Indonesia Photo Tour – Day 3 - Photo Tours

ND4_0861 — Borobudur Temple All photos copyright Wolfgang Kaehler

Indonesia Photo Tour - Day 3

By Michelle Alten

These trips sure aren’t called “Chill With the Wolfies”! Today we woke up at 3:30 to get to the famed Borobudur Temple before sunrise. We climbed the many steps to the highest point, using flashlights to guide our way. Alas, the sun didn’t give us the show we had hoped for, but this monolithic Buddhist temple, the largest in the world, still fascinated us with its 72 bell-shaped stupas, 432 Buddha sculptures, and relief carvings telling the story of Buddha’s life.

ND4_0736 — View of the head of a Buddha inside a stupa at Borobudur Temple

ND4_0837 — Relief carving of a ship at Borobudur Temple

ND4_0921 — Portrait of an old woman harvesting rice near Borobudur

A short drive from Borobudur, we stopped at the Mendut Temple and discovered monks in saffron robes and nuns garbed in white preparing for Waisak, the full moon festival. Banners of scarlet, ochre, and indigo fluttered in the breeze as the faithful cheerfully prepared for the holiday. They graciously chatted with us, explaining that they came from many different towns in Indonesia and Thailand for this important Buddhist holiday.Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning).

ND4_0959 — Waisak preparations at Mendut Temple

ND4_0985 — Monk at the Waisak preparations at Mendut Temple

By now we should have been passing out on the bus, but instead we had a delightful visit to a village where we zipped along in horse-drawn carriages to homes where villagers showed us how they prepared tempeh and other food products and taught us how to play the gamelan. What a delightful insight into village life.