Arriving from Bandung, I headed straight to Wonderloft Hostel, where I had reserved a bunk bed for one night before flying back home to Manila. I originally planned on catching up on sleep, but when I learned from the receptionist that the hostel was just a few steps away from the historic Kota Tua Jakarta, I ditched rest in favor of the chance to explore more.

After my temple run concluded in Yogyakarta, I went back to Jakarta for a couple of days before my Cebu Pacific flight back to Manila. At the hostel, I met two other Filipinas who became my accidental tourist buddies. Since we were all going home the same night, we decided to spend our last day just roaming the city aboard a tuk-tuk, stopping for some sights and shopping along the way. After walking out of the National Monument park (Merdeka Square), we were approached by a thin, middle-aged man wearing blue slacks and a tucked-in polo, introducing himself as an employee of the local tourism office.

Remember the two ladies who made a cameo in my flight-to-Jakarta narrative? Well, they stayed in the capital of Indonesia while I took a train to Yogyakarta. I thought the story ended there, but to my wonderful surprise, I bumped into them again a few days later. After spending four days in Yogyakarta, I went back to Jakarta for the tail-end of my trip and ended up staying at the same hostel as those two lovelies. They answered to the names Tania Gonzales and Carmel So. I was downstairs at the hostel lounge working on my laptop when I saw them come down; I almost fell out of my seat and just froze. I heard them talking about eating in a Korean restaurant before they walked out the door.

I could not wait to start writing about my trip to Yogyakarta, but a lack of time and too much procrastination in between disallowed me from diving straight in. However, I was able to put together, in a hurried state, a music video of the random footage I had taken while walking around that interesting city and visiting the temple complexes of both Borobudur and Prambanan. As a preview of my future blog posts about that journey of mine, here it was with The Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" serving as the soundtrack.

I had always worried about passing immigration since an experience in Hong Kong a couple of years prior, making it my biggest concern for my trip to Indonesia. Since I had been working as a freelancer for a few months at that point, I no longer had a company ID to present. As I arrived at NAIA Terminal Three, it was all I could think about. While lining up to pay the expensive travel tax, I was distracted by a Spanish-looking mestiza girl in front of me. I quickly assumed she was heading to either Bali or Phuket. That was why I felt a bit surprised when I spotted her again with her friend lining up at the check-in counter for Jakarta.