Hello from Jogyokarta, Indonesia!

It’s been a long way to Indonesia on this rather last-minute trip, but we’re here with a congenial group of travelers, seeing places I knew nothing about.

After three nights in steamy, hot Jakarta, a mix of old (Dutch colonial buildings and outdoor markets) and new (shiny highrises, a haze of air pollution, and a state-of-the-art transportation system), we have moved on to Jogyokarta, a more manageable smaller city (Jakarta has 12 million residents and another 4 million daily commuters) where there are a few more foreign tourists, most probably here to see the famed largest Hindu temple in the world, Borobudur, which we will visit this morning.

On the way here from the airport we stopped alongside the road to visit with a couple harvesting rice, trying our hand at using their threshing machine. I loved being out in the countryside with views of the mountains, which have quite regularly spewed volcanos.

In the evening five of us had a lovely home visit with a family at their home, with a delicious home-cooked meal. The husband was fluent in English and Spanish, as well as several other languages including some Indonesian dialects (there are something like 140) and works in a business exporting teak furniture to Spain. We finished the evening learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a set of bamboo instruments, each of us holding a set of bamboo pipes that played a single note.

People have been unbelievably friendly, asking us to pose with them for photos, the children giving us high fives, everyone one smiling, nodding, bowing, welcoming, eager to share, and curious about us.

There is so much more to tell — we gulped when we thought the ATM machine had swallowed our single card — but it finally returned it to us— whew! I had lost my two cards somewhere between the Oakland airport BART station and San Francisco, so we have no backup. I have many photos taken with my camera that i will wait to share when i have time to download and edit them st home.