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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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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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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