Yogyakarta

We arrived at Yogyakarta airport and it was the hottest place we've been to, but luckily we had a pick-up to our hostel. Within 10 minutes of driving it started to rain, and again this was the heaviest rain we'd seen, the streets were like rivers of water.
Yogyakarta is a lot bigger than we thought. We booked a hostel outside of the centre thinking we could have the best of both worlds with not too many tourists, but close enough to walk around. In the end there weren't many tourists anyway and we were too far to walk, but the hostel was really nice. Because of this we stayed in for dinner and ordered take-away Chinese food and it was nice not having to go out for dinner for a change.
The next morning we had an organised trip to Mount Merapi, an active volcano that last erupted only in November 2010. You'll probably pick up that we really didn't do our homework about Jogja, we didn't realise there was a volcano here, but had heard on the news about the eruption without knowing it was this one. We're really pleased we went up there, it's unbelievable to see the damage and the smoking volcano over the city looked amazing. We walked up as close as we could get, but we'd already been warned by our driver to listen out for the signal. Colin wanted to go a bit closer, but I managed to persuade him that a better photo is only worth it if you come back with it.
We also saw where the cooled down lava flows and the damage to some of the local houses. Some people were rebuilding as we were climbing up. We spotted something amazing and I've added the photo to the post... a single red poppy in the middle of all the destruction.
In the evening we got a taxi into the centre of town to see the Sultan's Palace where there was a fun fair and lots of food stalls. We went to a restaurant nearby and had really good Indonesian style chicken satay.
Next morning we went to the bus station and headed to Bali.