John Boyd Macdonald
John Boyd Macdonald
Banjarmasin is the capital of South Kalimantan (Kalimantan Selatan, usually just referred to as ‘KalSel’). It likes to promote itself as “The Venice of the East”. The Lonely Planet reckons this is “a jaw-dropping exaggeration”, saying that the city “sprawls in all…
The island of Borneo is deservedly famous for its butterflies (kupu-kupu in Bahasa Indonesia). There are masses of them, at least 939 species recorded in the Malaysian part of Borneo alone. And on top of that there are thousands of varieties of moths.…
The rains have arrived, the fires and smoke have gone for another year, and life has returned to what passes for normal here in Central Kalimantan (KalTeng). In fact the wet season storms arrived with such gusto that they demolished…
We get a fair amount of wildlife as regular visitors in our garden. We see lots of bulbuls and other birds, squirrels, bats, even one small snake that wriggled into the innards of my motorbike and hasn’t been seen since. But…
Around this time last year I wrote about the seasonal smoke haze that blights large parts of Southeast Asia each dry season. But last year looks mild in retrospect, as 2015 is shaping up to be the worst year on record. And without doubt the worst place…
A while back I wrote about the wonderful parade that kicks off Central Kalimantan’s week-long Dayak cultural festival, known as Isen Mulang (“Never give up” in the Dayak Ngaju language). But, grand though it is, there is a lot more to Isen Mulang…
The Dayak Tiwah ceremony that we attended back in last November was one of the most astonishing and powerful things that we have experienced in Kalimantan. So when we heard that another, much larger Tiwah Massal was to be held in the nearby…