A well written account of over a year's travel in the many islands that make up the nation. Both funny and profound, well worth the effort to read if interested in everything and anything Indonesian. ( )

We're going to celebrate the holidays this year with friends and family in Bali. Before reading this book, when I pictured Bali, I imagined beautiful beaches, terraced rice fields, maybe Hawaii before it became such a tourist destination. What I didn't realize is that Bali is just one island in the very large Indonesian archipelago and Indonesia is a very complicated country. Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world and it consists of more than 17,000 islands. And rather than being a single homogenous society, its population is very diverse with different languages, religions, and customs on the many different islands.

Elizabeth Pisani, a public health consultant who has lived many years in Indonesia, decided to take a year off and travel around the various islands. She didn't have a planned itinerary and traveled by ferry, motorcycle, fishing boat and bikes to learn about life on many of the major islands. She didn't stay in hotels but found accommodations in people's homes. She attended weddings, funerals, and pig roasts. What amazed me the most about this book is the sheer guts it took to take on this journey. The stories she tells are fascinating with snippets of Indonesian history and beautiful descriptions of some of the various cultures in this complicated country. I definitely recommend this book to anyone traveling to Indonesia. ( )

This is an exemplary travellogue. The balance between history, observation, interview, and authorial impression is perfect. One couldn't ask for a better guide to an unfamiliar country. Splendid!! ( )

This is a loving tribute to a magnificent and complicated country, part travelogue, part history. ( )

If you’re looking for a primer before going to Indonesia on business, Elizabeth Pisani’s Indonesia Etc is not the quick read you need. It’s 380 pages not counting the acknowledgements, suggestions for further reading and the index. But for anyone who wants to know more about one of the most dynamic countries on the planet and home to 1 in 30 of the global population, this book is much more than a travel memoir.
For a start, Pisani is not a FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) journalist capitalising on a jaunt with a superficial analysis tucked into a travel memoir. She has lived and worked in Indonesia on and off, longer than anywhere else she has ever lived, and she speaks Indonesian. She was there from 1988 to 1991; from 2001 to 2005, and from 2011 until she finished this book which was published in 2014. And in a journey of just over a year on a shoestring budget, she visited 20 provinces, all five of the biggest islands (Sumatra, Sulawesi, the Indonesian parts of New Guinea and Borneo and of course the Java that’s outside Jakarta) and dozens of smaller islands that most of us have never heard of.
At first glance, the book might seem like an assemblage of titbits, meandering through a collage of ideas and scraps of history, written by a journalist skilled at picking out the interesting bits. But Pisani has actually been very clever about the structure of the book. She uses each sojourn in places off the tourist trail for some kind of exotica to hold the reader’s interest, but she extracts from her interactions with the locals some kind of principle. For example in her chapter about West Timor, she describes how the Habibi government decentralised government and why, and the problems that have ensued in the transitional period. In the chapter about Sumba, it’s the clash between modernity and tradition. For this reason, Indonesia Etc far superior to most of the travel writing you come across, and it’s more in depth than the usual thematic format.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/28/indonesia-etc-exploring-the-improbable-natio... ( )