After three long days of biking on the hot sunbaked island of Madura we wer glad to be in Yogyakarta. It took a little while to warm up to the feeling though. That was mostly because we arrived at midnight on a train from Surabaya and were looking forward to checking into a hotel.and taking a shower after a long day of biking and riding the train. It was not to be so easy though. The hotel area was right beside the train station and so we made our way to the hotel we had picked out of the guidebook. The hotel was in a maze of back alleys and after five wrong turns we made it. But it was full. That was to be the first of many. We checked out 25 hotels in the area and all were full. The combination of high season, the weekend, and Indonesian Independence day meant everything in the area was packed. Finally we asked at a full hotel, "Is there a room open somewhere in this city?" The receptionist looked doubtful, pulled out a business card and tried making a phone call. There was no answer so the guy pulled out his motorbike and said, "Follow me". We had no other option so we got on our bikes and followed. 4 kilometers later we pulled up to a small hotel that looked completely closed and locked up. Our "guide" knocked and knocked and finally someone came out, lifted the bars in front of the hotel and let us in. Such was our welcome to Yogyakarta.

After that things got better and better. Yogya is a great city with a lot of culture. Near the city are two UNESCO temples dating from the 800 - 900 A.D. The first one we visited was Borobudur, a Buddhist temple. We arrived at sunrise and it was beautiful to experience the temple with the mist over the hills and the first rays of light peeking through.

After that it was off to Pramabanan, a temple built only 50 years later, mostly to symbolize the change of Java from Buddhism to Hinduism. Another beautiful structure.

Other than that in Yogya we spent two more days seeing the sights of the city, and relaxing a bit. After a week of food stalls and strictly Indonesian food it was nice to be in a bigger city that had a variety of different restaurants and tastes.

The other main activity we engaged in was looking at and shopping for Batik. Batik is a special process of dyeing fabric using wax to apply the dye. The colors are incredibly bright and if the batik is genuine the color is equally bright on both sides. We had fun observing the process and bargaining for some.