Take travel, for instance: there are land-worlds, and water worlds. Indonesia for me is an inland-y sort of place -- enormous islands with mountaineous and volcanic terrain, covered with forests and rice and fires and sand seas. Journeying is always overland, driving or riding or horse riding or trekking. and almost always inland, difficult for me -- all that ground to traverse, to surmount, so much land and earth beneath the foot as you move ever inward. "Into the interiors", and shall there be an inland sea? But once you go north of Malaysia, the whole of Indochina -- Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, even Thailand -- why that's a different world, these are water-based civilisations that grew up on the lakes and rivers of the great Mekong Delta. Once the great trading ports of the 16th and 17th century, they're still water worlds in everyway. Whole villages of houses on stilts on the banks of the Tonle Sap, floating markets where people paddle boats and coracles and bargain across the stern and hawk their wares in watery commerce, or row longboats into the nipa palm and mangrove forests harvesting for home life. And that world is green and blue and wet and gorgeous and bustling and tranquil and all wonderful and magical and different.

Note to self, also: re: delusions of grandeur: that the ferries to Batam and Bintan have names like Sea Raider, Golden Raider, and Wave Master (this last sounding rather like gym equipment rather than one with dominion over the sea)