It originally started out as an easy way for me to keep in contact with friends and diary at the same time. It did not really work out like that and in retrospect I think it would have been easier to have used Facebook to keep in touch and have kept a private blog for myself thus avoiding boring anyone but myself. However once started I wanted to see it through until I reached this point when I am relieved to be rid of it.
Writing online in a country like this with fragile internet access means writing very quickly with no chance of revision and often no time to correct the spelling and grammar. There are other problems too, even though there is a good internet connection I can barely see the keyboard in this dark cybercafe where I write this.
Thus for quick, easy communication in short sentences Facebook would have been a far better choice.
There is also the fact that in an internet world there is very little left to say, if anyone wants to know about life here in Java there are tens of thousands of better places to visit than my blog.
So this blog is something of a mistaken concept, as indeed the whole year in Java was. But isn't all our futures based on mistaken concepts? It seems to me that actually I had very little, or even no choice at all, in what I did here, where I went and who I met, I was simply carried along by the currents of happenstance, washed up from time to time on tiny crowded islands where people spoke in strange tongues and whose lives were bounded by bizarre inexplicable rituals.
The indescribable beauty and sadness of chaos, the Abyss of Birds, can only be experinced, imagination cannot give the slow crawl over rough ground, the thorns and the heat of the sun or the sudden unexpected lightening flash.
Thanks to all of you who have read these pages and kept in touch through them. Your messages were often a delight to read and savour, first thing in the morning and late at night, especially those that told me what you had been doing and what was happening back in Britain.
Now I close, pay at the desk, and head off for one my last few ice-lemon teas in Malang.
Goodbye.