Possibly because I was primed for an underwhelming experience for my first 'early hominid' fossil site WHS, I actually quite enjoyed my daytrip from Yogyakarta to Sangiran. The museum exhibits were pretty decent, but without a background in geology or the other scientific fields involved, a lot of the summations of facts and figures and dates didn't really stick. While English versions of the exhibits were clearly abridged summaries of the Indonesian language versions, they were generally present and basically useful.

My visit became interesting, beyond simply the halls of the main museum, when I realised that I hadn't properly clarified what the specific boundaries of the WHS were before setting off in the morning. As I didn't have access to phone internet that day, I had a minor panic that the museum was only in a buffer zone and that I needed to find an actual dig site. Luckily, I thought, a man approached me upon leaving the museum to take me to 'the site'. I saw nearby a large billboard advertising the recent opening of four new museums in the Sangiran area, so I assumed he meant one of these, as surely they were constructed over the dig sites. 

So I got on his bike, and he took me down a random dirt path until we got off, and he directed me to start walking into a field. Soon, he pointed at some dirt and stated that he, personally, found homo erectus there in the early 1990s. I cannot verify this claim at all, and honestly I am a bit sceptical, but who knows.

When we got back, I was still worried that I hadn't actually 'ticked off' the site yet with this random field, so I got him to take me to two of the newly opened museums. This was not worth the time and money. One of them, Manyarejo, was a small room with similar artefacts to the main museum but without any English explanation, and the other, Bukuran, was a large complex clearly designed for schoolchildren. All the exhibits are colourful, cartoonish, and in Indonesian. Multiple school groups thought it was hilarious that a random foreigner was there, and in May I was among the first foreigner (and only non-research student) in the mandatory guest sign-in book for the year. Without Indonesian-language skills, therefore, there is no reason to go to any of the smaller museums in the Sangiran area.