The bubbling mud of the volcanic Dieng Plateau
The package I had already spent a week waiting for simply wasn't arriving at the post office, despite (or perhaps because of) my checking every day, so me and the boys decided to make a break out of Yogyakarta – for me to get away from the bloody poste restante, and for Bjorn and Tim to do something worthwhile before heading back to Bali. The destination: the Dieng Plateau, northwest of Yogya and up in them there hills, if only for the reason that the heat in Yogyakarta was steadily building up, and we wanted cool, mountain air for a change.
The bus journey to Dieng was long and arduous – at least, it was for Tim and Bjorn, who hadn'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 was obsessed with putting his hand on his knee. Indonesians are a very physical people – it's common to see young men with their arms around each other, in much the same way it's common to see girls holding hands in England – but it still freaks most westerners out to have a local feel your leg or clasp his mitts where the sun don't shine. It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, too...
Steam shooting out of a vent in the volcanic area of Kawal Sikidang
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, taking a wash is almost unbearable. Still, if you don't sweat so much, you don't need so many showers... right? Well, 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.
The Dieng is an ancient volcanic caldera, one that isn't about to erupt again, but that 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 it's not your usual rice and corn fields: it's potatoes. Yes, Dieng produces hordes of potatoes, making the price of French fries in the restaurants pleasantly cheap, and the local landscape 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.
The thermal activity at Kawal Sikidang provides Dieng's electricity supply
And stuck in the middle of the plateau, surrounded by fields, are yet more Hindu temples, smaller than their Prambanan counterparts, but in a perfect setting. The Candi Arjuna complex, a collection of about five semi-ruined temples, stands in the middle of the plain, and other single temples are dotted around the area. The three of us spent Tuesday 4th November exploring the Dieng Plateau, deciding not to bother with the famous sunrise tour – getting up at 3.30am is always a tricky experience to actually pay for – and spending 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. Oh well, I thought, it's not as if the partying in Yogya was boring...
