Friday Flickr – Borobudur

For this week’s Friday Flickr I’m going to Indonesia to showcase the country’s most visited tourist attraction.

Borobudur is a Buddhist temple on the island of Java. It was built in the ninth century and abandoned in the fourteenth. Five hundred years later it was ‘discovered’ by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.

Much renovation has taken place since then and a lot of the crumbling stupas and sculptures have been pieced back together.

The temple, which is now a World Heritage Site, is embossed with nearly 3,000 relief panels and has 504 statues of Buddha over nine levels. The whole thing is topped off with a dome surrounded by 72 Buddhas each of which is encased in a stupa.

It took the best part of a day to explore properly. Slowly winding up the levels, gazing at the carvings of cats, chariots and topless ladies and peering in through the stone mesh of the stupas at the Buddhas seated inside kept me mesmerised for hours.

The views from the top were pretty good too and provided a good excuse to sit and rest for a while before winding my way back down again.

Click on the image below to access the Flickr album.

Do you think Borobudur is somewhere you’d like to visit? Or have you already been? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Author: Anne

Join me in my journey to live a life less boring, one challenge at a time. Author of the forthcoming book 'Walking the Kungsleden: One Woman's Solo Wander Through the Swedish Arctic'. View all posts by Anne