VidMama //

Indonesia is vast and endlessly fascinating, and offers travelers a delicious feast in adventure and excitement.  The urban centers are particularly cosmopolitan, with one of the largest cities in the world in Jakarta, and there are many different cultures and traditions that make up the fabric of the everyday here.  Even in Bali, which is often depicted as a center of a kind of old world island paradise, there are many cultures that make up the local population, with complex and intertwining histories that always come into play.  Things are never simple here, and never what they seem, but in many cases, turn out to be even more splendid than one could ever imagine.

This is true for the restaurants particularly, where the local cuisine is usually a combination of traditions, offering a splendid blend of spices that can’t be matched by any other culinary tradition around.  For luxury hotels, Indonesia offers sumptuous lodgings for travelers, with a welcome that is spectacularly warm, and small and enormously charming details that don’t make themselves known at first glance.  Indonesia is a fantastic place to get in touch with the rhythm of the world.  I Wayan Sadra is an excellent composer to listen to as you start to prepare for your journey here.

It’s also fantastic music to listen to while you’re here, and it’s an amazing thing to see him perform live, if you get the opportunity.  Born in Denpasar, Bali, in 1953, Sadra is one of the most interesting and innovative composers working in Indonesia today.  He is on the faculty of music at the University in Central Java, having moved from Bali to Jakarta to study traditional music, painting, and composition.  His works are a magnificent blend of traditional types of music from here, as well as some European techniques, to make a sound that is entirely contemporary, and  very local, and always on the verge of something new, found through mining the rhythms on the bones of the past.