It turns out that this summer we have ended up with a 6-week period of “in-between” time, between when we left our home in Tarakan and when we arrive at our home back in Idaho. Idaho, of course, being our long-time “home base” that we repeatedly return to, even though each time we leave we are gone long enough that when we return, it is a new Idaho. Both we and the people around us have changed. However… it is still Nampa. A town in the desert surrounded by industrialized farming watered by irrigation canals a few rivers.
But anyway, this entry finds us at the beginning of a four-week period of travel through Indonesia. On June 1, we departed Tarakan. The numbing series of goodbyes, the growing sense of loss, then the sinking feeling of final departure as the plane lifted off the tarmac and soared away from our Tarakan home and friends. That lurching feeling in my stomach… it had been building all along, and the final momentary pressure of at liftoff is like mark of finality of our goodbye to our Tarakan home. “Extricated” from it, a coworker called it. And it begins to feel that way. But there’s still the grief of that loss.
And now, in Jakarta, like C.S. Lewis’s wood between the worlds… except, nothing like the quiet, serene wood between the worlds that Digory and (?) explore in the Magician’s Nephew. A clogged, congested, bustling, churning froth of waves between the worlds, more like, like the sudsy foaming gurgling rock coast of Oregon. Jakarta is anything but quiet, calm, and serene.
(Except, notably, where we are staying in this guesthouse. It is quiet and removed from the street. I can barely hear the distant sonorous call to prayer around 4:30am. It is like the distant dream of Tarakan, where the calls to prayer were so invasive and blaring each day. But here, just 2 miles from the largest mosque in southeast Asia, the gentle moan and hum of the prayer is soothing… not jarring. Like a pleasant memory).
So we are in Jakarta, having spent three days here in between New Zealand, where we visited family and “tramped” around for two weeks, and a four-week tour across three Indonesian islands with the Hewes family.
The plan: travel across the populous, crowded island of Java (where Jakarta is) to Yogyakarta, a more “touristed” town on the island with lots of incredible geology and cultural history. The ancient Buddhist temple of Borobudor and Hindu temple Prambanan are near Yogyakarta, as well as numerous volcanoes. Next, hop over to the island of Lombok, crossing the Wallace Line onto another slightly more remote island tourist destination. Explore the beaches and islands there, until hopping over to Bali for about a week.
It is a little odd to begin an effort to record stories from our journey now, as we are touristing the most frequently visited places in the country. There are no shortage of blogs and guidebooks about Yogyakarta and Bali and their surroundings. However, even as I begin cataloging this visit I realize two things… 1) that the comparative lens I now have after eight months in Tarakan, a location soaked in Southeast Asia Pacific history and the weekly grind, a place where we were one of less than a dozen Western families on the island (six of them our coworkers), a place where I spotted an “outsider” or tourist probably 2 or three times my entire time there… a place 85% Muslim and much more culturally “Kalimantan”/Bornean than Jakarta/Javanese, and certainly a world away from the Balinese Hindu majority. Anyway, I ambled away from my point, which is that I feel a little better equipped to write about Indonesia and its vast breadth of cultural and geographical diversity having lived for a time in Kalimantan. Secondly, these locations we plan to visit are what most outsiders (tourists) who have any knowledge of Indonesia will be more familiar with. Specifically: Bali. Anyone who has visited Indonesia usually goes to Bali. (And, if you are in the expat missionary community, you more likely visited or lived a time in Papua. But unfortunately, our travels will not include Papua or its inclusion [exclusion!] from the larger expanse of Indonesian territory).
Oh, and thirdly, we plan to do this at a family-friendly pace, in a way that is hopefully memorable and enjoyable for a five-year old and infant. We are really excited to do this alongside the Hewes and with their kids, so this is kind of a pilot effort for all of us for kid-friendly travel! Hopefully, this will also pace us at a more reasonable travel rhythm than we sometimes (well, me specifically) push ourselves at.