A general introduction to the book-online
 ‘With a Hat shading the Light’

To go on line with a book is running against the medium. Something of the past put into the present. That is why I wrote a summary in english of my book in dutch, entitled 'With a Hat shading the Light', written in  the year 2000 (translation of the dutch title: "Met de Hoed tegen het Licht"). But I did more.
Five years later I went back to South East Asia and this time I took a lot of pictures with a digital camera as every modern hiker does. So, I now present on line a summary of the book, some parts of the text and a small selection of my pictures. A step forward to modernity.

Apart from this I selected haikus from my book and translated them. This is what you don’t do. It is like calling a duck a penguin duck as Alfred Wallace mentioned they did on Bali. To ease myself I combined haikus with pictures – another don’t. A haiku is a world in itself. It is just made of words, no other stuff. Basta.

Why I did this all? It is for the thrill of traveling and writing. Hopefully you’ll feel the thrill of reading.
 

 "With a Hat shading the Light"

At the end of the year 1999 I traveled in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. I had been several times in Indonesia as a civil servant of the Netherlands government. My field of concern in those days was technological cooperation between the two countries. The large archipelago of islands and its so varied landscapes of desas and ricefields, of volcanoes and mountains, of its historical monuments had cast a spell on me. Once upon a day I promised myself to come back and see Indonesia more in private, to have a look behind the screens of formality and diplomatic politeness. This time I would go for the people and their daily life, their traditions and ceremonies, their works of art, the mysterious ambiance and the beauty of the landscapes so intensely laboured by the people. The Japanese haiku poet Basho joined me as a poetic companion and the Portugese author Pessoa helped me to better understand the invisible things of life. Two strangers in Indonesia, experts however in observing and poetry.

I traveled in central and eastern Java, the lowlands and the high plateaus, the crowded cities and the lonely mountains. Apart from Bogor and Bandung with its colonial and Art Deco reminiscencies, hotels and shop signs, Yogyajakarta, the kraton of the Sultan and the nearby Buddhist Borobudur and Hinduistic Prambanan monument I went to the small town of Blitar and its mausoleum of the first Indonesian President, Sukarno, to Malang and its colonial air and impressive boulevards, to Jember and the surrounding plantations of coffee and rubber. The island of Java with her mystery sites and scenery without touristic signs is a world of contrasts and conflicts, of thriving activity and poverty. Java is an island of beauty and the ever singing Muëzzin, of overcrowded cities and desas along never ending roads. Java steals the soul, so I never can leave her behind.

On Bali I stayed at the artistic village of Ubud in the cooler hills, visited the Pura Besakih, the Gunung Kawi (mountain) and the caves of Goa Gajah. On Lombok it was the Sasak village of Senaru and a Hindu ceremony that brought me closer to the original life of the island. In Sulawesi I traveled by public bus for miles and miles from Makassar in the south to the northern tip, the city of Menado and stayed for some time in the central region, the Tana Toraja and its marvelous villages from where I went to see the balconies of the dead, the wooden well dressed-up puppets ( tau tau) high up in the steep cliff. In Malaysia I traveled by luxury bus and came along Malakka with still an old Dutch imprint on the architecture and its colourful Chinatown and Buddhist and Taoist little temples. Thailand I didn’t know, so I was impressed by the forest of Buddha temples and its realm of silence in the big, noisy cities of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. I made day trips to the old capital of Thailand, the complex of temple ruins in Ayuthaya and to Kanchanaburi, the railway over the River Kwae and the well kept war cemetery. To escape the crowds and the loudness I went on jungle trekking for some days and returned after three days to go home, to the little island of Curacao in the Caribbean. This is the topographic side of the medal.

In this booklet however I try to do more than just telling this story of my travel. With the help of Basho I make notes and use the haiku technique to bring together my observations and the wanderings of the mind. So, I write about little things such as a morning stroll in the sawas (ricefields), the pinpointing of my mosquito net in a hostel, the minibus as a high pressure cooker of passengers, the royal divings of a kingfisher, a horror story ( guna guna) in the night, a canoe and  hidden crocodiles, the daily loneliness of a Dutch speaking shopkeeper, gold fishes in a lake, the burning of fragrance sticks in a Chinese temple, the buy of a Buddha image on a market, a stony turtle and a bat, the smoking of opium by an old woman. All stories, histories, happenings and reflections on the little things of daily life.