Yogyakarta

Arrived to Jogya yesterday. We got a taxi at the airport and told him we wanted a not-too-expensive, central hotel, with swimming pool. He brought us to a road with a lot of hotels, and we picked the 4th or 5th we saw. It's about 20 Euro a night for a quite simple room with a double bed and extra mattress, but the place is alright otherwise. (At the airport they wanted to sell us on a 5 star at 80 dollars.)

Unfortunately Fiona has a high temperature since yesterday morning and still today, so we haven't been able to do too much together. We didn't really do much at all yesterday and this morning went for a tour of the Sultan's palace but it was closed due to a Moslem holiday, so we cut that short too - anyway Fiona was very tired (it was only 9am) so Gyorgyi went off to do some sightseening and I went back with the girls to the hotel. Later on after she returned, I went off to the Malioboro area to browse the markets. Neither of us came back empty-handed! It's pretty easy to get nice souvenirs, whether simple t-shirts or nice artwork, and the prices are very low. Even when we know (later) that we paid well over the odds due to lack of local knowledge, it's still very little for Europeans.

The standard mode of transport here is rickshaw. They hold max 2 so we took two this morning. The girls wanted to go on a horse drawn cab so later on we switched to that for the trip back to the hotel. This is the cheapest place we visited. To put the cost-of-living here into context, you can rent a rickshaw for the day for 30000 Rupiah - that's about 2 Euro or 600 Forints. Internet costs as little as 3000 Rupiah an hour (20 Eurocents or 60 Forints) with better deals for longer times or happy hours. Laundry costs as little as 2500 a kilo which means you can have 5 kilos done for less than a Euro - that's perhaps a machine load. T-shirts are 15000 up to 25000 for the better quality - that's 1 to 2 Euros.

I'm in a pretty stylish place writing this called the Ministry of Coffee. I'd seen good reviews of their rooms on tripadvisor and as it turns out we ended up just 20 metres from them. They don't have any rooms free but a nice menu of sweet stuff, so I'm sure we'll drop in again to bulk out a little more before our return.

We've got 5 more nights in Java, and the main aim is to visit Borbodur the big Buddhist temple that was founded between 750 and 850AD, and Pramadnan the other big temple in the area which is Hindu. We might also take in the most active volcano in the world which is not far north of here... at least so long as it's not active at the moment!!! We'll fly out from Solo airport on Friday coming to Hong Kong. Our very last night in HK will be spent in the Disneyland hotel (not cheap but they give us a second days admission to the park for no extra charge - that'll wear the girls out for the night flight home to Europe!)