The package that I'd already spent a week waiting for in Yogyakarta still hadn't arrived, despite (or perhaps because of) me visiting the post office every day, so the boys and I decided to make a break from Yogyakarta, for me to get away from the bloody poste restante, and for Bjorn and Tim to do something worthwhile before heading back to the beach in Bali. Our chosen destination was the Dieng Plateau, northwest of Yogya and up in them there hills, if only for the reason that the heat in Yogyakarta is steadily building up, and we fancied a bit of cool, mountain air for a change.
The bus journey to Dieng was long and arduous – at least, it was for Tim and Bjorn, who haven't quite mastered the survival technique forced onto me by Sulawesi's crushing buses. Tim was especially unlucky; he managed to get one Indonesian in the last bus who seemed obsessed with putting his hand on Tim's knee. The Indonesians are a very physical people – it's common to see young men with their arms around each other, in much the same way that it's common to see girls holding hands in England – but it still freaks out most westerners to have a local feel your leg or clasp his mitts where the sun doesn't shine. It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, too...
Still, the journey was worth it. Way up in the mountains, Dieng certainly gets cold; in winter it even gets frost at night. This might be pleasantly refreshing after the lowlands, where lifting your little toe can bring you out in a sweat, but it does have one disadvantage: the mandi water is so cold that taking a wash is almost unbearable. Tim went for a mandi in Dieng, and his shrieks as the icy water ran down his neck made the local mosque's loudspeaker broadcasts look positively pathetic. Bjorn and I decided we'd rather smell instead.
Dieng is an ancient volcanic caldera, one that isn't about to erupt again, but which still provides some interesting thermal areas. The volcanic soil is very fertile, and everywhere you look – on the plains, the hillsides, in the steep valleys – there are fields, but they're not your usual rice and corn fields: they're full of potatoes. This makes the price of French fries in the restaurants pleasantly cheap, and the local landscape is quite fascinating. While turquoise and green lakes effervesce with sulphurous fumes, pits of boiling mud bubble and steam vents roar into the clear sky, farmers go about their daily business, planting and harvesting, digging and irrigating. It's a strange sight.
And stuck in the middle of the plateau, surrounded by fields, are yet more Hindu temples, smaller than their Prambanan counterparts but in a picture-perfect setting. The Candi Arjuna complex, a collection of about five semi-ruined temples, stands in the middle of the plain, and other more solitary temples are dotted around the area. The three of us spent a whole day exploring the Dieng Plateau, though we decided not to bother with the famous sunrise tour – getting up at 3.30am is always a tricky experience to actually pay for – and instead spent the next day making our way back to Yogya, in preparation for the hop to Bali.
And that's when I found out that my package, for which I had been patiently waiting over 12 days, wasn't coming in the first place. Oh well, it's not as if the partying in Yogya was boring...