My Taiwan Adventure

So two days in Bali ARE NOT ENOUGH! I had plans to go to lots of cool places but we only had time to go to Ubud city and Kuta. Bali is famous for cheap and good spas. We went to an awesome one called SKIN in Ubud city. Ubud is the hub for pretty much everything. After massages and mani/pedi we went to the tourist office to buy tickets for the famous Legong dance at the Sultan's palace. Seeing a local dance performance was something I really looked forward to! We tried looking in the Ganesha Bookshop, a store recommended by the Lonely Planet guide. Let me warn you.... NOT WORTH IT! It doesn't have that many books on Indonesia and everything's expensive! So before the dance performance at night we went to the Sacred Monkey Forest. Monkeys there are known to be aggressive and just snatch things from people. I saw a monkey take a guy's back of chips and eat them. We got to buy a bunch of bananas to feed them and the monkeys just swarmed on us as soon as they s...

The next important and amazing temple to visit was Prambanan, a Hindu monument built between the 8th and 10th centuries AD. A lot of it was closed down because the area was unsteady. That's basically the reason why it wasn't as mind-blowing as Borobudur.     Look at how huge it is! Here are some neat carvings on some of the buildings: Look at the monkey on the far left... :X Have to hug a tree in Indonesia!! To get to the main building you had to wear a safety helmet! After Prambanan we went to the main market, Pasar Beringharjo, with our driver as a guide. Indonesia is famous for batik, a method of decorating fabric by painting directly on it. Yogyakarta is the best place to buy it so I was on a mission to get something in batik. The front of the market was selling food, the middle was batik and clothes and the back was a produce section. We walked around the whole thing and the old women in the produce sec...

This next part of the trip I was especially excited about because we were going to see thousands of years old temples!!!!! This day we went to Borobudur, a huge Buddhist temple built between 750 and 850 AD. We hired a driver through the hotel to take us around for the day. Borobudur is about an hour or two from Yogyakarta city. By the way, Yogyakarta is spelled two ways and it's pronounced more like the other way to spell it: Jogjyakarta, or "Joe-ja" For short. Yogyakarta is not as commercialized as Jakarta and it is famous for its colleges. It seems much more laid-back and there's lots of nature all around. So, back to Borobudur. It is HUGE! There are six square levels and three circular levels on top of that. It looks like a mandala when viewed from the top. There are thousands of carved panels on each level depicting different religious scenes. We didn't hire a guide and there wasn't one available in English that day so we just admired the place and didn...