What is Sarawak like?
The streets are crowded with cars, small trucks and motorbikes. The sidewalks are porticos, stuffed with vendors, sellers of all manner of goods. The interiors of the shops are dark, inhabited by Chinese men and young girls, silently waiting there for customers. You walk beneath the ceilings of the stores […]
South China Sea Dip
The South China sea is extraordinarily warm. It’s gentle and feels like a bath, and I floated out and put my ears beneath the waves and exalted in that splendor of nothing, of not hearing anything for just a few brief moments. Sony also loved being on the beach and […]
Mojitos in Hand, Chatting Up Concertgoers
The nicest thing about this big Rainforest World Music Festival are the people we’ve met. We got to the Sarawac Cultural Village early, and we sat on bamboo matts and drank mojitos. While lounging on big pillows we met a couple from Singapore with two young boys. He is an […]
Birds Nests Are Good For You…Really!
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. […]
Playing the Blues on a Sitar
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 […]
It Rains in a Rainforest–Even When the Music Plays
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 […]
Tonight We’ll Groove to the Beat of the Rainforest
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, […]
Bidayuh Music Is the Beat Behind These Dancers
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 […]
An Ironwood Mask, Found Amidst the Dried Fish
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 […]
Why Do They Call The Island Borneo?
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 […]
Rainy Kuching is a Diverse Combination of Faiths
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 […]
Time to Fly Again, This Time Across the North Pole
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, […]
Iran Says "Death Penalty for Bloggers" with New Law
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 […]
Great Work, Well Worth the Commute
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 […]
Nobody Ever Got a Callous Building a Web Site
This expression cracked me up when I read it on a poster selling power tools. Indeed, my hands don’t bear the callouses found on hard-working carpenters, iron workers or painters. But today I did one of the jobs that gives you callouses and it felt great. I painted the front […]
A Cunning Raid Yields Freedom in Colombia
News about Colombia always pulls me in, ever since I visited Medellin last April. I am going back in late August to Nuqui, a little beach town in the far north. Yesterday’s big news in Colombia and around the world was the raid that freed 15 hostages from the hands […]
Gilded Vanity Plates for the Richest in Abu Dhabi
I thought it was a bit of an extravagance when I bought my “GNCAFE” license plates for the cafe truck. Today I realized that I’m in little league when it comes to extravagant plate splurges. In yesterday’s WSJ, I read about vanity plates going for millions of dollars in Abu […]