Trip to Yogyakarta – Day 1 (Yogyakarta City)

Hubby, mum, MIL and I went for a trip to Yogyakarta in early February, so the following few posts on Yogyakarta are extremely back-dated posts.

We left for Yogyakarta on Friday, February 6 on flight MH857. There were nine of us in the group, two of whom were my colleagues. Our flight was delayed by almost an hour due to technical problems. We touched down at the Adisutjipto Airport just before 12noon local time. After checking into Novotel Yogyakarta, our rented MPV arrived and the driver took us for a lunch of the most famous local dish, gudeg, which is a curry of jackfruit, chicken and egg served with rice. We didn’t like the taste at all but luckily there were other dishes available, which were more suitable for our palate.

The gudeg stall with its many dishes

The streets of Yogyakarta adorned with flags of various political parties, as they were gearing up for their elections then

After lunch, we proceeded to visit a silver factory in Kotagede. Most of the handicrafts are meticulously crafted manually, and we were impressed with the dexterity of the workers in producing tiny pieces of decorative silverware.

We then visited the Chinese area, or locally known as Pecinan. It started to drizzle by then and we decided to just drive around town for sightseeing, driving past historical monuments such as Tugu Monument (Tugu Jogja), a well known landmark located in the center of downtown Yogyakarta and Fort Vredeburg (Benteng Vredeburg), the fort which protected the Dutch against possible attacks by Yogyakarta Kingdom troops. Built in 1765, the fort has high square walls confining the area inside with one monitoring tower in each of the four corners.

Tugu Monument

Fort Vredeburg

Dinner was at a roadside noodles stall near Novotel.