First stop Surakarta Hadiningrat Palace. A tired Palace with a more tired looking museum filled with a random assortment of war equipment, royal content and no explanation to most of the stuff. At IDR10k I think we got our moneys worth.
Our next stop after a short drive was Mangkunegaran Palace with a IDR20k per person entry fee with a secret mandatory guide fee of IDR60k. As sceptical as I was with the requirements of a mandatory guide, at the end of the tour, I was very impressed, and given the value of the artefacts, I actually saw the guide as being critical to the experience. Though I suspect the first palace couldn't have been made much better...
A problem of mine over the last few days has been wearing jeans (I only brought one pair, I'd much prefer to wear shorts) without a belt. It was a bigger deal than I thought it would be, but finally we actually went to the local Solo Paragon Mall and I bought a belt. We also had lunch in local chinese restaurant Wang Dynasty. The belt fell apart after a month...
After lunch, by the time our guide and driver turned up, we took a 10min drive to a local store called Pandono. Mum told our guide she wanted to see some Batik and the manufacturing process. We got a little independent store with one Indonesian speaking woman practising her craft. It was actually the one time I kind of wished that our guide had taken us to one of those tourist trap local trades craft places, like the mandatory carpenter or stonemasons centres that guide usually dump you at for 'experience' reasons, rather than 'comission' reasons.
I told our guide what we wanted and shortly afterwards we arrived at the House of Danar Hadi. IDR35k per person with a guide included. Our tour lasted an hour and while textiles and their history really don't interest me, our guide was good enough to keep our attention. Mum was in her element, asking all sorts of questions. No photos allowed, except for, towards the end we were shown to the manufacturing room where two local women were applying the wax masks to their creations.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped by a mobile phone service provider called Smartfren. We'd been asking our guide for over a week that we wanted a SIM card for data and he never delivered, even after several reminders, so we bit the bullet and bought a 60gb data card for 30days (even though we only needed 3 days worth for IDR60k. Bargain.
