The landscape is breathtaking—shimmering paddy fields, terraced hillsides, luminous green plains carved by rivers and studded with volcanoes. The people are, as Francis Drake wrote after sailing there in 1580, “sociable, full of vivacity and beyond description happy.” The culture is the product of centuries of cross-fertilization—Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic influences mixed with elements of animism, ancestor worship, and Javanese legend. The past lives on in the patterns in textiles, in the performing arts, in thousand-year-old temples. Before dawn, visitors clamber up the sides of the twelve-centuries-old Buddhist monument of Borobudur to watch Gunung Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, materialize out of the darkness, swathed in mists, the silence broken only by roosters and the whine of a motorcycle in the distance. At first glance, Javanese life seems to unspool in the open, as though on a vast and meticulously painted canvas: The dusty village streets shaded by mango and mlinjo trees where children skitter barefoot, the man bending in the flooded paddy field with his pants rolled, the women selling peanut fritters and gado-gado in the market.
