Tag Archives: Solo

The hotel offers half-day guided bicycle tours into the countryside around Solo and we are ready at 9am to meet our guide,  Patrick (presumably not his Javanese name, but who knows?).  After sorting  us out with a couple of rather ancient mountain bikes with somewhat ropey brakes, we set off with some trepidation through the city traffic.  Solo is a city of 500,000 inhabitants, but despite its size it doesn’t take long before we are crossing the river Solo on a small rope-operated ferry boat and leaving the city traffic behind.  Each village specialises particular cottage industry and we visit several small ‘factories’  making tofu, rice crackers, tempe (a fermented soya cake),  arak (rice spirit), roof tiles, gamelan gongs, batik as well as a bakery.    ‘Factory’ probably gives something of a misleading impression of these tiny businesses housed in run-down barns with dirt floors and an absence of western standards of hygiene.  Our namby-pamby sensibilities are shocked to see the conditions in which food destined for the city’s restaurant is produced.   Tofu is left out on grubby-looking bamboo shelves for the geckos to nibble;  the soya bean and yeast mix for tempe is packed into banana leaf packets on the floor of a village house;  the rice for crackers is cooked, pounded, pressed into racks and sliced into slivers,  all by  hand in a dark and dingy shed fit only for housing animals before being dried in the sun and then fried and bagged ready for sale.   The bakery is an equally dark and dingy affair with huge piles of dough lying on tables and buns being packed into cellophane bags by young girls sitting on the tiled floor;  and the distillery making arak for medical use under license from the government is incredibly crude and homespun.   The tile factory is involves one man laboriously producing individual tiles using a manual press to shape the clay.  The most striking thing about all of these little industries apart from the dubious surroundings in which they operate, is the total absence of any mechanisation.  Everything is done manually by villagers on incredibly low wages, some as little as 75p per day. 

It is the gamelan factory which is the highlight of the tour.  There are only six gamelan factories in
Indonesia apparently, and today they are in the midst of producing the gongs that form part of a gamelan orchestra.  Two furnaces which are little more than fire pits in pitch black rooms send showers of orange sparks flying into the air as the metal is lowered in the pit and turned until it is red hot and malleable enough to be beaten into shape.  The beaters then take up their 10 kilo hammers and pound the metal one after the other in a repetitive and rhythmic round.  The gongs are destined for Bali and the complete set will take three months to produce and cost £18,000.

Back in the Solo alleyways we stop in the quarter which is home to Solo’s famed batik industry.  Batik is produced in small workshops and we visit one which is behind a little showroom close to our losmen.  The whole process – the tracing of the patterns onto cloth, the application of the wax and the dyeing all takes place in a small room at the back.  There are five or six people working here;  three women are painstakingly applying wax to create intricate sarong designs whilst two men are creating batik cap which is a method of block printing wax onto cloth to produce a cheaper  batik product.  Alongside are tubs of wood from which the natural dyes are produced and several vats of dye.  Each piece of batik can be dyed up to 22 times to build up the layers of colour in the final design.

By the time we return to the hotel around 1pm we are tired and hungry;  cycling in the heat even on the flat is quite exhausting.  So we head for the rather characterful restaurant over the road and, despite what we have seen this morning, indulge in a delicious meal of tofu, tempe and rice crackers – and live to tell the tale!

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The hotel Istana Griya is a charming little place and full of character.    Colourful décor and seating under the shade of a porch-cum-veranda at the front gives it a homely feel and the immaculately restored Harley Davidson parked in the reception is clearly someone’s pride and joy.   The staff are very friendly and volunteer information and a map of the city.  We set out to do a bit of shopping, post some cards and generally orientate ourselves.  No-one could claim that Solo is a particularly beautiful city, but off the main roads are numerous peaceful little alleyways – free of cars and traffic noise –  which are home to the kampungs (neighbourhoods) where the inhabitants of Solo live.   The city is renowned as a cultural centre for the performing arts – although it doesn’t stand comparison with Ubud in terms of the number and diversity of performances on offer – and for traditional crafts especially batik.

It also has two palaces, the Kraton Surakarta and Puri Mangkunegaran.  The former is closed on Fridays, so we visit Puri Mangkunegaran which is the smaller of the two.  We are escorted round by our own personal guide and two school children who are observing as part of their tourism studies.  There are two royal families in Solo and this palace is home to the second house.  It is a Unesco World Heritage site and is well maintained as a result.  At the centre of the palace compound is large open-sided pavilion with a lovely painted ceiling and behind it a small, but interesting museum and the state rooms including a reception room – where we pose for photographs sitting in the royal chairs – and the dining room, where it is possible to dine with the royal family for a mere US$30 a head! 

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