Strong Women - Sukarara weaving village

After enough time on the road, travel stops being about places and starts becoming about perception. Not what you see, but how it rewires what you thought you knew.

I’ve felt that in many places and I felt it last in Sukarara, a weaving village in Lombok, where our driver pulled in on our way to Tetebatu - rice country.

Lombok is a predominantly Muslim island and before coming here I carried a loose, untested assumption. That women would be less visible. More hidden. That life would feel, in some way, constrained.

It didn’t take long for that to fall apart.

Our guide - Rhianna

We were shown around by our host, who introduced herself as Rhianna. Around her were Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, J.Lo, Ariana Grande. Not names given to them, but names they had chosen themselves, worn lightly, almost as a joke shared with the world passing through.

We pass outside a small house with a structure full of looms, sitting alongside a small platform where one of the village women (Ariana Grande) sat tirelessly working away, methodically building patterns with cotton and silk.

Nearby, Taylor Swift sits upright at the loom for hours each day, even in the heat of noon. Bamboo dowels clack softly as she works, adjusting the pattern thread by thread. It’s precise, repetitive work.

Intricate hand weaving in action by Ariana Grande

Even here, in the middle of it, she turns to my wife and asks if she knows Adele, after finding out we are from England. When she says no, Taylor Swift laughs and starts singing anyway - Someone Like You. Just the chorus. The two of them sing it together, half serious, half joking, while a pair of chickens wander past across the dry, dusty ground.

The loom doesn’t stop and the rhythm holds.

At one point, one of the older women (no stage name provided) tells me her niece wants to go to university. It’s too expensive. Schooling, she explains, doesn’t always stretch as far as ambition here. She hopes that might change.

She says it simply. Not as a complaint. Just as a fact.

It stays with me. Not as a judgement of the place, but as a contrast. A reminder of the things I’ve taken for granted. Of how differently life can branch depending on where you begin.

What struck me most wasn’t that this overturned everything I thought about Islam or Indonesia. It didn’t. That would be too neat. Too easy.

Sukarara weaving village, Lombok, Indonesia

But it did challenge the version I’d been carrying.

Because what I saw wasn’t oppression, or at least not in the way I had imagined it. What I saw were women with agency, organising, joking, hosting, holding the space. Visible in it. Comfortable in it.

Strong, not in a dramatic sense, but in a steady, everyday way.

It didn’t rewrite the whole story. But it changed the tone of it.

And that, more than anything, feels like the real gift of travel.

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