After a whole morning on Mount Merapi with an informative and historical tour in Ullen Sentalu Museum, we arrive at another Yogyakarta tourist hotspot, Prambanan Temple. The entrance ticket is on the pricey side with half of my friends preferring to walk and shop at the markets outside the temple while the other half of us decided to go for it. For IDR365,000, the rest of us made sure we enjoyed every second and every corner of these beautiful 9th-century Hindu temples. 

I have to say, photos do not do this place any justice at all. Honestly, before I came I googled images of this place to roughly see how it looked like. It was very beautiful but I didn't give it much thought until I was standing at the entrance to the entire Prambanan Temple complex. It was so majestic and breath-taking amidst the many tourists that looked like colourful ants moving around the foot of the temples.

We literally took 1001 photos from the entrance to every individual temple. One, was to made sure we enjoyed to the maximum because of the expensive entrance fee. Two, to show off to our friends on the other side of the wall on what a great time we had and that they were missing out on this. Well, at the end they had a great time shopping at the market which I wished I had the time to go shop as well but we were running out of time to watch the sunset at our next destination, Ratu Boko.

We were quite early for sunset so the boys planned on another round of video shooting session while I wandered off on my own because the Main Gate area was filled with tourists waiting for the sunset. While I headed away from the main spot, I suspected that there was more to Ratu Boko than the signature gate where everyone was crowding about. Before we arrived, we googled Ratu Boko and all that came out at the images section was the main gate with the sunset behind it and that was it. So we assumed that was all to this place. But later on, when I came back to KL and checked it out again, I realized that we should have came earlier and explore the grounds first before the sunset but nevermind, more the reason to come back again. Here are some shots I took while wandering around the garden area.

We waited for almost 45 minutes before the sun said goodbye to us and it was a beautiful sight. I don't know how people get to have the place all to themselves in some of the photos they take because it was packed! But it helps to come early because you still can photoshop the humans away but towards the time for sunset and before we knew it, it was pitch dark with no lights along the way back to the van.

Before we headed to our dinner place at House of Raminten, I asked one of our drivers to drop me at this photo shop I found on Google because I was running out of film rolls. At first I asked our driver to suggest any place that I can get film rolls but he himself said he didn't know where to go because I was the first tourist that even asked him about this. Nevermind, Google had it so off we were to Central Foto at Jalan Urip Sumoharjo which had a wide and busy road with no pedestrian bridge. We parked opposite of the the shop and thank goodness for the driver or I would have never been able to cross that road. There were not much choices of film rolls there and there was no Superia 200 nor Vista 200 so I grabbed the two rolls of Kodak Gold 200 instead.

As unpredictable as it can be, this particular roll of expired Superia 200 (Vista 200 for day shots and expired Superia 200 for night shots) killed some of my photos. Realized that all the photos of horses and friends I took at the restaurant were not all available on the expired roll, well these are some of the downsides of expired film. Only these two survived it all:

My Yogyakarta trip has been split into a few parts because I've got too many photos! If you've missed some of them, it's all here:

Yogyakarta Part 1: Alun-Alun Kidul 
Yogyakarta Part 2: Kali Suci Tubing
Yogyakarta Part 3: Timang Beach & Wedi Ombo Beach
Yogyakarta Part 4: Mount Merapi & Ullen Sentalu Museum

Till then see you again in the next part of my Jogja trip!

xx