West Java, Indonesia

A field worker in a bright red shirt, balancing a shoulder pole hoisting handwoven baskets filled with wet, green grass, appears on the horizon. I breathe deeply of the cool breeze carrying the incense of a distant wood fire.

 

He moves slowly, almost imperceptibly across the field and then down the rice terraced hillside, becoming larger in my eyes as he approaches. I had stood, in the glow of the imminent twilight, fixed in the same spot for twenty minutes, waiting for something, anything, to punctuate the endlessly green landscape. It was only when my hope seemed unreasonable, and I was about to walk away, that he appeared. As if on cue, he stopped, looked up seriously at first, and then gave me a shy smile, seemingly uncertain of why his work was worthy of my photographic fuss.

 

In the span of a single day, we had visited tea plantations, lunched in the West Java highlands, stared into the steaming sulfur spewing belly of an active volcano, sampled passion fruit and tiny honey pineapples at a roadside stand and even tasted Kopi Luwak coffee, made from coffee beans that were eaten whole and shot out the other end of a weasel cat…only to be collected, cleaned, roasted and then brewed into the world’s most expensive coffee.

 

But it was this unexpected yet undeniably hoped for encounter with a man who found me as curious as I had found him that will remain in my memory long after the suitcases are put away.

 

The beauty of this world will not come to your door. We must venture out and dirty the soles of our shoes with the soils of distant nations. We must struggle with speaking foreign languages and order food from menus we cannot read. We must be at ease with becoming the stranger in a strange land, and welcome the awkward stares of children who cannot contain their curiosity at the sight of you.

 

There will be moments so beautiful they will bring you to tears. And there will be other moments when the gastrointestinal jihad waged by a mystery meat purchased from a street vendor, will bring you to your knees.

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