Dieng Plateau to Borobodur

Another early a.m. start (again- with the mosque next door, sleep past 4:15 was virtually impossible anyway). We grabbed a minibus and headed to the Dieng Plateau. It was an eerily beautiful mountain plateau with the remnants of about 4 Hindu temples, the oldest on Java built between the 8th and 9th C.

It reportedly had over 400 temples. The main temples were in the Arjuna Complex.

The landscape was beautiful- steep mountainsides terraced with vegetable plots, steaming craters (it’s a volcanically active plateau).


Part of the group headed through a local village for a 2-hour walk. Once again, we opted for the bus ride to meet them. The locals had not seen many Caucasians and we were the source of much to-do….especially with the school kids. John started to call himself, Buckwheat” and me, “Mrs. Buckwheat”.

On the bus, Ari told us of the tragedy of this weekend when 13 people from his village outside Butkitinggi were killed in a bus accident. They were going to visit a local villager in the hospital and the bus, attempting to pass a car, met head-on with a truck.. He then proceeded to tell us that there are many such accidents in Indonesia today- local drivers driving too fast for the roads, tires too expensive to replace so they’re run with no tread. All this is going on while we watched our mini-bus driver driving through mountain roads with a serious twitch, the assistant guide (Ari’s protegee) was fast asleep in the front seat, and we were just hoping to avoid a wreck.
We finally made it back to town and we stopped at the warung (food stall) in front of the hotel for some “mie on gklok”, a spicy noodle dish with steamed cabbage, chilies and spicy “glop”. Pretty tasty.

Then it was on to Borobadur, one of the greatest Buddhist relics in SE Asia. It was built sometime between 750 and 850 AD. It was conceived as a Buddhist vision of the cosmos in stone, starting in the everyday world and spiraling up to Nirvana.

To walk the entire site is about 5 km. Each corridor was filled with decorated narrative panels (depicting the life of Buddha and aspects of Javanese life). At the top three terraces, there were 72 Buddha images sitting in latticed stupas. Reaching in the stupa to touch the Buddha is believed to bring good luck.

3 hours at Borobadur and countless vendors and we headed to our hotel 2 km away, the Hotel Pondok Tingal…no phone, no hot water, no CNN, rooms for 44,000 (about $5.00). The rooms were in a block with our entire group. The rooms were separated by bamboo walls and a fan to take away the humidity and heat of the day. After a beer, we decided that upgrading might be an option- and, for $2.00 more, we got a huge double bed, A/C and our own private section of the hotel. Definitely an upgrade worth the price.
Dinner was grilled “road chicken” - the most paltry excuse for chicken we’d ever seen…no meat and very tough—so it was another mie goreng night. Fortunately, the sambal made up for the boring food and we managed to procure the sambal dish- made from volcanic rock.