it was time for the main event: Borobudur, a few hours by van from Yogyakarta. In rice paddies, corn fields, and coconut plantations, near a ramshackle village strung along a bumpy road, it is one of the least touristy UNESCO World Heritage Sites I’ve visited. I didn’t see a single hotel until we entered the temple gate and parked at a cluster of low buildings set around beds of orange cannas. This turned out to be the Manohara guest house, originally built for researchers and architectural historians, who completed a major renovation of the temple in 1983 meant to keep it standing for another 1,000 years. Now open to travelers, the guest house provides a welcome drink of Coca-Cola with tamarind, modest rooms, good food in an open-air dining room, a video introduction to Borobudur, and easy access to the temple, especially for people who want to see it at sunrise.
We arrived in the late afternoon, under heavy black clouds threatening a downpour. Nevertheless, I headed straight for the temple, hidden by trees until the very threshold. Then Borobudur made its appearance, a great layer cake of mottled grey stone supporting a mountain of needle-pinnacled stupas.
The arched staircases from level to level are treacherously steep, overlooked by gaping-mouthed gargoyle water spouts, nymphs (or apsaras), dancing arms akimbo, and niches enshrining Buddha figures, each with hands in different symbolic poses (or mudras). His life story unfolds on the middle level, starting at the left side of the east entrance, with stone panels of great vividness, recalling the medieval Bayeux tapestry in France. I ran my hand over a carving of Queen Maya in a carriage headed for Lumbini Park, where she gave birth to the Buddha.
Just then a bolt of thunder thwacked, à la Macbeth, and guards began herding visitors to a gate far from the one I’d entered. When I told one of them that I needed to get back to the Manohara, he offered to take me there on his motor scooter, the ride of a lifetime circumnavigating the temple.
That night, I watched the Borobudur video; had a satay dinner at the restaurant, accompanied by gamelan music, and claimed a flashlight at the front desk for my sunrise visit to Borobudur. I slept soundly, without the interruptions I normally experience on the eve of a great event.
Dawn was still an hour away when I joined a small group of guests in the lobby and followed a guide across the lawn to the temple. He made no comment; there was nothing to say—except, perhaps, “hati hati.”
This time, I climbed to the top levels, which are round, not rectangular, and bare except for their forest of stupas, perforated to allow peeks at Buddha statues inside.
Experts say that Borobudur’s more abstract upper precincts, especially its empty central stupa, reflect nirvana, a state of being beyond human consciousness. But how could they know? How could anyone know, even sitting atop the temple watching the sunrise pool in a pink halo around soon-to-erupt Mt. Merapi, leaving the mystery of the cosmos secure.
If there is a keyhole anywhere, I’d wager it’s at Borobudur.
There is no one way to understand Los Angeles, no one way to take it all in, no one iconic view. Congested highways link its disparate parts without providing a sense of what lies in between. On their shoulders, a fellow in an overheated Mercedes summons a tow truck on his iPhone and a homeless woman brandishes a sign that says, Stranded, flat broke, need help.
But for those who seek a road to clarification, there is Mulholland Highway, ribboning across the east-west–tending mountain range that separates the L.A. basin from the San Fernando Valley. Rising to about 3,000 feet, the Santa Monicas are not high, but they are strategically placed, beginning near Dodger Stadium and ending at the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.
Driving its sinuous 55-mile course is the enterprise of one very busy day. Parks and scenic overlooks line the way, and the city unrolls on either side of you like an animated map. Close at hand on the eastern end are the “ego homes” of the rich and famous, clawing their way up the steep, chaparral-covered flanks of a swatch of the Santa Monicas called the Hollywood Hills. Farther west, Mulholland tightrope-walks across Sepulveda Pass and the San Diego Freeway, peters out to dirt for nine miles above Encino, then emerges paved again, taking travelers on a wild, wheel-gripping ride through the mostly undeveloped heart of the mountains.
As a scenic parkway, Mulholland abjures commercial development. However, sustenance for the body and fuel tank is available by turning off on any of the arteries that intersect it and lead down to the nonstop blandishments of Ventura Boulevard in the Valley or those siren thoroughfares to the south, Sunset and Hollywood.
An excursion along Mulholland is best started early, before the Hollywood Freeway clogs. The Mulholland exit lies about 10 miles northwest of downtown L.A., in the narrows of Cahuenga Pass, near where Cecil B. De Mille scouted locations for the 1913 picture, The Squaw Man, riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter to fend off rattlesnakes. The exit siphons drivers left off the highway; should you err so soon on the trip and turn right, you’ll lose Mulholland altogether, and end up in a maze of residential lanes surrounding the Hollywood Reservoir—a fine place for a morning walk or jog, with the letters of that serendipitous monument, the Hollywood sign, poking out between Italian cypresses.
Left onto Mulholland is the correct direction to go. This way, you’ll ride the road west, chasing the sun, starting with its rise at the Hollywood Bowl Overlook, about a mile beyond the highway on the shoulder of a somewhat stubby peak, tauntingly called Mt. Olympus. It is hard to imagine a better view of the L.A. basin, unless it’s from a picture window lining the living room of one of the cantilevered homes in the neighborhood. Downtown is a smog-bound mushroom struggling up from the ceaseless grid of streets; Hollywood rolls toward your feet like a weird wave; and in a cup-like declivity to your left once known as Daisy Dell, the Bowl nestles. Freeloaders come to this overlook to listen to the L.A. Philharmonic on summer nights. In the amphitheater below, boxes go for $3,000 to $5,000 a season, and are often hotly contested when their married occupants divorce.
Here on Mt. Olympus, you’re in a residential section of Hollywood that came of age in the 50s and 60s. Turn down any lane and you’ll find a marvelous, ridiculous cacophony of architectural styles that range from ersatz Georgian to Mayan revival. The architect Richard Neutra blamed the movies for the extravagant proliferation of building styles, and he is not alone in speculating that L.A. home builders see their lots as sets. But as Noel Coward said, “There is always something so delightfully real about what is phony here. And something so phony about what it real.”
Indeed, the more you house-hunt in the fabulously well-to-do neighborhoods that line Mulholland Drive, the more the ironies explode, particularly when you contemplate Hollywood’s humble beginnings as the inspiration of Horace and Daeida Wilcox, from Topeka, Kansas. In 1887, the Wilcoxes purchased 160 acres that would become central Hollywood, envisioning a Christian subdivision, free from alcohol and vice. The holly bushes Daeida planted did not thrive, and the community took unanticipated turns.
A mile beyond the Hollywood Bowl Overlook on the left is the northern entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, with paths that lead down into the thick of Hollywood, passing a Mission Revival-style mansion built by Gurdon Wattles in 1905 and a rag-tag community garden in
