My Travel Adventures

My last day in Java was a Monday. No, I did not skip work or take a holiday: it was the Thai King’s birthday over the weekend, and everyone got the day off – including the staff at international organisations. I ate a leisurely breakfast and took the hotel’s shuttle to Yogyakarta Airport, leaving for Jakarta at 10 o’clock.

The sun rose over a cloudy landscape in the morning. While I could faintly make out the contours of Borobudur from my hotel, the iconic Merapi Volcano was hidden from sight, and would stay that way despite ever-bluer skies. I checked out at eight o’clock and was promptly picked up by my driver for the day: I had ordered a tour online for visiting the Borobudur and Prambanan temples a few days earlier. While the tour was advertised as being without a tour-guide, Didik proved savvy, helpful, and very good at English.

I spent a restless night at my hotel in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport. I woke up almost every hour fearing that my alarm wouldn’t go off, until eventually it was so close to the time I had set that I simply got up and started preparing for my flight. My plane arrived in Yogyakarta a little after nine, but the Grab journey from the airport to the city centre took another hour.

As I lie in my hotel room, it occurs to me that even a few hours in Indonesia have given me a very different impression from my first few weeks in Thailand. While I gather that Bangkok can get quite smoggy during some months, this has not been the case so far, and the contrast with Jakarta could not have been greater. I could tell the plane was nearing Indonesia’s capital not because I could see the city below, but because I could not; the rough contours of buildings only started emerging at closer range through a thick milky screen. We touched down at about quarter to six, and as I walked through the rather empty airport at six, the loudspeakers started playing the Muslim call to prayer. Of course, Islam is quite popular in Southern Thailand, but I have spent most of my time in Bangkok, which is decidedly Buddhist.