John Boyd Macdonald
John Boyd Macdonald
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…
We were disappointed to have to (temporarily) leave Kalimantan when the smoke from this year’s dry season fires became intolerable. But it did mean that, while living as ‘environmental refugees’ in Java, we had the opportunity to visit the Cipanas site of…
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…
When we were in Jogjakarta back in July, we had the pleasure of (again) attending a performance of the Ramayana Ballet. It was held in the grounds of the 9th Century Hindu temple at Prambanan, 17km east of Jogja along the road to…
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…