BOROBUDUR, Indonesia (AFP) – Hollywood star Richard Gere meditated Monday at Indonesia's Borobudur temple before touring the ninth-century Buddhist monument with his wife and son.
"He meditated for 20 minutes this morning at the top platform and made a 45-minute tour to admire the details of the temple's reliefs," temple manager Purnomo Siswo Prasetyo told AFP.
He said the star of "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Pretty Woman" was "astonished" with the grandeur of the so-called temple mountain, which lies between two volcanoes about 40 kilometres (25 miles) northwest of Yogyakarta.
One of the peaks, Merapi, killed more than 320 people last year in its biggest eruptions in over a century.
The temple was abandoned with the spread of Islam on Java island in the 14th century, but was "rediscovered" in 1814 by English trader Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.
Restored with the help of UNESCO in the 1970s, it is now Indonesia's most-visited tourist attraction, drawing about 3.8 million people last year, according to Prasetyo.
Gere, a 61-year-old convert to Buddhism, arrived in Indonesia on Sunday on what he called a "spiritual journey".
He met President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the state palace in Jakarta and told local media he was thinking of making a film about the history of the temple.
On Tuesday he is expected to go to the Indonesian resort island of Bali for a holiday with his family.
The American visited the Jogye temple in central Seoul, South Korea, last week.
