Passing through the many villages scattered over the hills of Tana Toraja in the central Sulawesi highlands, you soon begin to wonder why they have so many bus shelters, sometimes several in one village. Some may be modest affairs but many are decorated with bright colours and patterns, clearly built with love and care. Even the design of traditional homes and rice stores is replicated for some. In reality the function of bus stop is just a fringe benefit, for…
Warning: animal lovers may find some of the images distressing Tis the season of good cheer to all God’s creatures, or at least that is what the Christmas card manufacturers would like us to believe. However, as you are probably aware by now, I am that nagging voice in a dark corner of the travel blogging world, reminding you that things aren’t always as nice as the travel brochures want you to think. So, I hope you have fully digested …
If your idea of holiday heaven is to be packed onto a beach with thousands of like-minded souls, knowing that MacDonald’s tastiest treats and a Starbucks Latte are only a stagger away, then Bali is the place for you. Even if days of sun-drenched inertia raise a twinge of guilt you could always go for a day trip to something cultural to justify your sandy stasis. Or, you could just say, “fuck it! I’ll have another beer”. After all the…
You may have thought that colonialism had been consigned to the dusty, historical cupboards of European guilt but in one corner of Indonesia it is alive and well. In a slight twist on the old school model, many West Papuans (who are dark-skinned Melanesians) converted to Christianity under the influence of Dutch colonial rule but are now under the yoke of the largely Muslim Indonesians. The central pillar of the injustice is the 1969 Act of Free Choice initiated by…
If you haven’t stayed in cockroach infested dumps, you haven’t traveled, as someone famous ought to have said. Anything else is just plain tourism. The scuttling horror of the cockroach, that all right minded travelers must dread, is one that you never truly get used to, no matter how often you share a room with them and I have done so more than most on my tours of the world’s less salubrious destinations. Some indefinable trait of unpleasant, alien otherness…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
