Transporting Indonesia's 'Spirit and Soul' to Half Moon Bay

Every year, for almost a decade now, Coastside resident Sheila Edwards-May experiences a little slice of heaven she describes as “fringed by palms” and where “the volcanoes drop their misty veils.”

Where is this place Edwards-May is referring to? Indonesia. In fact, she recently returned from her annual visit just a few weeks ago.

The owner of , a shop on Main Street, Edwards-May always bought batiks and other handmade items from Bali for years from wandering wholesalers in the U.S., despite thinking that she could buy from artisans in Indonesia instead.

In 2002, she did just that, and has made 13 trips to Indonesia since, buying goods and wares with as much "spirit and soul" as possible, she said.

Edwards-May says fair trade is "not even an issue because I am at the source and dealing with individuals who will agree we are both fair."

Her buying trips to Indonesia first started after attending her friend's wedding in Kathmandu in March of 2002.  Edwards-May said the wedding "already had me on the other side of the world, so what was a little detour from Thailand on the way back?”

“During my career as a British Airways flight attendant in the 1970s, I had never been to Indonesia, so this was uncharted territory and therefore exciting and new,” she said.

On any given trip, Edwards-May visits artisans from Sanur in the southeast to Ubud and surrounding villages of Mas, Pennestanan, Tagalalang, Celuk, Batubulan and Tampacciring.

During her trip in January, for example, she bought clothing, stone statuaries, wood statuaries, metal deities, sarongs, beads and some intricate sterling jewelry featuring cosmic geometry -- all to be sold at Tokenz.

“They are consolidated and crated by my cargo company and will show up here in a couple of months, except for the jewelry, which I carried,” she said.

Edwards-May stays at different places throughout the island country: “It lends the opportunity for a little experimentation on the fringes of previous experience,” she said. “Therein lie many gems. I’ve come to the conclusion that at all levels of the scale, from backpacker to executive, there are no bad dwellings.”

She visits with friends, some of them artisans, made during her very first trip: “Many relationships were formed during that short time that still exist and have only gotten better with time. Children have been born, and they are growing up,” said Edwards-May. 

Business is always mixed with pleasure for Edwards-May on these excursions, and she usually wraps up the trip on the West side “so that the lasting memory will be a grilled fish feed on a beach in front of a spectacular sunset,” she said.

On five of her trips she flew over to neighboring Lombok Island for three days “having nothing whatsoever to do with work,” she said. “I stay at Puri Mas in Senggigi and drink in the view across the water to Bali's most sacred of volcanoes, Agung. My partner has traveled with me on two of the last three trips, and we are so enchanted with this spot on Lombok that we are thinking of having our wedding there.”

She’s also brought four groups to the islands in the past, including a Tokenz employee, and has made many of the trips there solo as well.

“Thanks to wonderful Maxime Stadlen, who took the helm at Tokenz, I was able to bring Jessica Ranger with me in 2008, so she could touch, hear, see, smell, and know for herself," said Edwards-May.

Ranger spent 12 days with Edwards-May "to experience Bali and the buying process for the store," said Ranger. "By meeting the artisans, I was able to learn more about their background and about the items we were buying so I could share that with the customers back at the store."

Most of the items Ranger picked out with Edwards-May on that trip "have been sold already, but I still remember the artisans I met, and the store continues to carry their products," Ranger said.

"The whole experience was eye opening and wonderful," Ranger said. "Bali has such delicious fruit, friendly people, and beautiful lush green rice fields that I would go again," she said.

"The people we deal with are real, and Jessica is part of the loop," said Edwards-May, who adds that what she also loves about making the trip is “the immersion into a spiritually charged society in the tropics as a backdrop to working,” she said. “The jet-lag upon return is nasty and takes at least a week to shake it off,” but the whole experience, which she describes as “warm, spiritual and visual,” is worth it, she said.

She’s drawn back every year by “the really great pleasure of being out there in the world and meeting and working with a vast variety of people who conduct business with such honesty and warmth and dignity,” she said. “It just all feels good.”