Last weekend, I went to Borobudur Temple, which is a famous sightseeing attraction near Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. Now, when you book the tickets, they have lots of different options. When I was at Prambanan Temple the day before, you could buy a combo ticket, which gets you entry to Prambanan and Borobudur for a lower price than buying the entrance tickets individually. The cashier warned me, though, that I couldn’t climb Borobudur Temple with just the entrance ticket – it would grant me access to the temple grounds, but not climbing up it. That’s OK, I thought, because I didn’t want to be a stupid tourist climbing up the side of one of the most revered heritage buildings in the world. When everyone talked about climbing, this was the image I had in my head for some reason.

Of course, once I arrived at Borobudur – disaster! “Climbing” up the temple actually means “going up the stairs like a normal tour”! If my misunderstanding sounds stupid – yes, it is, but I don’t think it is that far removed from the sort of tourist trap activities that I’ve seen all over Indonesia, and Australia only stopped people climbing Uluru a couple of years ago, so I don’t think it was that unreasonable to compare the use of climbing in both scenarios. I had checked the climbing tickets anyway, and they were sold out (there is only a small quota allocated to each day). Fortunately, I met Lauren in a shared taxi to Borobudur, and we spent the morning looking at the (admittedly still beautiful) outside of the temple before exploring the local museum and grounds.

Lauren remarked to me a view that she has, having not really planned much of her trip – “the experience is the experience,” she remarked. By this she meant, “even though I was only able to get a ground entry ticket, that’s the experience I was able to have, and I can be happy with that experience, because I can’t change it”. Would it have been cool to go to the top? Absolutely. But we didn’t. Instead, we walked around. Perhaps because we didn’t go to the top, we found the rarely-visited museum and learned a lot there, and I got invited to practice Javanese gamelan in the museum courtyard – an experience that maybe I wouldn’t have had if I had gone to the top and been satisfied with that (or maybe I would have). The point is, there is no reason to judge experiences when that is all we are presented with in this life – the experience is the experience, and there’s a certain magic to it anyway.

I have been reflecting on this idea a lot, partially because my time in Yogyakarta was so raptured with a stomach bug which left me feeling quite miserable for most days. I was scared to go out and sightsee because I was worried I would end up somewhere without a toilet, or I wouldn’t make it to one in time, or any other number of very feasible and honestly probably disasters. I felt terrible being relegated to my room, but at the same time: the experience is the experience. Yes, I didn’t feel particularly great, and I missed out on seeing some cool things in Yogyakarta. That meant what I did see became more special, and it also meant I got really well acquainted with my local area’s food options. I wouldn’t say I particularly enjoyed it, but that was my experience of Yogyakarta, and that is what I must accept.