Marty Mellway Photography

Taken from my journal. We left Jakarta last week and headed first by train to the city of Yogyakarta. From there we took a bus to Borobudur, the site of an ancient Buddhist temple built in 750 AD. We arrived early in the morning off the bus and jumped in a small hand pulled cart to get to our guesthouse a few kilometers up the road. The guest house turned out to be very nice. In the high season the majority of the people who stayed there were Buddhist pilgrims who had come to see the great monument. We set our late in the morning so that we would have lots of time to walk through the temple. About 100 feet from our guest house on the main road you could see the very top of the temple rising out of the jungle beyond. We made our way down the road in that direction. The whole area seemed better kept than the rest of Indonesia, likely because they make a lot of money off it. We reached the main gate where we waited to buy a ticket to enter. The entry cost ended up being 100 000 rup...

Jakarta  april 10 th 2008 Written in the Jakarta train station. Taken from my journal. Indonesia is Chaos, I love it. I’ve been here for about a week now and already I can tell I have a future with this country.  Last weekend Jeanette and I went to Puncuk Pass,  a tea plantation about 2 hours outside Jakarta. We left early in the morning and managed to arrive before noon on Saturday. We spent the day exploring the hills of tea and checking out the amazing views. At one point we took a path through the rain forest which led us to a small lake which we later discover was the rainbow lagoon. The whole area was populated with macaques (small monkeys). Out in the open they were very friendly and mostly ignored us because we had no food. Later on we came upon a large family of them on a path next to the lake. There wasn’t much room with the mountain cliff to our left and a small cliff down into the lake on our right. But the monkeys were not at all impressed with our un...