I read this book while on holiday in Indonesia, as I am too much of a good girl to enjoy a vacation without attempting to learn something about the country I am visiting. What it made me feel is that even after three weeks in Indonesia I have barely been to Indonesia at all.
This is largely because it is enormous, the 4thmost populous country on earth (Jakarta tweets more than any other city!), 5000km from end to end, and made up of thousands of islands, each of which have a very different way of living. I enjoyed learning lots of stuff about Indonesia, and will even more enjoy telling people this stuff later at dinner parties so I look well informed.
However what I found most interesting was not the social or economic history but the author’s travel itself. She tries to say with ordinary Indonesians everywhere. Indonesia is not a very wealth country, so most of those people are quite poor. She spends a good amount of time telling you about individuals and their personal lives, and I can’t think when else I have read a book that genuinely tries to cross the class gap. At first I was rather suspicious of this effort, as it could very easily turn into that creepy ‘poverty tourism’ of some township tours, but she is herself aware of the danger of becoming “one of those slightly earnest foreigners who has gone native.” At some point she has a melt down, and after that I liked her much better:
I closed my door and suddenly seven months of staying in damp, windowless flea-pits, or being woken at four by the mosque, five by the chickens and six by the school kids, seven months of defending my childlessness, being asked why I didn’t have any friends. . . seven months in a world without loo paper, alcohol or English conversation, seven months of wearing the same six pairs of knickers, . . . of getting over foot rot only to come out in a mystery rash, . . . seven months of trying to fit into a world that was, quite simply, not my world. .
She bursts into tears and then pulls herself together (as she needed to go and see the crocodile shaman), but after this point I realized that she was trying to do something in this book beyond an ordinary travelogue. Or perhaps that’s just it, she is trying to do a travelogue of the ordinary. I’ve never read anything quite like it.