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.)
