Instagram story viewer> @uwern> Tagged

uwern

@uwern

34.4K

followers

1942

following

🇬🇧🇲🇾🏳️‍🌈 Luxury Travel | Inclusive Tourism
Experientialist®-in-Chief @outtheremag
Co-Founder @stockholmlgbt
Londoner | Sarawakian | Penangnite

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

🇮🇩 Prambanan, I think you’ve just blown my mind. It was so special exploring this extraordinary Hindu temple complex by day, then experiencing the epic Ramayana Ballet beneath the stars.

3

6

🙏🏽 When the Gods walked Java. Rising from the volcanic plains of Java, these 9th-century Hindu temples are a vision of stone and divinity – soaring spires dedicated to Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, their walls alive with tales from the Ramayana: love, demons, devotion and epic battles between good and evil. And here’s the mind-bender: Prambanan was built some 300 years before Angkor Wat. Three centuries before Cambodia’s most iconic temple was even conceived, Java was already reaching for the heavens.

Standing here, beneath these impossibly intricate towers, the scale of it all feels almost incomprehensible. Not simply the ambition of the people who built them, but the worlds they imagined – and the stories they believed were worthy of eternity.

Thank you to our amazing guide, Rumy @coelogyness.__ from @jogjahorizon who brought this all to life. I’m glad she did the talking because Prambanan has left me utterly, gloriously speechless.

3

17

⚔️ A sultan’s playground… with a little mystery in the mix. Taman Sari, Yogyakarta’s 18th-century royal water palace, was built for the sultanate’s pleasure and retreat – a labyrinth of bathing pools, hidden passages and quiet courtyards where power met poetry. Less part of a palace compound to impress the world than a private world unto itself. Yogyakarta has a way of keeping its secrets in plain sight.

3

11

👑 Keep calm and Kraton. The Kraton, Yogyakarta’s royal palace, is less about gilded grandeur and more about a living Javanese culture. Home to the Sultan and the heart of a sultanate that still matters today (yes, it might sound like a paradox but the Indonesian “Republic” still has Kings - and ones the still wield some political clout), it feels entirely of Yogya: quietly regal, deeply rooted and refreshingly unshowy.

3

7

🤯 Too stupa-d for words. Arupadhatu - the topmost level of Borobudur – an indescribable, electric sense of wonder, where stone seems to transcend the physical and the mind reaches for something beyond it all.

3

10

🛕 Life goal achieved. I’ve wanted to visit Borobudur since learning about this ancient civilisation just across the water from us in Borneo as a child. Today, after all these years, I finally stood before one of the world’s great architectural wonders – and it was every bit as extraordinary as I’d imagined.

Built in Central Java between the 8th and 9th centuries, this colossal Buddhist monument - the largest in the world - is a universe carved in stone: a journey through thousands of relief panels and hundreds of Buddha figures, towards the ultimate Buddhist ideal of enlightenment.

No cranes. No modern machinery. Just human ingenuity, extraordinary craftsmanship and a vision ambitious enough to turn an entire cosmology into architecture. Magic.

3

13

🏄‍♂️ Just had to. If there’s a paddle board nearby, I’m probably on it. And at Bãi San Hô, with that impossibly beautiful stretch of coast all around me, resistance was futile.

3

2

🌾 Somehow, I have wandered into a dream. No agenda, no deadline. Just a helluva lot of sunshine, a little romance and absolutely no intention of finding my way back.

3

3

🏖️ Beach, please. Bãi San Hô certainly lives up to its name. A long, private sweep of golden sand curling around the Bay of Corals, where the water is clear, time slows and the whole place has that deliciously escapist feeling of being somewhere the rest of the world hasn’t quite found yet. I love the beach-hut vibes, bare feet, salt on the skin and long mornings that somehow stretch all the way into sunset. It’s exactly the sort of beach I came to Vietnam hoping to find.

3

1

🕶️ Pool me closer. A villa overlooking the Bay of Corals, with a private plunge pool that has me completely smitten. At Zannier Bãi San Hô, it’s all turquoise waters, wild greenery, endless sky and this perfect little pool quietly suggesting I cancel all plans and stay right here. Some views you admire. This one you want to dive straight into.

3

9

🪸 This is Zannier Bãi San Hô. 98 hectares of coast, jungle and rice fields, tucked into a wonderfully quiet corner of Vietnam and one seriously exquisite stretch of coastline. @zannierbaisanho the kind of place where the road disappears into green, the sea keeps turning up when you least expect it and time seems to have misplaced its watch. Bamboo-clad villas are scattered through the landscape, fishermen drift past offshore and birdsong fills the afternoon. Then the light starts to change and everything seems to settle into the same slow rhythm – the palms, the water, the sky. Even the architecture feels like it belongs here, though thoroughly and beautifully considered and curated.

There’s a certain magic to Bãi San Hô. It doesn’t feel like you’ve arrived at a resort so much as stumbled into someone’s rather beautiful dream. And, frankly, I’m quite happy to stay in it.

Thank you @go4ital for persuading me to make the journey here. I’m thoroughly blown away.

I know you’ve left this magical place to focus on what’s next, but you’ve left something rather special behind. Not just a beautiful resort, but a sense of place that stays with you. That, I think, is quite a legacy.

3

11

💘 Love to love. @anantaraquynhon is playing the romance stakes with a very strong hand. Private beach dinners, rose-petal baths, couple’s massages, outdoor showers, sunrises that know exactly what they’re doing and that particular kind of barefoot luxury that makes you want to cancel whatever you were supposed to be doing next.

3

3