Yogyakarta On A Motorcycle

Located in the middle of the island of Java, the city of Yogyakarta is a great starting point to explore the many wonders of Indonesia’s most populated island. The best way to discover Yogyakarta and its surrounding is to rent a motorcycle!

Renting a motorcycle is a great idea, unless you’re like me and can’t even drive a motorcycle. In that case it is definitively not a great idea and you might want to consider another option; it isn’t exactly the place to learn! (They drive on the left side of the road there!).

But maybe you are lucky and you have a friend or a partner who can drive. Renting a motorcycle in Yogyakarta is basically easier than walking, every single hotels or guesthouse rents motorcycles, usually for a pretty good price, anything above $8 a day would be considered a rip-off.

My partner Ira is now an expert in motorcycle driving in Indonesia, he now feels so confident on a motorbike he could drive with his eyes clothes while making a sandwich. The traffic here in Central Java is non-existent compared to West Java, this will be easy-peasy for Ira! We have the motorcycle now, all we have to do is wake up early and head to our first adventure!

Borobudur

40 km north-west of Yogyakarta, this ancient Buddhist temple is one of the largest in the world. Built in the 9th century, it was abandoned 5 centuries later when Javanese people started to adopt Islam.

When a British ruler was informed of the existence of the temple, in 1814, the temple was in a rough shape and many repairs had to take place in order to restore the authentic beauty of the temple.

Sometimes to witness pure magic, you gotta wake up extra early. We aim to arrive there at sunrise as the park opens at 6 am, but we end up arriving around 8 am (Breakfast is too important to be skipped!).

Surprisingly the place isn’t crowded at all. We pay the “somehow unfair to foreigners” entrance fee of $25, which is 10 times to price local people pay.

I have nothing against paying a little bit more as a foreign tourist but 10 times more seems really crazy to me. Imagine the price foreigners would have to pay to visit the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower!

This time I did something extremely rare, I paid the full price and did not complain about it because I really wanted to see the temple. Apparently it’s cheaper if you have a student card. Damn, I knew studying was the answer! The temple does not disappoint, especially in the early hours of morning when the light is absolutely magical and the whole place is still surrounded by mist.

We climb up the stairs, admiring all the reliefs on the walls depicting different daily scenes and moments of Buddha's life.Tourists are starting to arrive but I feel lucky enough being able to take pictures without a single person blocking my view.

And the view is absolutely stunning! Magnificent mountains peaks and volcanoes all around the temple, green lush forests surrounding us and the sun rising at the horizon. Somehow I feel like Indiana Jones or maybe Lara Croft (without the guns!), exploring this ancient place of worship.

As the sun gets higher, the temperature rises as well, it is getting a little too hot for me. We decide to check out a little museum located in the park as well. It doesn’t seem to be popular since we are the only ones inside but it is actually interesting. Some English translations are not really accurate though but they definitively give me a good laugh! All around the park you will find dozens of vendors selling all kind of souvenirs. Ira bought a nice suling for a few dollars (a suling is a Southeast Asian bamboo ring flute).

A few kilometers away from Borobudur temple is another little temple called Pawon, also built at the same period. It is directly aligned with Borobudur and another temple called Mendut. We decided to visit only one of them, Mendut. It is way cheaper to enter because the temple is also way smaller! Inside you can admire a giant statue of Dhyani Buddha.

Mount Merapi

Mount Merapi is an active volcano located only 30 km from Yogyakarta. It is a scary volcano because it has been erupting regularly for about 500 years and has killed a lot people; its name literally means Fire Mountain in Javanese! So it's not really the perfect place to build your house on, but apparently, people still do.

Ira and I really want to see it from as close as we can. Apparently there is a great museum on its flank, so I enter the name of the village on my GPS and we set up to ride our motorcycle in that direction. After 35 minutes we find ourselves in a tiny little village. This is when I realize GPS should not be trusted here. It doesn’t like there’s any museum around…

But the good thing is, we do see Mount Merapi, it is a huge and steep volcano, very impressive! I’m so excited, I wanna keep going up but clearly this isn’t the way.

“Let’s ask someone” suggests Ira.

Ira spots a teenage boy outside his house and asks him where we could find the “Museum Gunung Api Merapi”, in a broken English and Indonesian, the young boy tells us to wait here as he runs to gets his motorcycle!

Then he signals us to follow him: “Ok, it must be close enough” I guess.

We follow the boy, who must be about 15 years old, as he drives through the countryside on little roads. We follow him for almost 20 minutes and we start to wonder if he understood what we wanted…

“Where is he leading us?”.

Finally he stops and points at the end of the road. Before leaving, he asks us if we mind taking a picture with him. We didn’t mind so we took a selfie and he left. We now follow each other on Instagram. Modern life stories. As we finally reached the museum entrance, we realize it is closed today and it is now starting to rain. We can’t even see Mount Merapi anymore.

We put on our rain jackets and wonder “Now what?”.

Ira reads the Lonely Planet “Let’s try to find that view point mentioned here”.

So we start driving our motorcycle towards the first people we see in the street, we ask them, they hesitate and tell us to go straight then right then left. Here is the start of a strange adventure, trying to find our way with the help of local Indonesians.

Let me tell you: it is NOT easy! Indonesian people always want to be helpful, even if they have no clue what you are talking about, they will try to help you.

But sometimes it means giving you wrong information, they don't mean any harm, they just don't want to disappoint you.

We keep riding on these tiny roads, I have no clue if we are getting closer or further from this viewpoint. I’m not even sure this viewpoint actually exists now. The last man we ask seems confident “Lurus, kanan dan kiri” (Straight, right and left).

Great, we should arrive soon then. But now the road looks less like a road and more like a dirt bike path. We take it anyway. It is getting really narrow and on the side… a river, 15 meters down!

“I don’t know about this Ira…” I whisper, looking over the edge nervously. Ira isn’t nervous, he has seen way worse terrain, he keeps driving. We reach a little bridge, large enough for people to walk on it. I close my eyes while saying “careful…careful…careful”.

We make it on the other side but here, the path ends. It is truly beautiful around, a green and lush canyon with Mount Merapi peeking through the clouds. But we can’t go any further, this is clearly neither a path nor a viewpoint. We have a good laugh, we are completely lost but we are having fun, driving a motorcycle is fun!

Before we go home, we decide to check another road going up. Eventually we reach a little town, many jeeps are parked here so we take that as a good sign. There are 2 men blocking the road.

They expect us to pay to go any further: “You can do a tour, we drive you there”

“But we have a motorcycle! Why would we pay someone else to drive us there?!”

“It is the rule”

“Sure, but it is a stupid rule, we just want to see what’s up there, we don’t want to do a tour, we just want to walk around and leave”.

After 5 long minutes of negotiation (in Indonesian!), the guy lets us go for free, visibly really annoyed.

We notice they don’t make any locals pay, just foreigners…how convenient!

We arrive to a little parking lot, in the middle of nowhere and there is an old Japanese military bunker! Such a random sight! The bunker is a little destroyed because of the last big eruption of Mount Merapi.

From here we should be able to see the volcano but it is now very cloudy and after staring at the white sky in front of me for 10 minutes, I conclude it is time to go. We didn’t see much of Mount Merapi today, but what we saw was pretty impressive! I wish I had money to climb it…

The Indian Ocean

We really wanted to get out of the city and see the Indian Ocean again so we headed south, first stop: Pantai Wohkudu! It is about 41 km south of Yogyakarta, you have to cross the towns of Imogiri and Panggang. I would say having a GPS could be helpful but from my previous experience, you now know it isn't really. Sometimes I would have no signal or my GPS would simply say “no road” and I would reply "Idiot! We are on a road right now! Can't you see?! What's wrong with you?!".

But it is truly a very pleasant ride once you’re out of the city.

The road is completely ours, we go up the hills and because today is a beautiful sunny day, we have a great panorama of the region. We cross little villages and everybody seems somehow surprise to see us here, it isn’t really the touristic neighborhood here. Finally we reach a little forest road, we pay the equivalent of a dollar to enter and we park our motorcycle next to a little shack selling noodle cups and water bottles.

A group of young Indonesian boys are having coffee in the shade. It is now extremely hot and I can’t wait to be lying on the beach in my bikini! We ask the boys where the beach is and they tell us to walk down a little trail for about 10 minutes.

And we arrive to this little, hidden, beautiful empty beach surrounded by cliffs! We are alone for a few minutes and two teenagers arrive on the beach. They spend about 30 minutes taking selfies. Something I’ve noticed here is that young people LOVE taking pictures and they love to add strangers on Facebook...

We end up on a few of their pictures, smiling for the camera. Life in Indonesia: feeling like a celebrity!

We just spend an hour on this beach, or maybe two? I completely loose track of time while being here. It is too dangerous to go for a swim; there are many rocks and huge powerful wages, but it is so relaxing to have your feet in the water.

After that, we decide to ride to a different beach; I don’t really have a precise indication on where to go so we just drive west, hoping we would find some kind of beach access! But it is mostly cliffs here! Eventually, we find ourselves riding our motorcycle on an unpaved trail in the middle of someone's field! We go really slowly, and it must take us 1 hour to do 20 km. But finally we reach a paved road and end up in a spectacular place, by pure luck!

This place is called Bukit Paralayang, Watugupit. It is a huge cliff where para-gliders start their flight, facing the Indian Ocean with breathtaking views! It seems to be a popular spot; lots of young Indonesians are sitting here, waiting for sunset. There is a little restaurant right there with great and cheap food and they have the best view you can imagine! We don’t want to drive home in the dark so we leave before sunset. What an awesome day we had!

I didn't really mention the city of Yogyakarta but it is nice spending some time there. You can find some nice restaurants and some more budget local eatery.

There is also another great temple you can visit around the city, Parabanan, we didn't get a chance to go unfortunately but it looks really beautiful too.

Now go ahead, rent a motorcycle, it is a great way to discover a place like Central Java. But please, keep in mind that it isn't the safest thing out there, you have to be really careful. Traffic can be calm for a while then suddenly it gets really crazy, it can also rain intensely and all of these factors make it really hard to drive sometimes. Local people are used to it, but remember that you are not, be extra cautious and wear a helmet! Many more adventures await for you!