T
HE JOURNEY BEGINS
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in theimagination, Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudicesand the self-division they induced for less constraining identitiesas citizens of the world.(De Botton, 2000: 146)While I was not travelling by the same means as Montaigne, nevertheless,this idea resonated with me. What follows are auto-ethnographicnarratives based on my travels and experiences through East Java (andBali), during three weeks April-
May 2011 and my efforts to ‘connect thedots’ regarding my family history. I was only one of four people on The
Indo Discovery Tour; of the four people, only two of us - the tour guideand me - had ancestral connections to Indonesia; the other two haddifferent reasons for taking the trip.
I was keen to keep in mind Bruner’s
observations about the effects of tourism on places that ethnographers arekeen to study; I was aware that I was both a tourist and an ethnographer;that this role was a blended one with no clear boundaries.The tour guide and the other tourist were departing from the Chicagowhere they lived; we were leaving from Adelaide. We were all meetingup in Yogyakarta at The Phoenix Hotel. Our eldest son and his partnerwere also travelling through Asia and planned to meet us in eitherYogyakarta or Ubud. (When we left Adelaide, they were about to fly into Jakarta and make their way eastwards by bus and train.) FromYogyakarta, the tour group would travel (mostly) eastwards, via touristtaxis, (arranged through a company based in Surabaya), and internalflights via
Wing Air 
. We would travel to three main cities (and otherplaces) in Java then fly to Bali.
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1
 No journal entries about Bali are included here for reasons of relevance.

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The first part of my trip was a pre-arranged one with a specific touritinery; the second part was unstructured. I was also meeting one of myIndonesian relatives for the first time in Yogyakarta on the day I arrivedin Indonesia. As I had some prior knowledge of Indonesian history,culture and family background based on my research so far, I was keen to juxtapose experiential learning against academic foundations. I also
wanted to test out my theory that I would ‘feel’ very dif
ferently inIndonesia
perhaps even more ‘at home’
 than in Australia. I had hunchesabout my own potential responses to Indonesia but I was open to thepossibility of being completely wrong.My Australian husband, who speaks no languages other than English,was my closest companion. Our New Zealand-born, ancestrally Dutch,residentially American tour leader and his American-Czech-Jewish femalefriend were the other participants on the organised first leg of the tour.They only spoke English; albeit the Chicago variety.My husband and I travelled together on the last leg of the tour and werealso joined at times, by our son and his partner, (who were doing anextended trip through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India and theHimalayas). Our tour guides were locals: Sundanese, Javanese, Indo-Indonesians and Balinese people with good English skills; our drivers didnot necessarily speak much English.I deliberately chose not to take a computer to Indonesia and to write byhand
–
 either while travelling, or on reflection, after the event. (I did,however write several blogs for the
Indo Discovery Travel
 website duringthe trip on a borrowed computer.) The journal entries were transcribedonto computer verbatim immediately after the trip in May 2011, afterinitially being written in long-hand into diaries and notebooks. A plethoraof photographs also served as memory triggers.

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On the day that my husband and I left Australia, DFAT (Department ofForeign Affairs and Trade) issued a blanket security warning against alltravel to Indonesia, especially to Java and Bali, (because Indonesiansecurity forces had foiled an Easter bomb plot in Jakarta). We were at theairport when we heard the warning. In commemoration of Anzac Day, alone bugler was playing The Last Post on the TV screen in theinternational departure lounge as we left Adelaide