March 5th, 2024

Today was an early day. We got up at 6:15 and watched the sail in. Apparently where we were docking floods easily and so there were a bunch of workers out with brooms and squeegees trying to get rid of all the water.

Worker bees in yellow, supervisor in blue

We had several buses going to the Borobudur Temple and we were meeting in the terminal which was a bit of a walk. Since so many of us were going we all wanted to be on the same bus so we had to walk out together and get our bus assignment together. They had 7 buses going which was nice since they were able to spread us out among the buses and not crowd us in. They also had a spare bus just in case something happened. It is a 3 hour drive from the port to the Unesco world heritage site and with traffic it can be much longer. To prevent delays they hire us a police escort. All the buses have to leave at the same time and with the escort they run red lights and if there is any traffic back-up they stop everyone and we start driving on the other side of the road. It was kind of cool and a lot of people waved at us as we went by.

One of our escorts

We stopped halfway there for a coffee/bathroom break. It is hard to come up with a place that 200 people can use the restrooms. They could not stagger us because of the escort.

Views on the drive Rice fields

We arrived at our destination around 10:45am. and the first thing you have to do is get sandals. You are not allowed to walk up the monument unless you are wearing sandals they provide. Something about the heels of some shoes hurting the lava rock. Borobudur is the worlds largest Buddhist monument. There is a temple at the monument which is at the very top. The monument was started in 820AD and took about 100 years to build. They only allow a certain amount of people to climb the monument everyday and Viking bought out the morning time slots so we could all go to the top.

Our new sandals. Thank goodness it was not like bowling shoes which someone else has used.

A few in our group decided not to climb the monument because of the heat, the steep steps and the narrow stairwells. Also not a lot of hand rails, and one of our friends had trouble with the sandals and did not feel comfortable in them.

Front view of Borobudur. There are 161 steps to get to the top.

Kathy and me in front of Borobudur

There are carvings on all the blocks they used to build the monument. (A total of 2672 reliefs)

Some of the carvings

We had great weather which just made it hotter.

You can see all the carvings

The round structures are called Stupas and each one has a Buddha in it and there are 504 of them around the monument.

One of the stupas with the top off so you can see the Buddha.

View from the top

The whole climb and exploration of the monument took about 1 hour. It was definitely easier going up than down. They had a buffet lunch for us that was really good and included noodles, beef and chicken satay.

After about an hour for lunch we loaded back up and drove about 45 minutes until our next bathroom stop which was a silver store that had lots of jewelry and t-shirts and a batik shop. Kathy actually found some pants that she really liked and they were less than 10 dollars each so she got 2 pairs. Right after we got back on the bus it started pouring so we were very lucky with our timing.

This person was in one of the intersections we passed. I saw them in the morning and then on the ride home I was able to grab a shot. They panhandle for money and I guess they thought the funny garb would get them more.

We arrived back to the boat around 5pm and we set sail at 5:30pm. After all the sweating we did a shower never felt so good. We grabbed a quick bite up in the world cafe and then we tried our luck with laundry. It has only been 6 days since we did laundry but with all the hot days we have had and being out and about on excursions we had quite a bit. We were lucky and no one was in the laundry room so we got 3 loads done.

We now have 2.5 days at sea on our way to Vietnam. We arrive on March 8th at 2pm.

During our first sea day I will post some pictures from my diving in Bali.