Food cart selling "bakso" (meatball). Actually they have chicken meatballs with noodles in a soup. It is tasty, but they put lots of MSG in it. Where's the kitchen to wash the dishes? A bucket underneath. Yum!

Elderly woman selling stuff on Jl Maliboro. I paid her 5,000 Rp for me to take this photo; that's about 55 cents.

Yogyakarta at night. Jl Maliboro (Marlborough St.) is filled with hawkers selling trinkets and food to Indonesian tourists. Most of the tourists were from Jakarta. Indonesia is a country with large natural resources, a few wealthy people, and heaps of poor people. Java is by far the most developed and richest island, followed by Bali (because of tourism). Something like 80% of the people live in Jakarta.

Relief art on the walls of Borobudur recount the stories about the Buddha. If laid out, these tiles would be 3 km long.

Borobudur buddha statues.

Borobudur

It is difficult to get a good impression of this place in a photo. Maybe
one from the sky would be better.

Macaque eating sweet potato

In Ubud, we visited Monkey Forest. There are tame macaques everywhere looking bored. They were hilarious to watch. They were pretty bold -- jumping on tourists to look for food in their bags.

A koi pond in a temple at Monkey Forest Temple in Ubud.

Terraced rice fields

You see pretty rice patty fields all over the place. This is one of the prettiest fields I saw; it is just north of Ubud. Rice takes three months to grow, starting in deep water, and after three months it dries out.

Mt. Batur and Lake Batur

On a day trip from Kuta, we saw this view of Gunung Batur and Danou Batur. There are active volcanoes all over Indonesia. This one blew and poured lava over a town below it in 1963. You can see the lava track to the right below the volcano.

Yogyakarta

I made it back to Kuta Beach on Monday, but instead of leaving after one night, I ended up staying for four. That pretty much sums up a lot of the trip planning I've been doing; plans go out the window, and I've been going with the flow. I caught up with a couple of Brits that I had met on my first day in Bali three weeks ago (they were on the same flight from Auckland), and I also met a cool Canadian couple, and we all hung out in the evenings. Good company.
We took a day tour around Bali, which satisfied me enough to know that hanging around poolside in Kuta was not so bad. We saw Mt. Batur, one of many volcanos on the island. And we spent a couple hours at Monkey Forest in Ubud, the other big tourist town in Bali. Ubud is known for its artsy-fartsy boutiques, while Kuta is known for its surf, beach, and nightlife. The macaques (monkeys) at Monkey Forest were very entertaining, jumping on each other in their little pond; very human behavior. But, returning to the pool at the hotel in Kuta Beach was the best. After the trip through Nusa Tenggara, I really can appreciate Kuta, much more than when I first arrived a couple weeks ago.
I was going to go to Mt. Bromo on Java a few days ago, but I really didn't feel up for a 12-hour overnight bus trip. Today I flew to Yogyakarta for a little more than the price for a 16-hour bus ticket. I should be here for a couple days, but then again, you never know.
Today I went to Borobudur, a 9th century Buddhist step pyramid. It is massive and amazing. I've never seen anything like it. In Taiwan, the Buddhist temples are rather garish in colors, but the dark gray stone of Borobudur seemed just right. I was careful to walk around each of the levels clockwise before ascending a level through the East gate. To walk counter-clockwise is to speak with the spirits of the dead. But other the tourists didn't seem to care; they're mostly Muslim in Java.
I took the public bus system to get to Borobudur, which meant taking changing buses, and then taking a tricycle-rickshaw type of thing to the temple. On the way back, the guys on the bus tried to overcharge me, but I didn't even budge. I paid the same price I paid for getting up there. I was feeling pretty ornery from the heat and the early morning flight. Then, as I was getting into town, I think a couple of guys tried to steal from me. One guy kept distracting me by saying this was my stop, constantly tapping me urgently for about a minute, meanwhile his co-conspirator got up to squeeze by me in the aisle. I realized then, that my backpack had mysteriously opened up. I quickly zipped it closed after an inventory and got away from them. I was warned by the taxi driver to be careful in Jogja.
Tomorrow I will try to get to the Hindu temple Prambanan at dawn. Or not. I had to wake up at 0400 this morning to catch my 0600 flight.

Welcome to the Six-foot-plus club. The Brits and Canadian and the surfboard.

"The Morgan show" during a break on our bus ride from Moni to Maumere.

Village kids dancing and watching the "Morgan Show". The Canadian was great entertainment for all the locals across Flores. Definitely a good attitude for meeting people. Some people are disarmed with the persistent staring, but Morgan would talk to people and touch them. If you needed to find him, you just needed to look for a circle of Indonesians.

A cool sunset on a village road. Music filled the air in stereo...a good day.

A good quiet black sanded beach at Waiara, 13 km east of Maumere. Clean, quiet, and no tourists. The water was warm, but no surf on this north-facing beach.

The Bermuda Triangle of Flores. A traveller can get stranded for days here. Flores was colonized by the Portuguesed, so they have afternoon siestas, and Catholic churches. It looks like what I imagine places in Latin America look like.

There's a goat under the luggage. This is the typical long distance bus in Flores. It seats about 98 people.

The terraced rice fields at Moni. The hot spring was somewhere near the man in the red shirt.

This was so amazing to be soaking and having locals descend upon us in such a pretty setting with the rice patties. A good day.

Villagers bathing at a hot spring in Moni. The water very clean surprisingly.

The turquoise lake at Kelimutu (1600m) and sunrise. You can make out the brown lake in the background. My hair is pretty long now, exaggerated, by the big winds at the peak. "When God painted the world, he washed his brushes in the lakes at Kelimutu." Okay, somebody else said that.

Day market in Bajawa.

The port of Sape where I was stranded for a day. I thought it had a dirt road, but it only looked like dirt from all the horse poop. They use these horse-drawn wagons ("dokars") for their public transportation system around town.