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Tom & Jo's Excellent Adventure
Wow...flew in with Adam Air, (cheapy airline) who nearly rolled the plane on the runway after landing ! Yogya is quite a sweet little place, lots of friendly locals who all want to talk to you so they can practice their english. The cover photo is from Borobudur an ancient budhist temple and one of the places we spent loads of time talking to indonesian students and then being made to feel like a celebrity when they all line up to have their photo taken with us. Apparently I look like David Beckham and Frank Lampard (he he he). Best bit of our visit here was the early start 2am, to go to Kali Kuning, 4.2km from the top of Mount Merapi. It had rained all day but by the time we arrived it had cleared giving us a great view of the smouldering slopes and lava.It was amazing to see and we were well inside the red zone (everyone within 8.5km of the summit had been urged to evacuate) if she blew then that was it, bye bye Tom and Jo ...Other than that we have explored the city and a lot of its quaint little gangs (small side alleys) and also the Sultans Palace and the Bird Market. The bird market was interesting but quite a horrible place to be, the animals were kept pretty poorly and the sight of something dead or dying was fairly commonplace. If you wanted you could get a adult fruit bats, puppies, kittens, rats, pythons (3m) and dozens of other species, squirrels, baby owls, barn owls, eagle owl chicks, monitor lizard, leopard cat cub, along with virtually every type of bird in asia and then more. It was really sad seeing the young maquaques (monkey), 6 to a 2ft sq cage. You could have bought one for just 30 quid. Our method of transport for the last 3 days has been on a trishaw. These poor sods cycle people around rain or shine (mainly rain for us !) for a pittance. A half hour journey costs about 5000 rupiah or about 30p. Even if they worked 8 hours a day everyday of the year they would only earn around 1500 quid a year but believe me its more like 300 quid a year max ! Its actually quite sad watching these people struggle to scrape together enough to live. We now head to Bromo, eastern Java, to conker another mountain, so until then...
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