Bali: one of about 17,000 Indonesia Islands

I just returned from Indonesia tonight. It is a long journey. I left Bandung at 8am Aug. 1 Java time and got into San Francisco at 8pm the same day Pacific Time. Crossing so many time zones is really surreal--it defies logic somehow.

I spent the last week in Java, the island just to the west of Bali in the massive Indonesian archipelago. I recently saw a map of Indonesia superimposed over a map of North America and it was staggering--the 17,000 islands of Indonesia stretch from Oregon to Bermuda. Superimposed over Europe Indonesia stretches from London to Moscow, With population of 220 million it is the fourth most populous country in the world and is home to more Muslims than the nations of the Middle East combined. Indonesia's Islamic culture is more evident in Java than Bali, which remains the only majority Hindu culture in Southeast Asia.

From my personal experience, narrow American stereotypes about Islamic culture are all but irrelevant to Indonesia. Sure I saw a few women in full black veils, but I also saw many women without any head covering, some wearing short sleeves or shorts, and in between these two extremes, I saw many women wearing fashionable head scarves of every color, attractive long-sleeved tunics and jeans. People of different stripes seemed to mingle easily and I found folks to be quite friendly and laid back. In Borobudur I was woken by calls to prayer, but hardly heard them in Bandung. On the outskirts of Jakarta I noticed many small mosques, for the most part humble buildings, dotting the sky line. When I asked my friend Achmad about why there were so many, he explained that they were small and needed to have many to accommodate all the local residents. I asked if they represented different sects and he said no, all practiced the same version of Islam.

I never felt any hostility towards America during my travels in Indonesia. Several people expressed excitement about Obama's candidacy.

Java and Bali share lots of cultural elements--some foods, a national language, a love for music and dance and for performances of the great epics of the Mahabarata and Ramayana in traditional puppetry and theater forms as well as on modern TV adaptations. However, although they are close physical neighbors, the islands feel to the visitor to be quite different. In my next post I will share some of my experiences in Java, and then will return to the rich range of experiences I had and people I met in Bali. And will have had time to download some pictures and video by then as well.