A strange kind of tourism: Sidoarjo Mud Flow

There can’t be many disaster areas that you can drive past and not notice but Sidoarjo in East Java is one such oddity. Back in 2006 a drilling operation caused a natural gas well blowout, creating the world’s biggest mud volcano. All these years later and it is still merrily chugging away, spewing out mud and steam. Although the rate has slowed considerably it has the potential to continue for years. As letting it gradually overwhelm the entirety of this…

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Baliem Valley, West Papua: guys and gourds

Well! that’s certainly the first time I have been welcomed at an airport by a man wearing only a gourd on his cock. Admittedly, when I say airport, the structure at Wamena in the Baliem Valley, West Papua tends more towards the idea of a cow shed than what you would traditionally imagine an airport to be. This however, did nothing to make the experience any the less superb. Plenty of destinations around the world would benefit from having more old men’s…

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Inspiration for travel bloggers

Staring out over the broad, arid plains of the travel blogosphere, strewn with Twitter inanities and rehashed Google searches, a few eruptions of brilliance pour lava flows of inspiration into the barren surroundings. Alas, none of them are mine, destined as they are to remain muddy pools of indifference in the shadowy recesses of the genre. It is however, these moments of volcanic intensity which should remind us its time to up our game and strive, at least for a…

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Gado Gado – Tenggarong street style recipe

As I was given an impromptu lesson in how to make the popular Indonesian dish gado gado (vegetables and peanut sauce), whilst looking for something to eat one night, it seems only right to pass the recipe on to the culinary inclined among you. There are numerous variations of the dish around the country’s many islands so I am not giving you a precise recipe as such. It can be altered to suit your tastes or what you have in the…

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Hit me with your rhythm stick, part 1

I had a stupid idea. En route for Borneo a lyric kept going round that big bit of my brain that’s used to store pointless stuff: “in the wilds of Borneo”, from Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ track, hit me with your rhythm stick. If this means nothing to you, by the magic of internet, here’s the video –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WGVgfjnLqc    As the lyrics below demonstrate, it references a series of disconnected locations around the world, some of which I…

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