Getting around (trains and boats and planes, plus bikes, becaks and buses!)

Plenty of transport options in Central Java. There are comfortable and regular train services.










 There are punts to cross the rivers on when you're cycling in the countryside.













There are lots of airlines plying the many routes between and within the islands of the enormous Indonesian archipelago, and they don't crash nearly as often as they used to.







Within cities you often rely on the ojek (motorbike taxi). I was unsure of the best pillion passenger etiquette. Do you hold on behind the seat, in front of you, or do you hold on to the driver? So I had a good look at what others around me were doing, and the truth is, hardly anyone holds on at all!

Or you can use a becak (bicycle trishaw - some of them now motorised with a little motor). I forgot to mention real taxis too. Plenty of them around too, though I don't seem to have a picture.














The odds are though that you'll do a lot of your land travel using buses. There are lots and lots of buses, going anywhere and everywhere. Traditionally if people stand on the roadside anywhere for more than a few seconds, buses will compete to screech to a halt alongside them, anxious to lure them aboard, whether or not they want to go where the
bus goes, and regardless of how much luggage they're going to lug aboard with them. Buses tend to be relatively clean and smart on the outside, but a bit the worse for wear inside. The ride can be exhausting. They're driven by maniacs who think nothing of tailgating and roaring past trucks and other buses on blind corners, only to screech to a halt seconds later when they see another potential passenger on the side of the road. Often, impecunious wandering minstrels get on for a few minutes at a time, and play ukuleles and sing tunelessly. Most passengers meekly pay them with a small donation - This is the country's social security system at work.

This sort of bus 'service' has usually applied to both city and intercity bus systems. So I was very pleasantly surprised to come across Yogyakarta's new city bus service. Would you believe there's a well organised network of air-conditioned city buses, with route maps and timetables even? There are designated bus stops - comfortable shelters on raised platforms, each with an attendant. You pay the attendant and are let through the turnstyle, and when the bus comes along it pulls up at the right spot for easy ingress and egress. The bus conductor, whose job is just to announce the stops to the passengers and to open the doors, then welcomes you aboard, and off you go to the next stop.

Batik - Now THAT'S a batik!

It's such a mistake to over plan your holidays. If you plan every detail in advance, you miss out on all the delicious serendipitous discoveries that are everywhere to be made when you wander the streets a little aimlessly sometimes.

So on 2 October I was wandering down towards Jogja's main Kraton (royal palace), completely oblivious to it being National Batik Day, when what did I stumble upon but this. It was a three kilometre long piece of fabric, looped backwards and forwards on the northern alun alun (main square), with about 3000 people sat in front of it. They were preparing to enter the record books, by creating the world's biggest batik!

It was a festive occasion, as are all these multitudinous Indonesian community events. There was music, there were dignitaries galore, lots of people were taking photos, including the media. There was even a long line of line dancers to provide the warm up entertainment.

Then they were off and running. The big collection of amateur and professional batik artisans set to work with their canting (wax pen devices), applying the wax to the traditional flora and fauna patterns that had been drawn for them. Officials from the Indonesia World Records Museum roamed the aisles, checking and recording names, and it was all go for a while.

A couple of hours later the square was emptying, the world record certificate had been presented, and the enormous cloth was being collected up, ready for dyeing and conversion into a giant kimono, for reasons which weren't spelled out to me (to do with promoting Japanese tourism perhaps?)

Reception room? Now THAT'S a reception room!

In the other room at home here in Sydney, they're watching that rather sad little English TV show, Escape to the Country. The funny little houses they try (and usually fail) to sell all seem to have 'reception rooms' these days.

When I grew up in England we had a living room, and a front room for special occasions, maybe for when you were receiving visitors. They were both pretty small. Now they have 'reception rooms', courtesy of the real estate agents. And they're often just as small.

When I was in Solo and Jogja the other week, I saw what real reception rooms looked like. What the sultans of those ancient Javanese royal families used when they had visitors to entertain. They probably still use them sometimes - there are still sultans living there, and in at least the case of the Jogja one, they're still very well respected and influential.

The top picture is of one of the (many) reception rooms in the royal palace in Solo (Surakarta), and the next two are in Jogja's main palace

To complicate matters, each city has a second royal palace where a lesser strand of royalty has set up home. I didn't visit these lesser palaces, to keep it all a bit simpler for me. And tonight, reading up on Wikipedia (so it must be right), I find that it's become even more complicated in the last few years. The Solo sultan who died in 2004 left no wife but lots of mistresses and dozens of potential heirs, who were fighting in the streets for their inheritence and possession of the palace! Here's one journalist's take on it:

SOLO, Indonesia — Pop quiz: How many kings are there now in the ancient sultanate of Surakarta?

Justin Mott for The New York Times

Answer: There is no correct answer.
When King Pakubuwono XII died four years ago, he left six mistresses with 35 children, but no wife, no heir and no instructions about the succession here in this city in central Java.
He might have guessed what would happen. Two half brothers each claimed the ancient crown, and the family split into two bitterly feuding factions.
The oldest half brother and his nine full siblings took control of the palace, a fortresslike complex called a kraton. He barred his 25 half siblings — the children of the other five consorts — and evicted those who had made their homes within its walls.
Except for one shouting match when the expelled half siblings stormed the palace and had to be removed by the police, the two factions have not spoken since.
Now people are asking what will become of the centuries-old Sultanate of Surakarta. Also known as the Sultanate of Solo, it has had no political power outside of the thick, whitewashed ramparts of the palace since the Republic of Indonesia stripped all royal families of power in 1946.
But the kraton here sees itself as a keeper of Javanese tradition — of purity, refinement and cosmic spirituality — and has continued to perform court rituals and to hold regal processions through the city.
Its royal family, meanwhile, continues to behave as royal families so often do.
“Palaces have many intrigues, you know,” said one of the evicted princes.

Meanwhile in Jogja I think it's all holding together a bit better. They certainly do a good palace tour for tourists like me. I paid about $1, and got entry to large areas of the place, an interesting museum, and several reception rooms. I was assigned my own personal guide (a dear old lady who could hardly walk and who had been on the Sultan's staff for maybe all of her 82 years). I also got to watch an excellent little concert, yes, in one of the grand reception rooms, featuring a gamelan band and a traditional palace dancer.

Searching for Sembungan

One of the things to do while visiting the Dieng Plateau in Central Java is to wander up the road from Dieng Village, to the highest village in Java: Sembungan (2300m). From there you continue a little further, and climb the mini volcano, Gunung Sikunir (another 100m or so to the top).

I was wanting a bit of volcano-climbing practice before attempting the real one - Merapi -and if there's a Java's highest village to knock off along the way, then that's fine with me.

Lonely Planet said it was a kilometre and a half from Dieng village to the Coloured Lake, and a further kilometre and a half to Sembungan. It said nothing about any other villages in between. Well that latter distance turned out to be all wrong. It was three or four kilometres at least, and there were two other villages along the way which The Book made no mention of. So I kept coming into yet another 'Java's highest village', photographing it, and continuing
upwards. One of these was this one, with the usual quota of very friendly residents and a stack of irrigation pipes spanning the roadway to service their potato fields.

Another was the one I strolled through while the noon call-to-prayer was playing from its one mosque and two prayer halls. A magnificently atmospheric experience.

Eventually I came upon the real Sambungan (pictured at top, with little Sikunir behind it). It was full of magnificently friendly folk, some very keen to ham it up for my camera!






Most domestic tourists who climb Sikunir, do it to the usual pre-dawn timetable, for the sunrise view. It's not much of an ascent, but a big deal seems to be made of it, with a sign at the base telling you all about the things you need to do and take with you! I must admit, I'd even forgotten my drinking water this time. But what with the cool climate and the rather undemanding little climb, I somehow made it back unscathed!

Solo pursuits 1: bicycles & cottage industries

Central Java's Solo City, known also as Surakarta, competes with Jogja, known also as Yogyakarta, as the pre-eminent centre of Javanese culture. Jogja is better known and much more heavily touristed, but Solo, with half a million people, is actually slightly bigger, and it's a more relaxing place to be.

What does a visitor to Solo do? There are temples and palaces to visit, dances and puppet shows to watch, and then there's the famous bicycle tours to do.

The best known bicycle tour is organised through the Warung Baru homestay, and involves cycling through the padi fields of the nearby countryside, and visiting several interesting little establishments.

There's a bakery, an arak (rice spirit) distillery, a rice cracker factory, and the inevitable batik fabric establishment. But the most spectacular of the photo-op stops was the blacksmith's workshop, the 'gamelan factory', where the huge gamelan gongs are forged and beaten into shape in a dark shed among sparks and flames by barefoot craftsmen with only plywood and palm leaves for eye protection. A gamelan gong machine consists of many different sized gongs, and this workshop's target is one complete instrument per day.

 At the end of our ride, our guide, the very entrepreneurial but highly personable Dodi, took us to the best gado-gado stall in Solo for lunch. The lady took our various orders (varying degrees of chilli hot, eggs or not, which vegetables). She then ground the peanuts with mortar and pestle to make our individualised sauces, and dished up the lot within minutes. And it was indeed delicious. (As was just about all the street food I sampled during my trip.)

Climbing the Mountain of Fire

Central Java's Mt Merapi is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It has erupted several times in the last few years, and it often looks like it does on the poster I saw, probably depicting the situation four years ago. I even remember peering at it from a safe distance on a visit to Yogyakarta nearly three decades ago, and it looked like the poster then too!

When planning my Central Java trip the Merapi climb was the one thing I told everyone I was determined to do. So climb it I did. I found all the organised tours insisted that you do the night climb, ready for the view of the sunrise from the top. They pick you up from Jogja at 10pm, drive you to Selo village, give you a cup of coffee, a torch, and some guides, and up you go. I spent a day or two looking for someone who would do it to a slightly later timetable, thus allowing a bit of beauty sleep beforehand. They were all insistent though, that the standard timetable was the one to do.

It's a very steep and steady slog, ascending from 1500m to 2900m in four hours. Somehow the sleepless night wasn't a problem. The loose and slippery surfaces were though. We all slip-slided our way up in the volcanic dust, scree and sharp rocks, and it was like doing double the ascent. There were four rest stops along the way, and at one of them, just below the tree line, the guides lit a morale boosting fire to warm us and dry our sweaty backs.

At one of the seismic monitoring stations, one of the guides tried to contact the seismic HQ people for an up-to-date activity report, but couldn't get through. We can proceed anyway, he announced, "but careful". He told us later that he was seeing more sulphurous gas than usual coming out of the various fumeroles around the place, and he wasn't keen on spending longer up there than necessary.

We made it to the top with a few minutes to spare, and the views were magnificent - before, during, and after the sunrise. You perch on the knife edge of the crater below, and try not to move too quickly or pass too close to a fellow trekker in case you're accidently despatched. There's an amazing moonscape around you, and a new summit that you don't actually try to conquer. I gather that it appeared during the 2010 eruption, and increased the height of the mountain by 38m. Just to the north there's the spectacular Merbabu volcano, and looking either east or west you see a whole string of volcanoes peeking out of the cloud layer - the chain that forms the spine of this most volcanic island in the world.

Going down takes two hours only! That's because you can see where you're going, and because in the scree sections at least, it's almost impossible not to run! There were of course cuts, torn clothes, and at least one ankle sprain. The guides agreed that they do in fact have serious injuries too, and do get to take people to hospital sometimes.

Breakfasted in Selo, and back in Jogja by midday, I felt good about my Fire Mountain experience.