Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Although its “proper” name is Surakarta, most people refer to this pleasant city in Central Java by its nickname: Solo.
Every Sunday morning the city’s main thoroughfare – Jalan Slamet Riyadi – is closed to motorised traffic, so residents can enjoy “various leisure activities”.
These include dancing and exercising in the street, plus a nicely informal market that stretches long and thin, along the roadside edge of the footpaths.
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Much of what once comprised the Hindu temple site at Prambanan is still in ruins…or no longer present, at all.
For many centuries makers of other structures pillaged building materials from here.
On the afternoon of October 19 2024, we were just a short drive away from Yogyakarta in south-central Java.
Our feet stood on a very large site; also standing upright were 16 carefully restored/reconstructed temples and shrines.
If we had arrived 1,100 years earlier, we would have been surrounded by 240 of them!
The “biggest/tallest/central” 8, however, do all now stand tall again.
In 2024 Prambanan is certainly one of the world’s “jaw dropping” temple sites.
The tallest temple – pictured above – is Shiva’s.
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I took the photo during a wayang wong performance in Yogyakarta’s Kraton – the Sultan‘s palace complex.
Yogyakarta, in south-central Java, is the only Indonesian region where the local monarch (its Sultan) is thereby the actual regional head of government.
Yogyakarta’s “royal” form of wayang wong – aka wayang orang, which literally translates as “human wayang” or “human puppet” – has a long history, and is highly refined/stylised.
Its “characters” are played by human dancers/actors, but their performance style is more than slightly akin to that of the puppets they have supplanted.
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