Starting with a few shots of the Blue Mansion, because have you ever seen more beautiful shades of blue? That is Pat there, our guide, who was informative, knowledgeable and so so funny (she’s inspired in me a new interest in feng shui).

We went to Kuala Lumpur and Penang for the long Easter weekend. It was interesting to be in Malaysia, which is so similar to Indonesia in many ways (culturally, linguistically, gastronomically) but feels a world away. For a start, the infrastructure there is a lot better, the traffic flows, and why isn’t there an army of motorbikes like in Indonesia and Viet Nam? On the way to Kuala Lumpur from the airport, except for a glimpse of a mosque and some palm trees, there was not much else to tell us where in the world we were.

We only stayed long enough in Kuala Lumpur to have dinner with friends and visit the Petronas Towers, the tallest twin towers in the world (very impressive). I noticed that the people in Kuala Lumpur were different. Everyone was polite but formal and reserved, in contrast to the ready Indonesian smile. An expat friend told me it was only true of Kuala Lumpur, and she was right because once we arrived in Penang, the people were friendly and warm. In fact the staff at our Penang hotel were so helpful I wanted to write a glowing review on TripAdvisor the very afternoon I arrived (the Yeng Keng Hotel - we wouldn’t stay anywhere else). And we met some lovely people, like the taxi driver who took us on a tour of the island and the guide at the Blue Mansion who was the kind of docent I can only dream of being.

Georgetown, the capital of Penang, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and well deserving of the title. Every lane, every street corner, every shop front, was ready for a close-up. One street had two mosques, a Hindu temple, a Confucian temple, a Buddhist temple and an Anglican church. There are signs in English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil. We visited temples, a British fort, a Chinese mansion, ate at a hawkers’ food center and had coffee at a glitzy mall, strolled past stately colonial buildings and humble shophouses. We walked as much as possible, just like we did in Ha Noi, and loved it all in spite of the heat of the midday sun.

I’m keeping our taxi driver’s telephone number just in case we go back (and I think we might).

My friend Andrea sent me this wonderful article about “thin” places, which the author describes as “locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever”.

I think I know what he means. These are places that you get to inhabit briefly. It’s like stepping through a portal into another world where your senses are heightened and the pace is different. When you leave, and you always have to leave, you feel a sense of loss, like you’ve been offered this rare glimpse, and now even that is taken away from you. Perhaps this is not just about places in space but also in time. I don’t know whether I can go back to my thin places and feel the way I did when I first saw them.

Two of these are in Viet Nam and involve a slow boat, the only sound that of the water lapping against the hull, and an immense sky. One was the Mekong Delta in South Viet Nam:

The other - it feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago - the Van Long Nature Reserve in the north.

Borobudur at sunrise is another one of my thin places.

In one of the treasure rooms in the old wing of the Museum Nasional, Jakarta, is a statue of ineffable beauty. It is carved out of andesite, the same volcanic rock that gave us Borobudur. It represents Prajnaparamita, the Mahayana Buddhist goddess of transcendental wisdom. This is my favorite item in the whole museum. I sometimes go to the treasure room and just stand there, gazing at her.

Because ancient Javanese rulers were often portrayed as deities, this statue is also believed to be a representation of Ken Dedes, wife of Ken Angrok, who was the founder of the Singhasari dynasty in 13th Century Java. She was married to someone else when Ken Angrok laid eyes on her for the first time, and he was awestruck by her beauty. It was believed that whoever married her would become king, so he murdered her husband and took her for his wife. He did become king but ended up being killed by his step-son, and every Singhasari monarch after him also died a violent death.

What a statue it is. Beautifully preserved, intricately carved, almost perfectly symmetrical except for her hands held in the turning-the-wheel-of-life position. She sits on a lotus throne in a meditative position. A lotus plant grows behind her, winds its way around her left arm, and blossoms over her shoulder where it serves as a shelf for the Book of Transcendental Wisdom. She’s dressed in a beautifully detailed batik skirt. The excess fabric is gathered into bows around her hips and draped over her seat. She wears a tiara ornamented with strands of pearls, and has rings on her fingers and toes, bracelets around her wrists, arms, and ankles. That is the queen in her. The goddess in her is supremely indifferent to all these ornaments. She looks downward, or rather inward, turning that wheel of life, following some inner thought. It is the contrast between her dress and her detachment that makes her irresistible.

Prajnaparamita is often referred to as the Mona Lisa of the East. The statue was found in Java in 1819 and shortly afterwards, was shipped to the Rijksmuseum in Leyden and there she stayed until 1978. In 1991, she traveled to New York for an exhibition on Indonesian sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum. It seems New Yorkers loved her as much as I do, read here.

I want to give a shout out to KOTO. This organization operates a vocational training program for street kids and other disadvantaged youths in Viet Nam, teaching them hospitality skills, life skills and English, and runs two not-for-profit restaurants where the trainees are employed.

KOTO (which stands for Know One, Teach One) was founded by Jimmy Pham. He was born in Viet Nam during the war, grew up in Australia, and returned to work as a travel industry consultant and tour guide at the age of 26. He was moved by the plight of the homeless kids he came across in the big cities. For years, he fed the street kids he met and put them through English classes. In 1999, realizing that this was not enough and that the kids needed jobs, he started a sandwich shop near the train station in Ha Noi. As he recounts it, “I then borrowed money from family and friends and moved to a larger place, and employed about 20 kids. After two months, Bill Clinton came.” The former US president dropped by the little eaterie during his historic visit in 2000 and ordered lunch (“a grilled veggie sandwich and a mango smoothie”).

Today, KOTO has two restaurants, one in Ha Noi across the street from the Temple of Literature, and one in Ho Chi Minh City. The training program is internationally accredited, and the graduates go on to professional jobs in the hospitality industry. The InterContinental took the entire class of 2008. One young graduate who used to shine shoes was able to buy a house for his parents after working as a chef at 5-star hotels in Ha Noi.

You can read more about KOTO and Jimmy Pham here and at KOTO’s website.

We went to the restaurant on our last day, and sat out on the terrace, where we had a great view of the Temple of Literature. The restaurant was packed. The food was the best I’d tasted all week.

We took two day trips outside Ha Noi. The first one took us south to Hoa Lu, the ancient capital of the Dinh and Le kings. From Hoa Lu, we drove past miles and miles of limestone formations rising amid green rice paddies, and arrived at the wondrous Van Long Nature Reserve. Van Long is a pristine wetland amidst more limestone formations. It is home to several bird species, storks, cranes, geese, spoonbills. Some of them stood guard at the top of the cliffs, others circled above, and dozens hid in the reeds as our bamboo boat glided by. After the hustle and bustle of Ha Noi, it was literally a breath of fresh air.

The second trip was of course to Ha Long Bay, which I had been hearing about since I was a child. Going there is something of a pilgrimage for a Vietnamese. It is a World Heritage site and a perennial candidate for a modern Wonder of the World. Imagine more than 2000 limestone islands of various sizes and shapes, some towering, others mere islets, rising above the calm waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. If you’re lucky (we were not), you will hear songbirds and see monkeys scampering around.

The weather did not cooperate. No pictures of emerald green waters for us, except for one when the sun came out briefly, but the fog gave the place an ethereal beauty.

Our 30th wedding anniversary came and went last year without much of a celebration, so when the time came last month to renew my Indonesian visa (which involved leaving the country and getting it stamped on re-entry), we decided to go to Ha Noi and call it our anniversary trip.

It was my first time (our first time) there, yet Ha Noi seemed familiar, a textbook case of deja vu. Part of me knew this place, recognized the landmarks, was familiar with the street names. I couldn’t open my eyes and ears wide enough to absorb all the sights and sounds. Going to sleep felt like a waste of time.

I would have been happy to sit on a bench by Hoan Kiem Lake or at one of the many cafes and watch the world go by for a week, but actually, we did neither. What we did was a lot of walking - I think we must have walked more during that week than during an entire year in Indonesia. We peered into busy storefronts and down impossibly long alleyways, squeezed past the parked motorbikes that crowded the sidewalks, went round diners sitting on their little stools. So much of Vietnamese life happens right there by the side of the street.

We were more taken with Ha Noi than with Ho Chi Minh City (although HCMC’s special place in my heart is assured). After all, HCMC is only a few hundred years old, while Ha Noi celebrated its 1000th birthday in 2010. Several of its landmarks - the Temple of Literature, the One Pillar Pagoda, the Tran Quoc Pagoda, among many others - all date from the 11th Century. The Old Quarter where we stayed was a maze of narrow streets named after the guilds which settled there in the 13th Century (Silk Street, Cotton Street, Incense Street, 36 original streets in all).

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex was a fascinating look into more recent history. Besides the Mausoleum itself where you can pay your respects, the complex also consists of gardens and memorials. Traffic-free and sedate, it is in stark contrast with the rest of Ha Noi. I’m not sure why, but what I remember most from that visit was the one-place setting in Ho Chi Minh’s dining room. The loneliness of that image stayed with me a long time.

I’d forgotten how lovely Kingwood was. I was back there in January and was so busy getting things done that I neglected to look around at the trees and the sky. Then early one morning, I was driving past Foster’s Mill and saw the mist hovering over the pond. I had to stop and take it all in.

It took me a while to understand the fascination with Indonesian textiles, but I’m now hooked. It’s not their exquisite beauty that swayed me; or the dazzling technical skill involved in their production (one mind-blowing technique called double ikat* consists of creating a pattern by tie-dyeing both the vertical and horizontal threads of the cloth before weaving); or the fact that almost every single one of the 350 or so ethnic groups seems to have come up with its own distinctive everyday or ceremonial style; what won me over was the realization of the intimate link between the religious or spiritual beliefs of many of these cultures and the production of their textiles. That is why I was so taken with the Iban Dayak who live in Borneo on both sides of the Malaysian/Indonesian border.

Textiles are an integral part of Iban creation myths - in one story, the Creator God wraps a wooden statue in a sacred blanket and shouts at it three times to bring it to life. Iban weavers were said to get divine inspiration for the patterns of their sacred cloths in their dreams, and therefore, no-one knew the meaning of a specific pattern but the original weaver. In the old days, master weavers enjoyed as much prestige as successful headhunters - part of the process of producing a sacred cloth was known as women’s war and could only be performed by highly skilled weavers in elaborate ceremonies. The power of some sacred cloths was deemed so strong that it had to be reined in - that is why there’s a border on many of the sacred blankets, it is there to contain the power of the cloth.

I got the beautiful cloth below from this website.

There’s another reason why I was taken with the Dayak, and it has nothing to do with textiles.

The concept of a longhouse or large communal dwelling (whether shared by humans with other humans or with animals) is found in many cultures around the world. Native American tribes had them (the Iroquois were known as “People of the Longhouse”); Neolithic Europe and later, medieval Europe, had them (the Scandinavians had the langhus, the English had the longhouse, the Dutch had the Langhuis); the Tucano people of Colombia and Brazil have them; in Asia, longhouses are found in Taiwan, Korea, Viet Nam, Nepal, but the longest longhouse of them all is that of the Dayak.

A Dayak longhouse is home to an entire clan or village. It can be as long as 600 meters and house up to 30 families, several hundred people in total. It is one of the most spectacular traditional houses in Indonesia (although my heart still belongs to the Minangkabau house, see my earliest post), and like most traditional houses, it is more than a functional space but also a spiritual one, meant to protect residents from natural and supernatural dangers.

AND there’s a special area for dogs, which the Dayak people consider sacred!

More pictures of Dayak longhouses here.

* There are only three places in the world that do double ikat: Bali (Indonesia), Gujarat (India) and Okinawa (Japan).