As its new year I am sure you all need a bit of colour to cheer you up, particularly after some of my more gruesome posts recently. If you are languishing in post-Christmas poverty, having mortgaged your soul to pay obscene heaps of food and booze to wash away the pain of regular employment, let me at least offer you a hint of sunshine. After a few weeks in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, buildings back home are going to seem rather…
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…
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…
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…
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…
