One Last Push

My legs tighten. One last push. Over another bump in the gravel and the climb finally gives way, opening out into a plateau. A stretch of green rice fields ahead, the sun catching on the flooded plains. Zebra doves make their mechanical whirring sound overhead as a worker in a conical hat walks past.

It feels like I’m in a film. And yet, somehow it is exactly as you’d expect it to feel in a place like this. Early morning mist lifting above the tree line. Mount Rinjani sitting behind it all, fixed against a big blue sky.

Mount Rinjani looming large, Tetebatu.

We cycle through small villages where children run out to greet us. Smiling and waving with the kind of enthusiasm you don’t question at that age.

Back into the fields and another scene opens up. A narrow dirt path raised between paddies, water on either side. Palm trees line the horizon. A small thatched house sits just ahead. A woman walks along the path, and it stops feeling like a film set, to something lived.

The tempo is slow, meandering, but deliberate. Getting lost feels like the point. There’s always the sense that something might appear just around the next bend.

Tetebatu rice fields, Lombok, Indonesia.

Eventually, we reach Hideaway Coffee - a name that, for once, doesn’t overpromise. It’s tucked away along a narrow pathway off the main road. Past more rice fields, through the edge of someone’s yard, a hen and her chicks scattering as we pass.

We leave the bikes at the top of a steep hill. Where a sign announces we are at the Hideaway, yet it’s nowhere in sight (appropriately). Narrow dirt steps cut through thick greenery. A short walk, a bamboo bridge, and then it opens out into a clearing with terraced levels where the eclectically furnished café sits, blending into its natural habitat. It feels like a natural end point.

We sit with coffee and pick up a book from a nearby shelf about why humans evolved to have a brain.

I look up from the page for a bit and take it all in.

Hideaway cafe - living up to its name.

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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 - Rihanna

We were shown around by our host, who introduced herself as Rihanna. 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 personally, 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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