Day 316- Yogyakarta, Indonesia

YOGYAKARTA, JAVA (13/11/09)

We had primarily come to Yogyakarta to visit it's famous Buddhist temples but we decided to spend our first day looking around this fascinating city. The main street in the City is like a giant, elongated market. Stalls stretch almost as far as you can walk and we spent several hours looking at an interesting mixture of quality merchandise and absolute, unbelievable junk.

Like Bali the mode of transport of choice is the moped. Anyone familiar with the early computer game 'Frogger' will understand roughly what we had to do to cross the road.

On the road side we saw this stall selling sugar cane juice. We were very impressed with the machine which seemed to have been designed specifically for the purpose. The man simply took a cane from the pile on top and fed it into a hole where it was noisily crushed. The resulting liquid was then funnelled into a cup and nothing else was added other than a little ice.

The result was not exactly what we expected, it had a mild, grassy flavour and was, of course, very sweet. It was pleasant enough although one cup between the three of us was probably enough.