Beautiful Borobudur – Buddhism at its best

After a very long day, night and day we finally arrived at Borobudur, Central Java on Saturday afternoon. We left our Barcelona hotel at 8am on Friday, caught a flight to Singapore arriving at 5.30am local time Saturday, then two flights to Jakarta and Yogyakarta, with long waits in between. Finally, after a two-hour drive from Yogyakarta and thirty hours after leaving our hotel in Barcelona, we arrived at the Manahora Hotel, Borobudur. We had already decided that we were going to have a rest for the remainder of the day and visit the famous, World Heritage-listed eighth century Buddhist temple the next morning, but as soon as we saw that our hotel (set on several hectares) was actually on part of the temple reserve, we dropped our bags and were off! We climbed up the many, many steps to the top, took lots of photos and didn’t come down until sunset. Then a well-deserved shower, a beautiful meal in the outside restaurant and a sleep in – until 4am, when we got up for the 4.30am start to again climb to the top of the temple for the sunrise.

The Borobudur temple was built some time between the middle of the eighth and ninth centuries. It was conceived as a Buddhist vision of the cosmos in stone, starting in the everyday world and spiralling up until it reached Nirvana. The base is 118 metres square and the entire structure contains two million stone blocks. It was abandoned shortly after its completion due to a shift in power away from the area and a decline in Buddhism, and suffered the effects of neglect and even earthquakes, but since its rediscovery by Sir Thomas Raffles in 1815 it has been gradually restored to its former glory. It even had to survive the effects of a terrorist-motivated bombing in 1985 and an earthquake in 2006.

It is an extraordinary monument in an extraordinary setting, surrounded, at a distance, by high mountains and forests. The immediate surrounds have been cleared and you can stand back for uninterrupted views of the entire facade of the temple on all sides. The six square and three circular terraces contain a total of 2,672 carved relief panels, and the large bell-shaped dome on the top of the temple is surrounded by seventy two smaller (but still substantial - more than two metres tall) latticed domes, each containing a Buddha. Watching the sun rise in the distance, and watching the colours on the face of the temple gradually change, was enthralling. Perhaps we were carried away a bit but overall, between our arrival Saturday afternoon and our departure Sunday morning, we took about two hundred photos either of, or of the views from, the temple. Choosing just six for this blog was a challenge.

Visiting the Borobudur Temple was the realisation of a long-held dream of Elizabeth, dating back to her study of Indonesian language and history at high school. And she was not disappointed.