Salamat Datang!
Welcome dear reader.
The following pages are excerpted from a travel journal in the form of several e-mails that I sent to close friends and family during my stay in Central Java in August and September of 2004. Since returning I have received requests from others wishing to read these off-the-cuff observations. Rather than send out the compiled e-mails to everyone I opted instead to take this opportunity and build my first web site. The contents here are those writings accompanied by photos taken by me while there (if you'd like to see larger images of the photos that run alongside the text, just click on the thumbnails and the image will open in a new window) and a handful of sound samples. I have attempted to clean up most of my more egregious grammatical and spelling errors, but I have left most of what I wrote as it was. To this end I must add a disclaimer of sorts: the views expressed here are not only my own (obviously), but are of a -- shall we say -- knee-jerk fashion due to my compulsive need to write down everything I saw and experienced as fast as I could before it could evaporate like so many alcohol vapors from my feeble memory. The reader is hereby admonished that any experience he or she may feel of an educational nature while reading these passages should be called into question and dismissed immediately. The purpose here is merely to titillate the visitor's senses. Should the reader receive no such enjoyment here, I take full responsibility.
Mangga!
Byram Abbott
By the way, I really ought to give some thanks to all of the people who steered me straight with web design: Allison Holt, Elizabeth Kairys, Winnie Wintermeyer, Windy Chien, Maw & Paw Abbott, Jim Haynes. Thanks also to Andee and Allan at AQ for allowing me to run my audio streams off the store's server.