Suiseki Stone

This was another one of my Explorer group tours. This is a family owned and operated business employing about 100 people—seratus orang! Our tour host was the son of the owners. The trip from town out to the site is about 1.5 hours by car  the trip back took 2 hours due to traffic). I opted to hitch a ride with an Explorer acquaintance instead of going in our car. As the "tour leader," Kim had already been to the site several times, and her driver was already familiar with the route. Pak Oky dropped me at Kim's apartment complex and picked me back up there almost 7 hours later.

As happens frequently on these outings, the schedule changed and I was much later getting back to town than I anticipated. This meant we went directly to B's office to pick him up. So, it was a very long day for me in two different cars.

Suiseki itself is an odd place. Part stone carvings, part wood carvings, even part plant nursery.  These are really weird trees. They are not from around here but were imported.

The largest space seems dedicated to storage of tons of rough stone. And I do mean TONS!

I suppose they have an expert or two who can ID the large stone pieces but we were told the stones were green stone or red stone or 5-color stone. The exception would be petrified wood stone. That one gets a real name. There is also golden crystal. This resembles slightly yellow quarts-like crystals found inside geodes I've seen from the American West. They are different, however, because they are very fine crystals. This "stone" looks like it came out of a cave but our host said none of the material came from caves. Hmmm.

Some pieces even resemble stone coral.There is also rough blue topaz. There was some material that looked like melted coke bottle glass. We were told it was obsidian. Our host explained that they get their material from a wide variety of sources so maybe they don't really know the origin of the items? I remain doubtful that the obsidian is really obsidian.

I mentioned stone carving earlier but I'm not sure carving is the correct term.Most of the stone is worked on with tools for cutting, grinding and polishing. Each stone is individually worked on to bring out its best qualities, but it's not really being carved into anything.

The stones range in size from about 6 inches to 10 feet tall. Most of the large pieces reminded me of Devil's Tower Monument in Wyoming. If you aren't familiar, please look it up. Interesting place.

Each stone piece has a wooden base carved to exactly fit the base of the stone. Most of the wooden bases are made of teak root systems. Clients for the large pieces are generally office buildings and hotels. A friend purchased a smaller item as a birthday gift for her husband. It was made of rough blue topaz. I admit it was pretty but not worth the sticker price as far as I am concerned. I thought a lot of the stones were pretty but didn't see a fit with our decor now or in the future.

As for the wood carving, they do produce a few pieces of furniture. It's pretty massive and in a more rustic style than I like.

Our tour host is also an artist specializing in recycled materials. he's currently working on a transformer character (of metal recycled parts) in an attempt to surpass the height of the current transformer character record. The record is currently 11 feet. His transformer will reach 12 feet. It's being worked on in multiple parts so I couldn't get a good photo of it.

These elephants were so cool. I'm not sure about the base material but they are covered in cut pieces of petrified wood.

This bike might have been saved as one piece or put together part by part but I really liked it hanging on the garden stone wall. It has a giant kickstand which is difficult to see.