Early Travel Books

My first books grew out of travel and the places where I was living and working in Indonesia.

East Kalimantan

East Kalimantan was published by Times Editions in 1988 as part of the Times Travel Library. The text was written with Kal Muller, whose photographs were also central to the book.

At the time, East Kalimantan was still a place many overseas readers knew chiefly through extractive industries and a handful of exotic images of Borneo. The book tried to provide a more useful portrait of the province as a lived place with its own landscapes, communities and histories.

Yogyakarta

Yogyakarta followed in 1989, also in the Times Travel Library, with photographs by Michel Bikker and others.

It was an early English-language guide devoted specifically to Yogyakarta and its surroundings, including the city, the court traditions and the great temple landscapes of Central Java.

These books began a long involvement with writing about Indonesia for readers who often arrived with very little context — and with the problem that has occupied much of my later work as well: how to explain a place without reducing it to a collection of picturesque shorthand.