Dieng Plateau
"Dieng in the fog feels like the earliest version of Java — before the empires, before the crowds, just the temples and the cold."
I took the wrong bus from Wonosobo and ended up on a local minibus that stopped every four hundred meters to collect passengers and produce until the vehicle was so full that bags of potatoes were balanced on laps and a chicken was somewhere in the back of things. It took two hours to cover forty kilometers. When I finally arrived in Dieng village at around ten in the morning, the fog was still thick enough that the Arjuna temple complex was invisible until I was standing in front of it. There is something to be said for arriving everywhere the hard way.
The Dieng Plateau sits at two thousand meters in Central Java’s Kedu highlands, and in the cold clear air of early morning it feels remote in a way that Java, one of the most populated places on earth, very rarely manages to feel. The eight-century Dieng temples are the oldest surviving Hindu monuments in Java — pre-dating both Borobudur and Prambanan — and were built by early Shaivite kingdoms before the great Sailendra and Sanjaya empires that would later produce the grander monuments of the plains below. These are small, almost modest temples by comparison: squat stone structures named for Pandava warriors from the Mahabharata, set in a swampy plain between the volcanoes that give the plateau its source of geothermal heat.
The plateau has more active geology per square kilometer than almost anywhere in Java. The Sikidang crater — fifteen minutes on foot from the temples — is a roiling, churning mud field of bubbling sulfurous vents and boiling pools set in an open plain that smells like the inside of a chemistry cabinet. The Telaga Warna colored lake changes color with the season and the light, shifting between green and yellow and blue depending on the sulfur and mineral concentrations, and it sits in a forested crater that requires a forty-minute walk through bamboo forest that drips in the early morning cold. I went at seven and had the crater to myself for an hour before the school groups arrived.
The food on the plateau is specific to its altitude: carica papaya in syrup — a small mountain fruit that does not grow below a certain elevation — is sold in glass jars at every roadside stall and eaten cold, the syrup sweet and slightly floral. The mie ongklok is a Wonosobo noodle dish eaten throughout this region: yellow wheat noodles served in a thick starchy broth with shredded cabbage, leek, and a side of satay, and it is the right food for this cold and the wrong food for almost every other climate. I ate it for breakfast and lunch on my two days up here and regretted nothing.
The Dieng plateau has a small but well-organized network of guesthouses in the main village, most family-run, all providing the extra blankets that the temperature difference from lowland Java demands. The potato fields that cover every available slope — Dieng supplies a significant fraction of Java’s potato production — are harvested in dramatic fashion, whole hillsides of green turning to bare brown in a few weeks. The annual Dieng Culture Festival, held in August, brings wayang performances, kuda lumping trance dances, and the ritual dreadlock-cutting ceremony for the plateau’s famous gimbal children — children born with naturally matted hair whom the local Dieng community believes have special protective status.
When to go: April through October for dry season clarity — the plateau can receive cloud and rain at any time of year given the elevation, but the dry months give the best chance of clear dawn views from Sikunir hill. Nights on the plateau drop to five or six degrees Celsius even in dry season; bring warm layers regardless of when you go. The August culture festival requires booking accommodation weeks in advance.