with Nef she had to get a t-shirt, too. Different art, but we’ll definitely have to avoid wearing them at the same time. Or not.

Voice of Jogja

The shop right next door was also t-shirts and prints, but it couldn’t have been more different. Here, the designer took traditional characters from the Ramayana and did them up as classic comic book superheroes, à la John Buscema or Bernie Wrightson. This is a documented sweet spot for us, the modern twist on traditional techniques and motifs. The artist’s goal was to recontextualize the old stories for a younger generation, to make them relevant and keep them a part of current culture, not just the dusty past. Check!

Of course, I bought a couple of shirts. They heat transfer on premises, so I picked the size and shirt color and they did the transfer while we were there. I picked two that focused on the Punakawan characters the Indonesians inserted into their tellings of both the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They decided the stories wasn’t funny enough, so they added four characters for comic relief. Semar, parent of the other three Punakawan: Gareng, Petruk, and Bagong.

Diva Galleri

Our final stop was a little shop we found by accident. It looked like a coffee shop from the outside, advertising Kopi Luwak, but we’d already done the civet dance, so we were prepared to pass it by. But a peek inside revealed… puppets! And masks! And batik paintings!

We walked away with an absolutely stellar Wayang puppet, Kamajaya, the god of love. He came as part of a matched pair with his wife, Kamaratih, but he was a little expensive so we split the lovers up. He’s made of painted water buffalo leather and his central support is a piece of carved water buffalo horn. The shop proprietor made all of the puppets.

Wayang Kulit Gift Shop

We went to a performance of the shadow puppets, the Wayang Kulit. Or that’s what we thought. As it happened, through a little cross-cultural miscommunication, we saw the Wayang Orang instead, a masked dance. No puppets. But the gift shop at the performance space had the puppets, so we spent quality time there pre-show.

We didn’t understand at first that Sulistyo, the enthusiastic guy showing us around, was actually the master puppet maker. He made all the puppets for the Wayang Kulit and all the puppets in the shop. We thought he was just really into it, but it was great to pick up pieces directly from the creator. I felt better about separating Kamajaya and Kamaratih, knowing that we’d created space for our very own Krishna, the god of protection, compassion, tenderness, and love. That’s two gods of love! In one house! Three, counting me.

Lurik

While batik is the star of the show in Java, there’s a completely separate weaving tradition called lurik, which simply means stripes. There’s a hotbed of it in the Bantul neighborhood, right next to where we’re staying in Kotagede, so we massed the troops for a field trip. The goal: two workshops and a store.

Dibyo Lurik

Our first stop was Dibyo Lurik, a small workshop with a single weaver onsite. They work with other weavers, which they’d have to, as this one poor woman could produce only seven meters of fabric in a full day.

After marinating in batik’s riot of color and pattern, the austere beauty of the lurik felt like a palette cleanser. I wasn’t expecting to be enchanted by subtlety, but there you go. The very definition of travel being broadening.

I checked prices as we were looking through the goods, and reported that the lurik was 350,000 rupiah/meter, about $20. Not an unreasonable cost for artisanal hand-loomed fabric, but a substantial amount regardless. It turns out that I couldn’t process what I’d actually been told, which was 35,000 rupiah/meter, because $2/meter for this fabric was literally incomprehensible. We loaded up.

Tenun Lurik “Kurnia”

Our next stop was what seemed to be the largest lurik producer in Bantul. Where Dibyo Lurik had a single loom and a very tired woman, Tenun Lurik “Kurnia” (tenun means weaving) had several rooms full of active looms.

The work at Kurnia was even more beautiful than what we saw at Dibyo.

Ardjo Lurik

Our final stop was a little shop, Ardjo Lurik. The shopkeeper was napping when we arrived, but got up and opened up for us. She doesn’t weave lurik herself, but uses what’s produced in the neighborhood for her own creations.

Baskets

We’d birddogged a shop called Mercia Natural Baskets, but what we didn’t know was that it was in the center of an entire basket district. We went to visit a store and had fallen into a field trip, all unbeknownst.

The basketry came in all shapes and sizes, but the most spectacular form was, hands down, lampshades. They existed in every combination of refined vs. rough, symmetric vs, asymmetric, organic vs. abstract. The range was dizzying, and the saddest part was that there was not a single piece of a scale that permitted bringing it home. Oh, we discussed it, we strategized, we planned. And while theoretically possible, we abandoned our schemes and settled in to just enjoying them for themselves, and not as potential loot.

Still. We are Olympic-level looters, and it hurts to be thwarted. We are bad at unrequited.

Here’s an overview of the extraordinary range.

And some standout individual pieces.

Glass

Nestled into the basket district was a lone, dusty outpost of the glass arts. We’d seen their specialty before, at a shop in Ubud in Bali. Glass vessels are slumped over natural wood so the two pieces fit together perfectly. It’s a lovely effect, but what we saw in Bali was much more modest in scale, more tumblers-on-coasters than the sculptural pieces on display at Deco Glass.

Parri Genuine Stingray Shagreen

We’d gone to several of the small exhibitions ancillary to ArtJog, Yogya’s annual art show, and this one found us out in the hinterlands at an eco-spa and restaurant called Yabbiekayu. Nef found a table with little stingray leather bracelets, which turned out to be the merch outlet of a real store. It’s not like we had options at that point. We had to go.

First, let it be said that the stingray skins are ethically sourced. They’re not endangered, nor are they harvested for their skin. They are fished for meat, and before the owner/designer had his epiphany to use them for luxury leather, the skins were just trashed. So, recycling. Super green.

Whew! That’s a lot. It’s one of the reasons we’ve found Indonesia so compelling. In our ongoing game of Would You Live Here, Indonesia gets an upvote for its accessible language, it’s ridiculously low cost of living, its friendly folk, it’s delightful beaches, and it’s rich cultural offerings. We’ve loved Indonesia, and we only just scratched its surface.

Batik is a particular flavor of wax resist dying, which has been a thing since ancient times, having been practiced in Egypt, southern China, India, and different parts of Southeast Asia. Javanese batik techniques are the most sophisticated of the various flavors, although it’s impossible to put a precise date on their origins. UNESCO estimates that the local traditions are over a thousand years old.

One of our very first stops in Yogyakarta was Malioboro Street, the downtown batik mecca. Half the stores sell batik, the other half sell bakpia, little cakes filled with sweet flavored mung bean paste, and the final half are snack emporia. Yep, come to Escape Velocity for the highfalutin Latin plurals. Stay for the math jokes.

Batik Junwita

The very first shop we visited on Malioboro was Batik Junwita. We were not prepared. Batiks come in several flavors, the primary distinction being true batiks, which are made by hand by applying wax as a dye resist in various layers, and prints, which mimic batik patterns but are printed commercially. Shops that sell printed batiks look much like other clothing stores, but louder. There will be a rack with a particular design in multiple sizes, and if you see something you like in a print you can ask and they’re likely to have it in stock in other sizes.

But real batik fabrics are hand made, one at a time, so literally every garment and piece of fabric in these shops is unique. If it doesn’t fit, too bad, but more to the point, it’s actually disorienting to be in a retail store with zero duplication. The range of choices in any one shop is dizzying, and there are hundreds of these shops all over Yogyakarta, a lot of them on Malioboro. It’s impossible not to get swirly eyes. Here’s Junwita. Quite the introduction.

One of the hallmarks of the shirts, even inexpensive shirts made from the printed batik, is the insane precision in the cutting and assembly. You can see it here on a shirt from Junwita, with the placket matching the pattern practically to the centimeter. The pattern tends to repeat in perfect symmetry on the back in a single piece. It’s stunt sewing at its finest.

Creative Batik

As I mentioned, Dorothy wasn’t bowled over by the batiks at first. A little loud and unsubtle for her tastes. Precisely why I loved them so. But then we found Creative Batik, which happened to be less than five minutes by foot from our apartment in Kotagede. It hadn’t come up in our research ahead of time, we just saw a sign for it on the corner. If we hadn’t been neighbors we’d have never found it.

This was the sweet spot Dorothy and I are always seeking: traditional techniques and motifs mixmastered through a modern sensibility. We seek that out wherever we go, and we found it in Yogyakarta, by accident, practically next door.

Here are the clothes we got at Creative. I picked out three pieces of fabric they made into custom shirts for me, and then bought another off the rack when I picked them up. The base price of the shirts, including the tailoring, was $32.

Batik Sastronegoro

A high end shop that we’d read about while doing our homework was Batik Sastronegoro, near the Taman Sari craft village. We went one evening, and, as has happened repeatedly here, the place didn’t seem to exist. We careened about looking for it and got picked up by a fellow who asked where we were headed. He promised to take us to Sastronegoro so we followed him. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it was dark, and we were wandering through tiny lanes and alleys, and while we currently outnumbered him, who knew how long that would last? Long enough, as it turned out, to arrive at a house where he knocked on the door. When they opened it up, it was… a batik shop. A closed batik shop that they opened for us.

It took a few minutes to piece it together, but Batik Sastronegoro had closed, and the family that operated it had reopened as Batik Tulis Griya Sentong. The guy who picked us up was a friend of the family, so he knew where to bring us.

Sastronegoro had a long, multi-generation tradition of producing beautiful, highly detailed work, and they were incredibly generous with their time and attention.

Dorothy and Nef both bought heirloom pieces, done by the clan’s grandmother about forty years ago.

But that wasn’t the end of the evening’s adventure, although it would have been enough. Our guide, in walking us back to the street, gently suggested that we might want to visit his father’s workshop. Not having been shanghaied so far, we figured we should say yes. New experiences, new adventures!

This was another form of batik that we’d seen in some shops, but nothing we’d looked at carefully. Whereas the fabric batiks were almost entirely abstract, some artists specialized in using batik as a technique for figurative illustration. Fabric paintings, basically.

Galeri Batik Jawa

We had one more place on the list we’d compiled from advance research: Galeri Batik Jawa, which specialized exclusively in indigo. We were surprised at how rich they were able to make a monochromatic palette look. We were expecting to be interested, but not enchanted. Silly us.

Babaran Segaragunung Gallery

One last, unintended batik adventure was in store. We were in Yogyakarta during their annual art extravaganza, ArtJog. The main event is at the national museum, but there are small galleries all throughout the area putting on ArtJog adjacent shows with local artists. We made our way to several, one of which was focused on textile arts. We didn’t know what that meant exactly, but shouldn’t have been surprised that it meant batik.

Which we discovered when we were finally able to get there. The producer had sent me a Google Maps link to the location, but you can’t put that directly into the ridesharing apps here, Grab and Gojek. So I entered the name of the gallery into Gojek manually, and it popped up as a destination. It dropped us off at what turned out to be the studio for the gallery, not the gallery itself. The people working there were mystified by our presence.

Having figured out the error, all I had to do was get Gojek or Grab to pick us up and take us to the right place. Which they’d have happily done had any cars been in the area, but we were in a noticeably non-urban location. We timed out on searches on both apps, and weren’t keen on the 45 minute walk to the gallery. Completely doable in the worst case scenario, but the day was already getting hot, and we’d trekked Parambanan and Borobudur the day before, so we weren’t feeling so fresh.

I reached out to the producer on WhatsApp and asked if she could send a car from her end, where they’d be more likely to be clustered. Her affirmative manifested in about ten minutes as a scooter carrying these two gentlemen.

The fellow in the back introduced himself as the gallery’s curator, and the gentleman in the front was one of the artists. That fellow, Lejar Daniartana Hukubun, had quite a story to tell.

After a little back-and-forth with the producer, it didn’t seem like a car would be forthcoming. I checked Grab again, and there was a car in the area. Our new friends clearly didn’t trust us to negotiate the taxi successfully, so they instructed our driver to follow their scooter. It only took an extra hour, but we finally made our way to the gallery.

There was a main gallery with major pieces that weren’t for sale. There were variations on batik as a technique that ranged from subtle to graphic.

The rest of the gallery was a little more like a store, but not one that seemed to have any experience actually selling things. Every time we asked the price of something either someone had to be called or intense head-to-head conversations occurred.

These two pieces were by the same fellow who did the blue pieces in the gallery. We would completely have bought one, as they were objectively spectacular, but they were so big, we couldn’t figure out how we’d display one. We were very, very sad to leave them behind.

The rest of the story there was about Lejar Daniartana Hukubun’s work. He’s written a story about the fuckery being perpetrated by the Indonesian government on the indigenous Malind tribe of Merauke in Western New Guinea. Shockingly, that fuckery is about land and resources. Lejar didn’t say, but we strongly suspect the Malind are his people.

Lejar has told this story in a book, in videos, in a modernized take on a Wayang puppet show, and in his own artworks, in both batik and illustration.

But of course, this all resolved in shopping. Given that they had sent ambassadors to rescue us, it was the least we could do. After much careful consideration, Dorothy settled on a positively stunning silk batik scarf. The ability to produce batik on silk at all, let alone at this level of detail and precision, is kind of mind-blowing.

Other Batik

Dorothy bought interesting, less elaborately produced fabric in other shops, too.

I found some full-on batik t-shirts at nDalem Mbah Bei in Taman Sari, but that was the only place I saw them. You’d think they’d be an obvious thing, but for whatever reason they’re rare. T-shirts with batik prints are in souvenir shops everywhere, but real batik, not so much.

And one final trip to Malioboro netted me a couple of last-minute keepers.

And here is my personal wall of regret, shirts I loved but didn’t get, either because they didn’t quite fit or I was very briefly overcome by common sense. After all, I bought more shirts in Java than in all our travels to date, I think. To say nothing of the ikats I got in Bali. Not to lapse into jargon, but I lost my shit here. Still, these are the ones that got away.

But Wait, There’s More…

One of the things Dorothy and Nef were most excited about in Yogyakarta was taking a batik class together. They took a two-day intensive class in Oaxaca on natural dying, and they were looking forward to learning enough batik technique to bring it home and use it on their own projects.

The challenge was finding a class geared towards practitioners, not ladies-who-lunch looking to make their own souvenirs. There’s a ton of those sorts of tourist enrichment activities here, from batik to silver to cooking classes. The trick is finding the classes geared to the serious student.

We thought we’d ask our new best friends at Creative Boutique, and to our delight they offered their own classes. They were four person classes and they only had one other attendee, so we bought the fourth seat and burnt it, just so we weren’t waiting for a random fourth to pop up. Or not pop up, and miss the whole thing.

They asked if I wanted to take the seat, since we were paying for it anyway, but I explained that my hands were like mittens, and I’d only hold everyone back. Having seen the pictures and heard what actually transpired during the class, that was a great call. That experience would have made me cry. And not in the good way.

The basic batik process is simple, in a sense. What makes it hard is the skill required to do it well. It’s a form of resist dying using wax as the resist medium. There are many ways to create a resist, from practical, like wax or paste, to physical, like tie-dyeing or shibori, where the knots in the fabric create places the dye can’t reach.

In batik, you apply wax to fabric and then dye it. The dye color doesn’t take wherever the resist has been used, so those areas are undyed. After dyeing, the fabric is boiled to remove the wax, and the process is repeated as many times as necessary to create the finished design. The more colors in the design, the more times the fabric has to go through the process. And the more time consuming and costly it is.

Tulis is the term for applying wax by hand. Tulis literally means handwritten. It can be applied by brush, but is most often applied with a small pen, called a canting, that has a reservoir for the molten wax. The wax can also be applied with a copper stamp called a cap. Dorothy has had a cap for years, as it’s a beautiful artifact in its own right. The C in Indonesian is a ch sound, by the way, so that’s tjan-ting and tjap.

Dorothy and Nef had originally wanted to learn both methods, at least until the teachers explained how the cap is actually done. Getting the wax onto the stamp in exactly the right amount, consistency, and temperature is hard enough, but then you have to turn it upside down without dripping and apply it to the fabric by hand, without any sort of jig to align it properly to the previously placed stamps. You could make a mistake on the final stamp and ruin an entire piece.

The canting takes enough precision on its own to be daunting, so the executive decision was made to skip the cap and stick to the tulis.

The goal was to come home with reusable knowledge, not just an artifact. Mission accomplished. Also, Dorothy and Nef were consistently awestruck at the batiks we saw after they took the class, burdened as they were by understanding just how very hard it is to execute with the level of precision on display.

Wayang Orang Sonobudoyo

We’d yet to see a shadow puppet performance, so I contacted the Sonobudoyo Museum, which stages performances of both live dance and shadow puppets. I specifically asked about the shadow puppets, and was given performance information for the Wayang Orang performance. Which I didn’t notice was one of the live masked dances, not the shadow puppets, which is Wayang Kulit. So we still haven’t seen the shadow puppets.

Which is sad, but it’s not like the dance is annoying. Plus, we’ve seen so many renditions of the Ramayana, we felt like we knew all the main story beats and could take it in like a local. But the Ramayana is big and wooly. It’s about 1,700 pages, or about 1.5 LoTRs, which is the preferred unit of measure for sagas. There’s a lot going on, and while it’s fundamentally Rama’s story, it doesn’t really progress in a straight line. Performances are, by definition, excerpts, so our previous experience didn’t wind us helping us out. This was a chunk of the Ramayana we’d never seen before.

Still, the fancy printed program had plot synopses for each of the seven scenes, which should help. Or, as it turned out, not. Here’s the outline of the evening’s performance from the program.

All well and good. But only tangentially related, it seemed, to the action on stage. To be fair, this first scene wasn’t actually part of the Ramayana. It was a bonus dance of young women coming of age. With birds on their heads. As they do.

Sorry for all the videos of the backs of people’s heads, btw. We were all of four rows back, but the seats weren’t raked. Bad theater hygiene. Bad.

The Ramayana started for real with what the program notes tell us is the Queen mooning about Arjuna to her rakshasi, shape-shifting evil demon warriors. Here, they appear to have shape-shifted into women with adorable kitty heads. Except for the actual demon, who apparently can’t be bothered to make the cat face.

We couldn’t map this to any part of the narrative as presented in the program. It appeared to be an opportunity for this delicious boy to hold very, very still so he could be stared at. And drooled over. There was definitely drool in that room.

Stabby McCatFace and Normal Lady have a mano-a-mano. We had no idea who these characters were, or what their relationship was to the plot outline. Doesn’t matter. No one doesn’t love delicate lady fighting.

The two champions square off. Mighty blows are struck.

The coup de grâce.

The final battle. Between a different pairing of Stabby McCatFace and Normal Lady. Because it never gets old.

It was all silly fun and we had an excellent evening out. Even though we never did get to see our shadow puppets.

Prambanan Ramayana Ballet

We had already been to Prambanan, as part of our day trip to Borobudur. What brought us back for a return visit was an outdoor ballet extravaganza staged in the shadow of the temples.

I’d attend an autopsy in that setting, but even that wasn’t an option. The major storm we’d enjoyed earlier in the day had subsided, but the grounds were soaked enough that the evening’s performance was moved to the indoor theater. Sad. Indoors or out, however, the audience still gave its all. We definitely felt out of place, unmasked as we were.

Still, this was the part of the Ramayana we were most familiar with from previous performances, which provided, as you might guess, absolutely no help in following the dance, because the story is so bonkers. Graciously, supertitles were projected onto a screen, so we had a boost. Let’s walk through it.

First this, which just seemed like a prelude with bows, no arrows. An amuse-bouche before the main action.

Rama, his wife, Dewi Sita, and his brother, Lakshmana, are wandering the Dandaka forest, having been banished from their kingdom for, the evidence suggests, excessive gorgeousness. A beautiful golden deer frolics in a clearing in the forest, and Dewi Sita, enchanted by it, begs Rama to chase it down and kill it. Because that’s what you do to things you admire. Or fear may be more beautiful than you.

Rama takes off to chase the golden deer, leaving Lakshmana in charge of Dewi Sita. Here we have the Dances With Deer interlude.

Soon, however, Lakshmana hears Rama calling for help, and leaves to come to his aid, but not before encircling Dewi Sita in a magic spell that will keep her safe as long as she stays inside it. You can see where this is headed.

However, it’s all a plot by the evil demon Ravana, who intends to kidnap Dewi Sita. Cause she pretty. The golden deer was his henchman Maricha (all the demons are shapeshifters) and Rama’s distress call was Ravana imitating his voice. The demons are also voiceshifters.

Ravana performs a seductive interpretive dance intended to attract Dewi Sita, which, him being a horrific demon and all, fails to close the sale.

So he comes back shapeshifted as a beggar and tricks Dewi Sita into leaving her protective circle. Which wasn’t truly all that hard. Dewi Sita is very, very pretty, but a little simple.

However, a bird creature demigod named Jatayu has been flying through the sky, in the carefree manner of bird creature demigods, and makes the mistake of witnessing the kidnapping.

Ravana isn’t pleased, and dances with the bird god until Jatayu is mortally wounded. Meanwhile, Lakshmana catches up to Rama and they figure out they’ve been had, so they race back to the clearing and find no trace of Dewi Sita. What they find instead is one of Ravana’s demon pals, looking to finish them off. I love both the demon’s dance and Rama’s insouciant sash flipping.

Our hero prevails, and the dying Jatayu appears. Sadly, he has to spill to the boys before getting to enjoy his dramatic death.

The brothers do what any of us would do in the same circumstances. They ignore the bird guy and call the monkey king Hanuman for assistance. Hanuman responds, as any of us would, by performing a spirited monkey dance.

Meanwhile, Ravana is still trying to woo Dewi Sita, with what appears to be some playful butt touching. Curiously, this does not work. Enraged, Ravana attempts to kill Dewi Sita, as one might, but is held back by Trijata, a demon he has tasked with taking care of Dewi Sita during her captivity. I’m not at all sure what’s going on here, but there’s a clearly complicated dynamic amongst these three. Everyone appears to have feelings.

Hanuman then makes himself very large, takes a single step to Lanka, Ravana’s island kingdom, and confirms Dewi Sita’s presence. There is much warring and fighting, culminating, as you knew it would, with a Boss Battle.

It all takes a year before Rama is able to rescue Dewi Sita. On being reunited, however, Rama expresses his concerns over how she’s spent the last year. Or as the supertitles so delicately put it, he “doubts her purity.”

Really? Your wife is kidnapped by a demon and when you finally rescue her, you wrinkle your nose and declare, “Eww, you got demon stank all over you. I think you fucked that dude.” What a douche.

Never one to pass on a challenge, Dewi Sita declares that she will prove her chastity by… setting herself on fire. Jesus, these two deserve each other.

However, the fire doesn’t burn her, as the fire god Agni protects her and delivers her back to Rama, vouching personally for her chastity. Which is good enough for Rama. Dewi Sita, firmly on brand, conveniently forgets that her husband was ready to let her die in flames because he didn’t trust her. She has her man back, so… happy ending? As close as the Ramayana gets.

Whew! The happy couple reunites and… curtain. Metaphorically.

During the curtain call we’re told that we may approach the cast for pictures. I’m old, so I didn’t understand that this meant a selfie scrum. I was somehow able to negotiate the crowd and get photos of our delightful principals that didn’t include a leering geezer spoiling the view.

Our story ends, as all good stories do, with merch. Dorothy got to this shirt before I did. She is clearly the hero of this epic journey.

We booked a dedicated car and driver for the day. Neither site is that far from Yogyakarta, but the ride-sharing apps don’t work in the hinterlands. First stop: Prambanan.

Prambanan

As part of our package we were offered sunrise at Prambanan, which is supposed to be magnificent. It also requires cooling your heels for a couple of hours until the temple opens to the public. We enjoyed sunrise at Angkor Wat. We good.

Prambanan is Angkor Wat’s little brother, the second largest Hindu temple in Southeast Asia. It was originally built in 856 and was dramatically enhanced in 930. Sadly, it only survived until 1006, when a massive earthquake reduced everything to rubble. It wasn’t until 1930 that restoration began under the Dutch. They don’t get enough credit for their good works. It wasn’t all slavery and extraction.

According to our guide, Prambanan was also an answer track. Borobudur was constructed between 778 and 850. You’ll note that Prambanan was started just six years after Borobudur’s completion. The local Hindus were apparently dismayed by the massive Buddhist temple in their backyard, and built a response, not to be outdone. It turns out they were slightly outdone after all. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Prambanan is the largest Hindu temple in… Java.

The restoration work is massive, ongoing, and mind-blowing. They are able to reassemble temple structures, from the mountains of rubble, using about 70%-80% of that structure’s original stones. That just boggles. I am boggled. Still, only 22 of the estimated 240 temples in the Prambanan complex have been restored. It’s the archaeologist’s Full Employment Act. But what they’ve been able to do so far is spectacular.

As a Hindu complex, Prambanan is devoted to the Trimurti: Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. They each get one of the three largest temples, and a satellite temple for their preferred mode of transportation: Brahma’s swan, Shiva’s bull, and Vishnu’s garuda. Vishnu clearly has the best ride.

Each of the three main temples also has inner sanctums, shrines with unlit statues. I think the dark definitely contributed to the ancient vibe. Very Indiana Jones.

Prambanan is also adorned with stupas, like the ones at Borobudur. Except they’re not stupas at all, they’re called ratna, and are completely different. They just look a little alike. While Borobudur’s stupas specifically contain statues of Buddha, the Hindu ratna are a purely decorative architectural element with religious significance, rather than a niche. They still look cool.

More Ramayana, Please

Prambanan is known for its bas-relief panels that retell a core part of the Ramayana, from the abduction of Rama’s wife Sita to Rama’s killing of the demon Ravana. This is the precise part of the story portrayed in the Prambanan Ballet’s performance. 72 consecutive panels across the three main temples are ordered so that you traverse them clockwise, or Pradakshina, always keeping the temple to your right.

More Stuff Carved Into Stone

In addition to the Ramayana panels, Prambanan is chock full o’ delicious sculptures and carvings. As you would expect.

We were offered a short walk to another part of the complex to view a Buddhist temple, but since we were headed for the largest Buddhist temple on the planet we chose to preserve our legs. On our way back to our ride, we passed a cassowary in a cage. Does there need to be a reason? You’re so literal.

Borobudur

Prambanan is a complex made up of hundreds of individual temples. Borobudur is a single gargantuan temple, filling the horizon and inspiring legitimate awe. As the design spec foretold.

As was the case with Prambanan, Borobudur was lost for centuries. Construction was completed in 850, but the temple fell into disuse by the 1500s, abandoned as Java’s cultural center shifted east and its religious center shifted towards Islam. It was eventually covered in volcanic ash and reclaimed by the jungle. Until a white guy discovered it!

In a brief interregnum sandwiched between Dutch fuckery, the British owned Indonesia. It only lasted a few years, from 1811 to 1815, but that was long enough for Sir Stamford Raffles, the very model of a modern Major-General (it’s actually hard to believe that Sir Stamford Raffles isn’t a Gilbert & Sullivan character), to stumble on Borobudur and, to his credit, recognize that some work needed to be done.

Actual restoration wasn’t commenced until 1907, under the kindly Dutch. That stabilized the structure, but the restoration that gave us the Borobudur we see today didn’t start until 1975, culminating on completion in the temple being deservedly named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

The Buddhists, god love ’em, are geometry geeks. Borobudur is in the precise shape of a big fucking mandala, with four entry points in the cardinal directions and concentric levels rising through the three zones of consciousness: Kamadhatu (the realm of worldly attachment) at the lowest level, Rupadhatu (having transcended desire but still possessing an earthly form) in the middle, and Arupadhatu (the transcendence of earthly form) at the top, crowned by the central sphere representing Nirvana.

Experiencing Borobudur is to rise metaphorically through the zones of consciousness and arrive at the summit. Which is the closest to enlightenment I’ll ever get.

Even before entering the temple, the views from the outside are ridiculous.

One may experience the lovely grounds as one likes, but the ascent to Nirvana requires special shoes. Street shoes are verboten, to preserve Borobudur’s steps. These uncomfortable slides are gift with purchase. They wouldn’t take them back.

And there are plenty of those steps to reach the peak, around 150 in total.

The payoff is obviously the summit, but there’s plenty to see as you ascend through the various zones of consciousness. Borobudur boasts 2,672 relief panels, almost four contiguous miles of carving. Nearly 1,500 of those panels are a single narrative (the remainder are decorative), telling the story of Sudhana, a human who falls in love with Manohara, one of the Kinnari bird ladies. Why not?

To say nothing of the various non-relief statues and carvings.

But you came for the Stupas of Nirvana, and I have been denying you. They are everything they are advertised to be: beautiful, resonant, and deeply imbued with meaning and intention. They are simultaneously soothing and thrumming with power and energy. Nirvana is, as it turns out, a perfectly lovely place to spend an afternoon.

When it came time, we just couldn’t. Perhaps this is proof that we’re too old to keep doing this. Not enough in the tank for the Chicken Church. Time to hang ’em up.

So I was surprised to learn that betel nut, an addictive, cancer-causing stimulant, was legal. Obviously, I had to try a legal drug. Assuming that I could locate it. I thought there might be the equivalent of hookah bars for tourists interested in walking on the wild side, but that was just a fantasy. I’d have to assemble my own ingredients. Thankfully, my reprobate older sister, Nef, served as my trustworthy wingman. I wouldn’t have to fly alone.

Betel nut is chewed in a home-rolled pouch called a quid, the side effects being euphoria, alertness (which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for tweaked), red stained teeth, and cancer of the face mouth. Sign us up! Although to be fair, we were in no danger of doing enough betel nut to suffer anything but the alertness and euphoria.

There are three main ingredients to a betel nut quid: the betel nut itself, which is the fruit of the Areca palm, a touch of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, and if you’re wondering where ancient peoples shopped for their chemistry ingredients, it can be made from seashells), and a betel nut palm leaf to wrap it in.

You remove the nut from the husk and cut it up. Take a pinch of the slaked lime and spread it on the leaf. Before rolling it up, connoisseurs add spices like cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. The slaked lime has a chemical interaction with the betel nut that jacks up the stimulant effects, but the spices are strictly for flavor.

OK, time to shop. We were headed to Pasar Beringharjo, the downtown traditional market, for some other spices, and I bet that we’d be able to find the ingredients. That turned out to be harder than we’d thought. Unlike most of the traditional markets we’ve been in, where everything stocked is displayed, there were shops with backstock in Beringharjo, so the ingredients we were looking for weren’t visible. Not, to be fair, that we were 100% on what our shopping list even looked like.

We found a large spice shop and I whipped out Google Translate. Which rendered betel nut as pinang in Indonesian. Blank expression. After some back and forth, I stumbled on the correct word, which is sirih. She dove under a counter and brought up a multi-kilo bag of dried betel nuts. I asked whether the dried nut would work, and having figured out why I wanted it, she returned with the fresh stuff.

Now I had to somehow ask for slaked lime, but she was on to me, so that part was easier. A baggie of calcium hydroxide appeared, along with a pantomimed rendition of how to prepare it for use. Next stop, betel leaves, or daun sirih, as the locals say. Our spice merchant, however, was not a one-stop-shop, so we set off in search of the fabled leaf. We couldn’t find it in Berinharjo, which is a very big market.

A few days later Nef and I walked over to our neighborhood market, Pasar Kotagede, asked for daun sirih, and found the leaves almost instantly. The hooch vendor offered us a large bundle for 100,000 rupiah, about $6, but when we asked for four leaves she just gave them to us. We’d done it! We had our kit and were ready to go on our first Indonesian drug-fueled bender. It’s what big sisters are for. I think.

To be fair, the betel leaves may just be a convention and not a requirement. They don’t appear to offer anything chemically necessary to the process, and any chewable leaf might have done the trick. But it was nice to know that we had everything the recipe required.

Lacking cardamom and the like, we dressed our first quid with rendang seasoning and honey. It still tasted excrescent. We chewed for about 15-20 seconds and spit it out. I had a medication once that my doctor said would be absorbed more efficiently if I chewed the tablet, and it tasted kind of like that. My doctor was an idiot, by the way. I think he just enjoyed telling me to do stupid shit.

So Nef and I sat around looking at each other, doing that “Do you feel it yet?” thing. We admitted, after a bit, that there was a mild buzz, sort of like a Benadryl. Nothing, though, that you’d risk cancer and addiction for. Not when you could just chop and snort a Benadryl.

Many years ago, early 20s, San Francisco, in our LSD days. We’d gotten a new batch that no one in our group had tried yet, so I agreed to be our first guinea pig. My friend Bob came over to mind me with my roommate Stav, and I took a liberal three hits to start the evening’s festivities.

This was our first experience with windowpane acid, little gel tabs for you whippersnappers. All of our previous experience had been with blotter, little squares of paper infused with psychedelic wonder. You don’t savor blotter. You give it a quick chew and swallow. So that’s what I did with the windowpane. After about 45 minutes I felt myself edge slightly into tripping and then recede.

Obviously pretty weak acid, so I took another two tabs, to see if I could get any action. This time, I left them to melt under my tongue. Which, I later discovered, is what you’re supposed to do with windowpane. Approximately a nanosecond after Round Two dissolved all five hits came on at once, like a freight train straight from the 60s. One minute, standing in the kitchen and talking like a person, the next minute mute and supine.

Bob and Stav sprang into well-trained action, shuffling me off to lie under the covers in my darkened bedroom. Then, realizing that they had a long haul ahead of them, they did the only rational thing: baked marijuana brownies, so they could be really high, too. Side note to my side note, they couldn’t get the oven lit, so they took the tray of brownies to our downstairs neighbors and asked them to bake them for our party, since our oven was broken. Our downstairs neighbors were three lovely Catholic nuns, who I am certain, that evening, we consigned to hell.

Bob and Stav knew better than to leave me fully unattended, but I was enjoying an actual out-of-body experience in my darkened room, so their presence didn’t register at first. When I finally noticed them I articulated the desire to speak to Dorothy, who was deployed to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival during our Gap Year. I think I articulated that desire by croaking “Dorothy” until they dialed her up.

I believe my intention had been to communicate to Dorothy the truly cosmic wonderland I was inhabiting, but the only sounds I could force my mouth to make were “I… can’t…” I repeated that several times before Dorothy, more than a little alarmed, asked me to give the phone back to Stav. I think she told her not to leave me alone for a second, lest I choke on my own tongue and die.

The story has a happy ending, of course. Bob and Stav ate the brownies, and I eventually came back down to earth. Later, we discovered that the acid was unusually strong, 300 micrograms/dose. I had accidentally ingested a gargantuan 1,500 micrograms of prime LSD. And lived to tell the tale. That tremor is just nerves.

My point being, I felt like I had the earned authority when I turned to Nef and said, “Dude. We underdosed.”

Further research, which, I suppose, might have been better executed before attempting our first betel nut experience, indicated that a) we might not have kept the quid in our mouths long enough, and b) we might not have used the ripest nut. Apparently, you’re supposed to chew the quid to start the process and then tuck it between cheek and gum for about five minutes. To really activate the cancer. As opposed to our method, which was to chew the fuck out of the quid for about 15 seconds until it dissolved into a gruesome mouthful of paste that screamed SPIT. ME. OUT. NOW!

We vowed to do better. Next time.

Next Time

As it happened, our next attempt fell on the seventh deathiversary of Nef’s husband Alan. There was a man who knew his way around a third-world bender, so there was something poetic about paying homage to his spirit in an exploit he’d have happily joined.

The interwebs still failed to divulge any meaningful dosage information. I even looked on Reddit. That’s turning over all the rocks. It felt like we needed to hunt down an old toothless, red-gummed man and pay him to be our trip guide. Absent that, we did the next best thing. We guessed. What could possibly go wrong?

This time, like the acid trip, we took a little chew and tucked the quid into our cheek pouches with a timer set for five minutes. After which Nef confessed to a buzz and I felt nothing. To be fair, I usually feel nothing, but I was hoping to feel something. Anything.

After about half an hour Nef suggested that, as I outweighed her by a hefty margin, perhaps I hadn’t had enough. She prepared another quid for me, which I readily agreed to, deeply committed as I am to never learning anything from my previous mistakes. Hey, you make your choices and I’ll make mine.

And… nothing. After all that, not even a Benadryl buzz. For me, at least. Nef: “I feel good.” Me: “My tongue stings.” Dorothy thinks I exist on “such a high plane of Wow” that nothing can get in, but that doesn’t explain my inclination towards my best friends, the opiates. Still, I’m not tempted to smuggle the rest of the betel nuts back to the US, so it’s not like there’s no upside.

And somehow, despite heroic efforts, I avoided fully recreating my acid overdose. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat the journey, if not the destination.

The Last Laugh

As a coda to this experience, as if it was in need, we had tickets for a traditional dance performance at the Prambanan site the night before Nef’s departure, and had made arrangements with the driver who had taken us to Sadranan beach to get us there and back.

I’d reached out to him prior to see if he knew where to get betel nuts, as drivers are notorious for knowing where the contraband is to be found, and he told me his brother could procure some for us. He got back to us a few days later to say he’d been successful and to find out how many kilos we wanted.

None. We wanted none kilos. We wanted a few nuts to try, not kilos to set up an international operation. I explained this, and got no response for several weeks, when, while checking in to confirm our ride to the performance, he mentioned that he had our betel nuts in hand. And yes, they had been procured and paid for.

The tab came to 35,000 rupiah, about $2, so I obviously agreed to reimburse him even though he’d given us no clue this transaction was even occurring and we’d already had our betel nut experience. I’m certainly not going to grind a guy who was just trying to be helpful, despite his poor communication skills, over $2.

When I shared this saga with Nef, she smacked her hand on the table and said, “And that’s exactly how I got two donkeys in Greece.”

The Google search was best beginner snorkeling near Yogyakarta, which gave us Pantai (beach) Sadranan. The closest accommodations were at Pantai Krakal, a mere ten minute walk away. We booked for three nights, which would give us two full, uninterrupted days.

The whole area is a long stretch of beaches, each with its own name and, supposedly, identity, but it felt like one Long Beach occasionally interrupted by volcanic rock outcroppings. Sadranan was supposed to have the calmest waters and the best snorkeling in the area, so we figured to spend most of our time there.

Our hotel was the Royal Joglo, which was a notch or two below royal. Charming and fine, but scarcely royal.

Like most beach communities everywhere, the beaches were a hive of small restaurants, or warungs. Weirdly, they were almost all completely closed. I don’t know when season is down there, but we were pretty clearly off-season. We struggled to find lunch and had dinner at the same warung, right next to our hotel, all three nights. We weren’t expecting a beach visit to induce food insecurity.

Mostly we stayed on the beach, but we also walked along the main road one day to get to Pantai Sadranan and enjoyed the lush, tropical flora.

Outside the hotel, however, it was raining with gusty winds. On arrival, we walked the few feet from our hotel to the beach to see what was going on, and it was pretty wild. Surf was definitely up. Not in a run-for-your-life sort of way, but definitely less than inviting.

So… no snorkeling. And while we refused to skip swimming altogether, we did have to experiment to find the calmest of the troubled waters. But those waters, if ill disposed to swimming, were spectacular. We may have missed the snorkeling, but we topped out on the majestic, terrifying power of… OCEAN!

Plus, it was pretty.

Here’s a beautiful overview of Pantai Krakal. It doesn’t really scream “Hey, let’s swim!” On the other hand, this really captures the heartbreaking shade of turquoise as the waves crest.

And here’s a great view of the power of SURF (OCEAN‘s cousin).

Even with rough surf, though, the tidepooling and beachcombing were excellent.

Pools Of Tide & Combs Of Beach

The defining feature of the beach was the sand, which was composed of tiny round beads of coral and shell, like limestone couscous. The beads were large enough that they didn’t compact, like normal beach sand. A step could sink your foot six inches or more. It’s also one of the reasons the water is so clear, as even the pounding surf can’t dissolve the sand into solution. The little beads are too heavy and just sink back down, leaving the water beautifully transparent.

The rain was rarely heavy, so we were able to swim pretty much whenever we wanted. Once you’re wet, you’re wet. But the tidepooling and beachcombing were best done in the sunshine, and there was enough so that we got to do both every day we were there. The swimming was best at high tide and the tidepooling and beachcombing were best at low tide. The days were just packed.

The Beach

The volcanic rock outcroppings divide the beaches, either into discrete stretches or small coves. Other rocks just sit on the beach like sentinels.

Of course, the entire point of combing the beach is to collect loot. And there was Loot Galore (my favorite Bond girl), a dragon’s hoard of shell and coral treasures, rescued moments before, one imagines, being ground into beach sand. Quite the haul. All the cowries are meant for a necklace-to-be.

The Pools

The beaches had, for the most part, long sloping approaches with the coral sand topping rock flats. At high tide the water was deep enough to swim with sand underfoot, and at low tide the rocks were exposed for tidepooling.

When we first stopped at the pools they looked empty, which seemed odd. But slowing down and staring revealed wonders, not the least of these being what Google identified as fireworms. I was all about skipping about the tidepools willy-nilly until we saw these fellows. And that was before Google flagged them as venomous. So. Feet were carefully placed.

They live tail end in holes and snake their heads out to venomously forage. Like even creepier eels.

Those might have been the most terrifying thing we saw, but hardly the only wonders. There was this mysterious hole. I kept waiting for something to pop out, but it never happened.

And this adorable little fellow, who was about the size of a currant.

Our Cove

We found the ideal beach just a short walk from our hotel. Still part of Pantai Krakal, we found a little crescent cove, perfectly shaped to funnel the violent surf to a soft landing.

There’s a sharp drop-off just behind the shallow rock shelf. At low tide, that drop-off swallows the breakers, robbing them of energy as they roll to the beach. At high tide, the waves break over that transition, so they have more power when they reach shore. Here it is at low tide, the waves gently rolling in.

Here’s a better view of the strength of the waves. I know there’s a lot of video of surf here, but I just find it mesmerizing. I could stare at waves for hours. Without drugs. But you don’t have to. Just don’t click the Start button.

Swimming there at high tide, I stood in chest high water facing the beach, waiting for a wave large enough to crash into my back and send me hurtling shoreward. Like bodysurfing, with a top note of Keystone Kops. And the closest thing to a roller coaster I’ll ever enjoy.

4×4 Jeep Tour

This shouldn’t have been much fun. It was just a couple of hours of driving around to different beaches crammed into a 4×4 all-terrain jeep. Look-around, no swimming, back in the jeep, on to the next beach. But we wanted to do something other than splash in the surf, which sounds stupid when I say it out loud, and we figured it would be fun enough.

We were mistaken. It was riotously fun, from the kidney-jarring 4×4 to the occasional rain shower. It was entertaining start to finish, with each of the beaches having a distinct character. It could have been an all day tour with time for swimming, but now I’m just being a little bitch. It was great.

It must have been a slow day, with stormy weather and the off-season colliding, as our driver interpreted our two-hour itinerary generously. We took three hours and unscheduled stops.

Each beach had its own distinct flavor, either through their natural differences or the evolving light based on time of day and the fast-changing weather conditions.

Pantai Watulawang

Our first stop was a wild stretch of beach with some powerful surf.

Pantai Sundak

A beautiful beach with amazing light, but whatever. The highlight was the stalls selling seafood gorengen, fried bits of aquatic deliciousness.

Pantai Sepanjang

When will it stop? Another beautiful beach.

Some powerful surf at Sepanjang.

Pantai Baron’s Lighthouse

Pantai Baron is unique in this stretch of beaches in that it also has a freshwater spring that has made its own lake. We didn’t go down to the beach, but there’s a lighthouse on the cliff overlooking Baron, providing a spectacular view.

Pantai Mesra

The light at this beach was beautiful.

Pantai Krakal Vista Point

Just above Our Cove was a vista point that permitted a 360° view. It had an enormous yellow fish sculpture at the top, because why wouldn’t it?

We got to see Our Cove from above, which was a treat, as were the panoramic views of the beaches and rocky coastline from that height.

The other side of the vista point from Our Cove featured a truly wild, completely dangerous assemblage of water and rocks, with a very drownable profile.

Home Again

We’d worked through groceries before leaving on our adventure, so we went out to dinner when we got back, even though a home-cooked meal would have been welcome. Rather than the same old noodles or rice, we found a restaurant that specialized in gudeg, a jackfruit curry with chicken, or ayam in Indonesian, and dried cow skin.

Prompting my very first Indonesian dad joke: Who’s a gudeg? Ayam.

It’s true, by the way. Ayam a very gudeg.

Yogyakarta is pronounced Jogjakarta, and is commonly referred to just as Jogja. The J-Y shift is a Dutch hangover. Don’t worry. It’s the only one. The Dutch were otherwise stellar stewards of their benighted little brothers. BFFs, really.

Jogja is also, and this was a surprise, a monarchy. They have their very own sultan! While a few other areas in Indonesia have their own sultans or local rulers, Hamengkubuwono X is the only one with official state power. As sultan, he is the Governor of the Special Region of Yogyakarta. This arrangement is payback for the then sultan’s support for independence during the post WWII revolution.

Kotagede

This time around we’re not in the throbbing heart of the city center, as we so often are. Instead, we’re in Kotagede, Jogja’s old city. Kotagede means Great City, and it was the capital of the Mataram sultanate, dating back to the 16th century. The Matarams were the precursor to the current Yogyakarta sultanate, having lost power through Dutch fuckery. Kotagede is renowned as a craft center, and has been a major locus of silver artisans since Mataram times.

Our Apartment

The apartment is comfortably appointed, if a little charmless. There’s a thorough selection of kitchen appliances, a dining table (which has been in short supply during our Southeast Asia run), a comfortable seating area, and three (!) bedrooms. That last is important because my sister, Nef, is joining us for four of our six weeks in Jogja, so she gets the upstairs bedroom and some privacy. We get to use the extra first floor bedroom as a closet. It’s nice to not trip over our stuff.

There are a lot of nice, small touches. They provide water, in five gallon bottles with a dispenser for hot and cold. There are balconies on both floors. There’s a washer and more than enough drying racks. And this is the first place we’ve ever been that’s provided enough hangers.

We are suffering a quirk of Southeast Asia, which is that they use duvets instead of top sheets. Which makes zero sense, since the weather is way too hot for duvets. We’ve managed this in the past by pulling the duvets out of their covers and using those as top sheets, but the duvets here don’t have covers, so there’s nothing to strip off. We visited several department stores and figured for six weeks it was worth it to buy a top sheet and just leave it behind, but there were no top sheets to be found. We are sleeping under a rotating layer of lovely Balinese ikats.

The bathrooms here are a challenge. The only hot water is from the two showers, but at least there’s a faucet, so you’re not holding a basin under a shower head to get hot water to wash dishes, like we did in Amed. And the only actual sink is in the kitchen. So the bathrooms are more like 3/4 baths, with just a shower and a toilet. We renovated ours by moving in an outdoor table and placing a plastic basin there for a faux sink. We’re survivors.

The biggest challenge was how shockingly dirty the apartment was. We spent our entire first day doing nothing but cleaning. It was everything. Floors, walls, toilets, dishes, cookware… I spent over an hour on the refrigerator alone. It’s fine now, and we’re not using their cleaner. There’s no point. We haven’t said anything, as it’s not like there’s something they can do. It was dirty and now it’s not, so problem solved. Also, they’re really nice people, and we don’t want them to think we’re weirdos. There’s been the odd plumbing problem, for example. and they’ve been great about getting someone over right away.

And we are completely not being weirdos. Every place we’ve been has required some cleanup on move-in. That’s a normal and expected part of the Airbnb experience. But what we faced here was a level of filth we’ve never encountered before.

The Neighborhood

Kotagede’s streets are narrow and recursive, circling back on themselves not unlike the souks in Marrakech’s Medina, but without the density. They’re perhaps more reminiscent of Gunajuato’s narrow, winding streets, but without the mountains. It makes exploring the neighborhood feel like an actual exploration.

The vernacular building design here is completely different than in Bali. There, homes are built around open courtyards, almost Mexican or Moroccan style, and the ubiquitous black volcanic rock is a common material. In Java, peaked, tiled roofs are constructed over wood-framed buildings. A completely different look, but every bit as beautiful.

While that’s the archetype, there are other interesting things going on here. This street is Between Two Gates, and features traditional Javanese Joglo houses.

Masjid Gedhe Mataram Kotagede

Kotagede is also home to Mataram’s historic mosque, first established in 1575. The current iteration is a rebuild from 1926 due to a fire, but there are clearly still structures from much, much earlier.

At the ticket booth there’s a separate price for wedding party photography, which made sense once we were inside. It was almost impossible to take a step without unintentionally photobombing a bride and groom posing together.

The site is full of beautiful historic structures.

And sweet architectural details.

The highlight, without question, was the Pasarean Mataram, the final resting place of the royal family of the Mataram Sultanate. All of them. Going back to the 16th century. I am disinclined to credit the spiritual, but let’s just say there was a vibe to this place. It was an indoor mausoleum, and pictures were not allowed. I even searched the interwebs for something to scrape, figuring they’d have let in a journalist at some point, but nothing. Not, of course, that a photo would have communicated what it was like to be in that space. It was truly beautiful. I felt things.

This is from a neighborhood cemetery, but the style of the aboveground crypts is typical Javanese. The royal crypts are fancier, of course, but the design is pretty much the same.

Appropriate dress to enter was both required and supplied, for a donation. Leading to a rare sighting of a mating pair of Waldos.

Taman Sari Water Palace

The Taman Sari Water Palace was built in the 1750s by the first Yogyakarta Sultan, after the Mataram’s fell. It was meant to be a place for the sultan to relax after a series of wars. It’s a modest site, but it has some beautiful structures.

Taman Sari’s highlight is the bathing pools, which is where the sultan did much of his relaxing. He would leer out of an upper floor window watching his concubines bathe. But not in a creepy way. They were his concubines, after all.

When he made his choice he would throw a rose down to her to indicate his favor, and she would get to spend the night with him in one of the upper chambers, in a bed heated by charcoal braziers underneath. That’s just a win for everyone.

Shopping

Pasar Kotagede, a traditional covered market, is just a few minutes walk from our apartment. There’s an even bigger version, Pasar Beringharjo, downtown. It was massive, covering several square blocks, and has… everything. Groceries, handicrafts, electronics, an entire batik market…

Supermarkets were a different thing. It took us multiple attempts before we found something usable. The first two we went to were Carrefours, whose local brand is TransMart. Which led to this:

As it happened, the first TransMart we went to was being renovated so hard it was no longer a store. They were doing the same thing to the second TransMart we went to. Then we went to a third supermarket, based on a google search, and it was just a jacked up Quickie Mart. I finally asked our host, and on our fourth attempt we found a real supermarket. Although it took a fifth store before we were able to locate pickles. Vlasic is everywhere, if not in every store.

Downtown’s Malioboro street is chockablock with batik shops, but it also seems to be snack central. There are snack shops that seem like the modern equivalent of the riches of the Silk Road. Rendered in snacks. These photos are all from the same shop!

Dining

Eating is a form of shopping, and we enjoyed an evening at the Alun Alun Kidul Night Market, a nightly cultural institution.

The high point was these hollowed out cars that had been transformed into glowing pedicabs. I know, we should have taken a ride. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

We also dined at Omah Duwur, a lovely Dutch era restaurant with magical grounds, right in the neighborhood.

We’re back in a Muslim country and are once again immersed in the call to prayer. There were places in North Africa where competing mosques reduced the overlapping calls to prayer as noise, but there were also places where a single mosque’s call rang clear and sounded like music. There must be a lot of mosques here, since we’ve yet to hear a distinct call. Here’s what it sounded like while we dined at Omah Duwur. Hard to peel it back and hear how many mosques are at work here, but it seems like a lot.

The Javanese have done to Islam what the Balinese did to Hinduism, mixmastering it with their traditional belief systems to make a bespoke religion that’s all theirs. We’ve had several people say, “We’re Muslim, but not like [waves hands] them. You know, that whole Sunni/Shia thing.” They really want us to know they’re the chill Muslims.

To be fair, this is a thing.

But our very best meal was when we backslid (all the way to grade school) and had dessert for lunch. But look what we were up against. We never stood a chance.

And here’s how Bear In Bathtub met his end. Oh, she’s a savage one. Although I suppose that bringing a hammer with your dessert is technically foreshadowing.

Graphic Design & Packaging

This is always one of my favorite reports. I absolutely adore local graphic design, and Java has seemed denser in entertaining graphic presentation than many of our destinations. There’s a lot to love here.