In Yogjakarta I spent about three days exploring the city, together with Claudia and David who I had met on the way there. David had been traveling for well over a year and had some great stories from all around the world. Together they plan to travel at least another year; most people I meet are traveling for more than 6 months: it shows 7 weeks is not a very long time :p. In the time that we had in Yogja we visited the main sites which consisted of the center (Malioboro street), the Sultans Palace, the Buddhist temple Borobudur and the Hindu temple Prambanan. Most of the visits were interspersed with locals asking for pictures; and these are not just scool children I’m talking about, also groups of older women and grown up men. Apparently being white is quite an attraction in these parts of Indonesia.
Even though Yogjakarta was a great place with great sights it was also the place where I kind of got fed up with Indonesia. Its not the country, the food or the people per se because I really like all of them. It is the attitude people have towards tourists. Someone – most likely the decadent tourists – must have given them the idea that money grows on trees in the west. Now in a sense it is true that money earned in euros or dollars goes a long way in Indonesia, but it does not mean that we are willing to spend all the money we have there. All this culminates in the fact that tourists are overcharged for everything everywhere! I can understand this for certain things such as Borobudur which realistically is expensive to maintain and letting the tourists *and* locals pay for it would mean that locals could not visit anymore. So tourists pay more: fair enough.
What I do not understand is why I should pay three times as much for an ice cream, or a bottle of water, or a local bus. I’m sitting in the same crappy seat, have the same non-AC’ed sweaty ride and yet I have to pay more then everyone else. And they’re not even official tourist prices.. No, its just that the bus conductor decides that he’ll ask me three times as much. Then later seeing him buy some cigarettes from the pile of money that he just collected from everyone does not make me feel better either. Sure I may be haggle things down, but I have not been able to haggle down to local prices. And trust me – being true to my Dutch heritage 
– I’m not a bad haggler.
Anyway so much for my rant. I guess its a reality in much of the tropics, though I have had similar complaints from other travelers. Apparently Indonesia is one of the worst places when it comes to ripping off tourists; only the Philippines are worse.
Altogether I still had a good time in Yogjakarta and it was a good place to end my stay in Indonesia. The morning of the 4th I took a plane to Singapore for a change of pace.
See below for the pictures:
The diving is here is amazing! The water here is 30 degrees celsius, even at 30m depth! Compare that to 16 degrees in California, it makes diving so much more fun! For the Advanced Open Water I had to do 5 adventure dives, which included a little bit of theory but were mainly just fun. I started of with a wreck dive, in which we explored the USS Liberty which was torpedoed by the Japanese a long time ago. We saw a lot off beautiful fish, and there were all sorts of corals. The most memorable moment of that dive was seeing ‘Nemo’ – the clown fish – from Finding Nemo 
In the words of Arnold: it was a good things that I was wearing underpants 