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Month: October 2014

Tenggarong: island of shame

Many things are doomed to failure, such as starting a hog roast franchise in Chechnya or basing your foreign policy around the concept of dropping bombs on people. One such folly must surely be Fantasy Island in Tenggarong, eastern Kalimantan, on the Mahakam River. The region’s coal mining operations had blessed the local authorities with that affliction we all desire, of having more money than sense, so they decided to blow it on turning the town’s river island of Pulau Kumala into…

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The heroes of Samarinda

Samarinda, on the east Kalimantan coast is never going to win any prizes, unless there is a competition for  pavement obstructions in SE Asia. Its general air of tattiness, wafted by the fumes of sluggish traffic would prompt the less charitable to describe it as a bit of a shithole. Warranting special mention is its drainage system, which valiantly performs several tasks, such as removing rainwater, sewage and the rubbish, that those of the more bone-idle residents, who decide they don’t…

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Wehea Forest: of apes and men in Borneo

I have taken the unusual step of handing over this week’s post to a guest blogger, Professor Tokolodo Dangerleybeets, an Orang Utan from the Wehea Forest, in north-east Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, who is an expert in humans and their cultural practices. Here in the Forest we have two kinds of human: the Treecutters and the Watchers. The former we don’t like, because taking away our trees is like what it is for a human to have a bunch of Gorillas…

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Buggery in Brunei

When is a dictatorship not a dictatorship? Brunei is an intriguing example of this conundrum. Technically the Sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah, with six hundred years of hereditary privilege behind him cannot be a dictator, but like kings everywhere before him he holds powers all  dictators aspire to. Even violent psychopaths like Saddam Hussein or the divinely ordained, like Ayatollah Khomeini had to juggle competing powers to maintain their position but the Sultan has virtually no concrete bounds to his powers and…

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Malaysia: tresspassers will be shot

It is difficult to reconcile the welcoming nature of the average Malaysian, regardless of religion or ethnicity, with the warning signs commonly seen on fenced property around the country. The threat of an armed response may be normal practice but in the US but much of the rest of the world has a lesser inclination to the indiscriminate use of firearms, Malaysia could however be taking the first steps down that path. A spate of shootings in 2013,  generally linked…

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