We took our friend Bidari up on his kind offer to drive us over to the Sarawak Plaza to his friend’s record store in a hotel van. He picked out a bunch of CDs and a kind young lady unwrapped each of them and played cuts for us to choose. […]
These guys called Akasha from Malaysia rocked the rainforest with their blues number played on a sitar plus twangy Indian drums, guitar and bongos. They also played Jimi Hendrix’ Voodoo Child, with that unforgettable riff from the beginning repeated over and over. It was a fantastic performance and the most […]
The Rainforest Music festival is held in the shadow of a great mountain called Santobong, which means coffee in Iban. There were thousands of people there, and they were all wet and muddy, since from before the first note rain poured down. This is the rainforest after all. Sony and […]
The Rainforest World Music Festival starts tonight, it takes place at the base of a mountain about forty five minutes from our hotel in Kuching. So far they’ve sold about 24,000 tickets, at a cost of about $77 for three days of music. It’s a big, big deal in Sarawak, […]
The last time I visited Malaysia, I remember the music was one of the highlights of the trip. It was in a market, the tunes blared out and just caught me. On TV early one morning, watching thousands of men circling the Ka’aba at the great mosque in Mecca–a ritual […]
I walked out into the humidity and bright sunshine of a Sarawak afternoon. Strolling down the street, I turned onto a street that was all Chinese. Vendors dozed in darkened shops, no lights on, no one asking for sales, but eyeing me over, not friendly, not curious, more like what […]
We’re just back in the hotel after a tour of this lovely city of about 500,000 on the banks of the Sarawak river. This huge island is called Borneo because way back in the 1800s, a British explorer came up the shore and a man was husking a coconut, or […]
We didn’t fly over the pole, we headed straight for Stockholm and an hour later were airborne for a tough eleven and a half more hours. Then a little break in KL and after two more hours, we landed in Kuching. This city is named for the Malay word for […]
I usually pack for a one-week trip. But last night I stuffed my biggest suitcase fuller than usual because my trip tonight will take me far, far away on the longest non-stop flight you can take. I’ll take off from Newark tonight and go over the pole to Kuala Lumpur, […]
I read in Global Voices today that the Iranian Parliament is considering a bill that would put bloggers in the same category as rapists, murderers and thieves and make them eligible for the death penalty. The bill would ‘toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society’ and that ‘establishing websites […]
Yesterday as I was driving down Rte 5, I passed this truck parked near the exit ramp off of Interstate 91. I noticed that it had Connecticut plates, and I saw that this guy had parked it there. Here you see his hardworking efforts, he is drawing a sign that […]
