It’s convenient that Borobudur and Prambanan, the two principal UNESCO world heritage sites in Indonesia, are located close together, Borobudur a few miles to the north west of Yogyakarta and Prambanan out in the eastern suburbs just beyond the airport. They were probably built at around the same time in the 8th and 9th centuries CE, but they couldn’t be more different in character.

Borobudur is an artificial mound, a set of ascending platforms and stairways leading up to a single bell-shaped stupa. There are terraces of smaller stupas at each level of the climb. In many cases they are broken, revealing inside stone-carved Buddhas gazing out over the plain to the mountains. It’s not known why is was abandoned, but because of its proximity to Mount Merapi, it was buried under ash for centuries before being rediscovered by Stamford Raffles, briefly governor during a period of British rule, in 1815. It is now set in well maintained parkland and we were fortunate in our guide Anit, one of the large number of guides accredited at the site.

At Prambanan the main temples are dedicated to the Hindu trinity, Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma and their vehicles, Garuda the eagle, Nandi the bull and Hamsa the swan, but there are 237 in the complex as a whole, many in ruins. From a distance they recall the towers of Angkor, the illusion of height achieved through the same technique. Where Borobudur is horizontal and still and massive and serene the temples at Prambanan are vertical, slender, spiky, flamboyant, and restless. It’s difficult to imagine two more different sensibilities and surprising to find them so close together.

Prambanan is also set in a landscaped park, and the inevitable vendors are corralled into an area at the side. Well-informed guides are available. While at the site we encountered a number of parties of schoolchildren who were eager to practice their English on some native speakers. They must have been prepared by their teachers because they had their questions written down. Where are you from? What do you like about Indonesia? How old are you? They diligently wrote down our answers in their notebooks or taped them on their mobiles.

Little is known about this time. The Hindu Sanjaya dynasty that constructed Prambanan was close neighbour to the Buddhist Sailendra dynasty that built Borobudur. The Sailendra dynasty fell within the sphere of influence of Srivijaya, a coastal power based in Palembang in Sumatra that dominated the Indonesian archipelago and the Malay peninsula between the 7th and 13th centuries. It seems there is no folk memory of Srivijaya; what we know has been reconstructed by historians. Sometime in the 13th century, the influence of Srivijaya waned in central Java, pushed back by the expansion of the Majapahit empire which dominated the region between the end of the 13th and the early 16th century.

Yogyakarta was subsequently the location of the Islamic Mataram sultanate, itself the last independent sultanate before the Dutch occupation of the island. In 1755 in a treaty with the Dutch implementing colonial divide and rule tactics, the Mataram sultanate was split into the Yogyakarta and Surakarta sultanates. After the second world war, it was briefly the headquarters of the nationalists in the fight for independence which was achieved in 1950.

Most of the main sites in the  town date from immediately after the treaty. We visited Fort Vredeburg, built in 1756 for the Dutch governor, which houses an extensive museum dedicated to dioramas dramatising the Japanese occupation and the often brutal fight for independence from the Dutch after the Second World War. The explanations make no concessions to English speakers, but once you realise that Berlanda is the Netherlands it’s fairly easy to follow. The Kraton, the sultan’s palace, built in 1757, is extensive and surprising. We couldn’t enter the private quarters but the ceremonial spaces are open pavilions used for performances of music and dancing. We watched performances of gamelan music and Javanese dancing: very slow and precise movements of hands and feet. The current sultan is the 10th in his dynasty, and poorly served with wives and children, having only one wife and five daughters. His predecessors sometimes had many wives and hundreds of children.

Close by is the Taman Sari or water garden, a complex of swimming pools built in 1758 for the sultan, his wives and his daughters. There are hollow spaces under the beds in the tower which separates the sultan’s pool from the rest where fires could be lit to heat fragrances to perfume the rooms. It is all surprisingly sybaritic for this region.

The town itself is sprawling and low rise and has something of the feel of an Indian city, probably a consequence of the density of the population; Java is the most densely populated island in the world. As the suburbs thin out, rice paddies fill the spaces. The airport at Adisucipto is new and smart but not particularly comfortable. I would put it some way behind Siam Reap among the small airports of south-east Asia. Also, immigration is slow, though from some complaints we heard while we waited, getting into Bali is even slower. We stayed at the colonial period Pheonix Hotel (*) which  has been newly refurbished. They organised the car and driver for us. The hotel’s 1961 Mercedes sedan would have been our first choice for style but an air-conditioned SUV turned out to be more practical transport..

As a pendant to this trip, sometime after our return we saw a performance of readings in translation and dance interpretations of the Serat Centhini (*), a long poem written in Javanese in neighbouring Surakarta and dating from the early 19th century.  The poem collects together both the tales and histories and also the theoretical and practical knowledge of the culture. The readings were by writer Elisabeth Inandiak and the dance interpretations by Didik Nini Thowok.