Borobudur Temple

The trendy tourist thing to do in Jogya is to go out to the site of Borobudur Temple early enough to see the sunrise and the mist burn off. We chose not to be so trendy. Instead, we arrived around 11am after a two-hour bus ride and climbed the steps up the several tiers of this largest Buddhist temple in the world. Both Borobudur and Prambanan are UNESCO world heritage sites. Both have had extensive reconstruction to fix damage caused by earthquakes and humans. Borobudur is an extremely popular tourist destination. Very few of the tourists looked like Westerners. Similar to our experience in Konya, Turkey, we often found ourselves to be immersed in the Muslim culture , but of course, here, we were surrounded by friendly and helpful Indonesians. Both temple sites were amazing but the crowds and surrounding commercialism detracted from the holiness of the sites and the religious devotion that caused them to be built over a thousand years ago.