Indonesia: this country is beautiful; sumptuous; stunning. It's one of those places where you wonder how so much raw physical beauty got concentrated in the one spot on earth.

If you haven't been here, you should come.

If you have, then you know you need to return.

On the 8 hour train journey from Jakarta to Yogya, the windows are full of the most incredible vistas. Pure greeness, in the form of smooth-as-glass paddies, stretches out forever. It's broken only by the darker green of elegantly crooked palm trees that shade into deeper jungle-y vegetation.

The green of the paddies is what astonishes the eye. It makes you feel you've never truly seen the colour green before. So bright it's almost yellow, and yet it's impossibly rich and deep and vibrant as well. All this captured in a single blade of long-leaved grass, and then repeated endlessly into infinity. It feels like I've stared at the sun too long; as though my retinas are shot through with the intensity of it all.

Like mainlining chlorophyll.

Late in the journey, at around 4 o'clock, the sky darkens and fills with clouds that are heavy like the eyelids of an overtired baby. Full of tropical rain and drama and portent. They won't burst today, as it happens, they just hang in the sky like gunmetal-grey demon wishes.

One of the first things I ever learned about Norway from my relatives there was that trolls were thought to inhabit the landscape. Stories and legends abound describing the mischievous and conniving ways of the troll. But when you see the landscape in Norway, it becomes deeply apparent how one could see impish malevolence lurking behind every rocky outcrop. The setting is so preposterously wild and beautiful - full of slate and sea and tumbling hills - that something has to account for it being so.

So too, in Java, it is easy to feel the weight of folkloric tales in the air. There's a magic in the pouting, coy beauty of the landscape that suggests something stranger and more fanciful than the everyday can account for.