The following morning, we were roused bright and early at 4:00 am by a nearby imam’s eardrum-shattering call to morning prayer. After numerous efforts at stuffing the corners of a pillow into his ears proved ineffective at muffling the intrusive, wee hour Arabic wails, Vik stormed off muttering with laptop in hand to seek refuge in a spot offering some relative peace and quiet. By his own account, Vik made the best possible use of his time by watching the Lost season finale on the Slingbox (he still wonders why Charlie couldn’t just close the hatch door behind him). In the meantime, Kaberi and Jason each tried to fall back asleep but soon had to concede defeat to the persistent, immutable sonic forces at hand.Shortly thereafter, we returned to the airport to catch a short but bumpy flight to Yogyakarta, a city in eastern Java and the most appropriate conduit for traveling to the ancient temple ruins located nearby. Upon touching down, we hailed a taxi to drop off our bags at our hotel – an oddly-expanded French colonial mansion in the center of a rather unremarkable town – before setting off again to visit the Hindu temple ruins at nearby Prambanan.
We were conveyed to the temple site within a half an hour and found ourselves in the unusual position of essentially having a UNESCO World Heritage site entirely to ourselves, save for a lone shepherdess allowing her flock of sheep to roam free through some ruins. By entering the site almost exactly on the one year anniversary of a powerful earthquake that weakened the main temples’ foundations, we were rendered unable to enter into any of the most prominent Prambanan sanctums.
The three of us contented ourselves with a thorough stroll across the entire complex expanse, comprising 224 temples and representing the largest Hindu temple compound in southeast Asia. The Prambanan temples were constructed nearly 1,000 years ago, making them older than their more famous cousins at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. We were especially impressed to learn that Prambanan's dynastic creators specifically constructed the Hindu temples without demolishing any nearby Buddhist sites as a gesture of religious tolerance. After wandering Prambanan, we made a subsequent visit to nearby Buddhist ruins featuring intricate stonework.
Having toured the temple ruins in the height of the afternoon sun, we whisked ourselves back to the hotel for a leisurely – and ultimately frigid – dip in the pool and a late lunch in the shady courtyard. The duration of our lingering, however, was sharply curtailed by the overwhelmingly-loud, throbbing guitar screeches emanating from a few yards away. To our considerable surprise and dismay, our hotel was hosting what we could only assume was an Indonesian rock showcase punctuated with live jam sessions. Shaking our heads in disbelief, we appreciated the irony of being inconvenienced by loud, unrelenting wailing twice in the same day.
After a few hours of downtime, we regrouped for dinner. As it turned out, the remainder of our evening unfolded in a seemingly-unending comedy of errors. With a restaurant recommendation billed as "the best place in town" by our hotel’s youthful combination front desk staffer/receptionist/concierge in hand, we drove halfway across town in search of the place. Once there, after what felt like an eternity, our cabbie declared that the venue was closed for renovation. Exasperated, hungry and increasingly impatient, we drove to the nearest landmark on our vague map, the erstwhile Radisson hotel. Inside, the friendly night desk manager directed us to the nearest eatery.
Trudging around in single file on dusty, unlit and poorly-marked streets, one or more of us began to question the wisdom of getting advice from a hotel that could not even successfully maintain the Radisson banner. At the very moment when it appeared that we were hopelessly lost, Kaberi found the restaurant to which we were directed. As we set foot inside, we realized that we had entered a low-end Indonesian university food court. While Kaberi was game for sticking around, Jason and Vik opted to bring us back to our hotel where we knew a satay buffet awaited us.
Ultimately, the decision to return to the hotel for dinner was the crowning folly of the evening. Midway through picking through the very mediocre offerings, we discovered that the satay chef appeared to be averse to keeping the meat on the grill for longer than two minutes. After each of us found soft, wet, salmanella-inducing flesh in the middle of our satays, we collectively lost our appetites and decided to cut our losses for the evening. We hoped that better luck would grace us tomorrow.
