Orangutans

Here’s a list of “things I didn’t know about orangutans before I came to Kalimantan”. To be honest, it was pretty easy to put together a fairly long list, because I didn’t know much about…

Manugal 2015 at Tewang Rangkang

For two years in a row, we’ve had the pleasure of attending and helping with the planting of rice in the Dayak Ngaju village of Tewang Rangkang, on the Katingan River a couple of hours…

Kuda Lumping II

Not long after we first arrived in Central Kalimantan, I wrote about a Kuda Lumping ‘performance’ in the village of Suka Mulya, just a kilometre or so from our home. Several months later, we were delighted to hear…

Banjarmasin

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…

Kupu-kupu (Butterflies)

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…

Tiwah Kampuri

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…

Green crested lizard (Bronchocela cristatella)

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…

Kalimantan smoke haze emergency

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…

YUM village at Cipanas

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…

Isen Mulang competitions

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…

Ramayana Ballet

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…

Tiwah Tewang Rangas

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…

Dayak wedding ceremony

We’ve been to a fair number of wedding receptions over the past year in Kalimantan. Actually, Karen counts 11 that she has attended – Dayak, Banjar, Javanese (she’s a couple ahead of me…) – and…

Chicken and veggies

One of the many nice things about working of the Agricultural Project of the Yayasan Usaha Mulia (hereinafter just ‘YUM Agro’) is that I get to meet the project participants, and to spend time making photographs in the seven…

Isen Mulang parade

No story this time, just some faces from the opening parade of the Isen Mulang Festival, which was held in Palangkaraya 18-24 May. The festival is an annual celebration of Central Kalimantan cultural diversity –…