7:61 S   110:20 E    

Borobodur, think it is 20th September, have lost all track of time!

 

In addition to volcanoes, Java has loads of temples.  There are mosques everywhere of course, as the majority of the population are muslim.  A big mosque is called a masjid, a little one a mushola.  There are mushola in hotels, and filling stations, and they always seem to be near a public loo because of course people have to wash before entering.  We didnt visit any mosques in Java, we were mosqued out in Turkey.  Anyway, the call to prayer here 5 times a day is quite a row, compared to the very beautiful singing we heard from the minarets in Turkey!   But we did visit 2 amazing temples.  Prambanan (6 on map) is the most important Hindu temple and Borobodur (8 on map), the most important Buddhist temple.

 

Borobodur is over 1000 years old.  It is close to Gunung Merapi, Java’s most active and unpredictable volcano.  On the way to Borobodur we passed through one town where there were great swathes of  grey rubble and devastation,  from Merapi’s lava flow  in 2006, which they were still cleaning up.  The Borobodur stupas were only unearthed when Sir Stamford Raffles was governor of Java in 1815.  It is hard to imagine when you see it, because the stupas cover a massive hill.  They were all buried under volcanic debris and scrub vegetation (probably helping the survival of the structures) and several ambitious cleanup operations have occurred since the 1800’s.    In the 1970’s to 80’s the entire structure was taken apart block by block in order to inject concrete foundations to stabilise the hill.  In 1985 opponents of Suharto planted bombs and blew up some of the stupas, and again repairs were done and the temple survived.  Borobodur is now a Unesco World Heritage site, and painstaking work is still going on with tiny brushes and sticks, to remove volcanic sand and debris from between each of the ornately carved blocks.