Prambanan Temple

And then you actually stand there and realise that photographs don't really explain the scale of it.

I also visited Prambanan, which was another highlight.

The temples there reminded me quite a lot of Angkor Wat, although obviously they are very different places with their own histories.

So at that point, I was having a very good trip, and then my stomach decided it had other plans.

And that probably explains why I felt so terrible for so long.

Looking back, the trip itself was really good.

Brunei, Jakarta, Jogjakarta, Bulbudur, Prambanan, and then all the completely unexpected things that happened afterwards.

I certainly didn't plan any of that, but I suppose that's one of the things about travelling.

Like those Greek classics, they're knotted with great valour, human frailty and moral ambiguity, and like the Iliad and the Odyssey, are foundation stones for much Western culture.

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are an integral part of cultures across South and Southeast Asia, from Laotian poetry and Javanese shadow puppets, the great temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Prambanan in Java, Even the name of Thai kings and the Indonesian national airline Garuda reflect the importance of the Ramayana to those cultures.

Both those epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, feature three of Vishnu's avatars, which you'll see in the exhibition.

The... eighth avatar, Krishna, and the sixth avatar, Parashurama.

Alfira, I mean, you know, did you grow up with stories of the Indonesian Kakawin Ramayana, the way we would have grown up with retellings of the Ramayana or the Prahlak Pralam?

Actually, I was born in Australia and my mother is Achenese, so that's Northern Sumatra.

And when we would go back to Indonesia, we would go to places like Borobudur and Prambanan to learn about it, but I was very small.

So I didn't really understand it until I went to the Institute of the Arts in Java, in Yogyakarta and then in Surakarta.