This series is taken from my time with people from the Baduy, Mentawai, and Sasak tribes on the islands of Java, Siberut, and Lombok in Indonesia. I lived with them for a week each and managed to gain a small insight into their ways of life. Even though we couldn’t converse through English, my aim was to relate, observe and befriend these lovely people who isolate themselves within the surrounding (natural) environment, and live peacefully away from the noise and distraction of today’s first world technological reliance.

The draw of Indonesia is its diversity of people and sheer scale of geographic and ethnic variety. It is such a huge country, made up of thousands of islands, volcanoes, multiple religions, tribes, and cultures, draw-dropping beauty from end to end, and thousands of years of fractured history. My fascination with it deepens further every time I visit and I have wanted to explore deeper and deeper into this intriguing place ever since I came to live in Southeast Asia. And this trip was the most immersed I have been within the Indonesian culture yet; I had an opportunity to travel as far away from reality as possible, and in a year where reality seemed to have faded almost completely, it felt appropriate in many senses to be as far away from other people as possible.

My sheer love of art, photography, and travel, as well as just embracing new experiences has led me over many years to seek the more weird and wonderful places of the world, however difficult they might be to get to. In addition, I want to show people the diversity and differences of the world, culturally, ecologically, and geographically — after all, we are all in this together, so why not go and see as much of what’s out there as possible? Photography is the perfect medium for me to do this, and I love the way that the equipment and my creative vision can either inspire or enlighten. I see people wrapped up in their own world every day, so why not put yourselves in someone else’s?

The main goal of the trip was to visit The Mentawai Tribe — people who I had read about for a while and seen documented before through photography. My second goal was to visit the island of Lombok where my wife and I have bought some land, but rather than visit there for other personal reasons I wanted to see the indigenous groups of the island, the Sasak people. But first, to get to the island of Siberut, one of the islands where various Mentawai families live, we had to figure out and plan a rigorous and arduous travel schedule. Eventually, the timings of the different sections of the journey meant that the Mentawai Tribe part would be sandwiched between the Baduy people in the highlands of Java and the Sasak people in Lombok.

And so I had a plan – three tribes over three weeks.