Borobodur

Today we visited the very impressive Buddist temple Borobodur which is from the 9th century but was unearthed only in the 19th century, and drove up towards Mount Merapi to see where the lava flow destroyed a village only 3 years ago!

We had lunch at a restaurant along the way where every table is on an individual pavilion on a small lake, the fish there was so good we ordered a second, and when you are finished your fish you can throw the remains into the lake where the large lake fish eat it greedily! We could also take little bamboo rafts out on the the water which was good fun after eating.

It was raining heavily when we got back so Gyorgyi went off to finish the Batik painting course she started yesterday and we retired to our favourite cafe for cake and ice cream.

Fiona was over her high temperature yesterday but we took it easy, not to tire her out. She's fine today. And yesterday Briana was playing in the pool with some kids from the family that I guess own the hotel. They have enough English to communicate.

Tomorrow we will visit the Sultan's Palace in the morning and in the afternoon move to Solo and visit Prambanan along the way.

Misc news from Ubud, Bali

Yesterday and Today Gyorgyi is doing a course in "Tantsu". Meanwhile, yesterday the girls and I went to the local Ubud Monkey Forest which is a temple around which large numbers of Macaque monkeys run wild (and steal your food, hats etc). The girls were a little bit scared by the monkeys especially when one started to pull at Briana's skirt, but we spent a while there.

I can manage to do some decent running around here as it is a relatively rural area. I got out at 6 this morning for a long run on a quiet country road through the paddy fields. The highlight was coming round a bend and suddenly seeing a 100+ group of men around the road preparing for some feast (I guess) today (Sunday) - they were cutting coconuts and other foods - including butchering a cow right there on the road surface! So much for hygiene standards...

There is a shop near the hotel setting DVDs for 15000 Rupiah each, that's just over 1 Euro. They have a library including latest movies, US tv series, etc. All region-unlocked, so they say anyway. Of course one doesn't ask where they come from... :-) Unfortunately when in Kuala Lumpur I bought some for twice the price... a whopping 2 Euro!!! Will get some more here though. Of course I know they can be downloaded but at these prices...

We booked our flight to the larger Indonesian island Java for 23 May, which will mean 6 nights there before flying to Hong Kong. The Balians warn us not to expect too much in Java, that it's not nice like Bali. I can anticipate there is a big contrast - Bali has 3.1 million people, Java is a few times larger in terms of land-mass but it has 88 million. Perhaps a very rough analogy would be between Ireland and Britain - imagine meeting a tourist in Galway or Dingle (especially if the sun shined 365 days a year) who says they want to next visit Birmingham or Manchester, you'd probably try to change their minds! Anyway we were planning 9 days on Java in Jogyakarta and Solo but partly because of flight availability and partly because of advise, we will cut that shorter and it will allow us to stay one extra location in Bali which is just fine; Bali is very nice... and inexpensive too.

The girls finished filling up the drawing books we bought so today we bought some new ones, and as I write this they are busy beside me drawing and colouring-in their pictures of balinese dancers, flying ponies, and monkeys.