Showing 1-18 of 18 results
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11 months of travel, 4 minutes of video
Blog: Around The World On The Toilet - 23 March 2012
We’ve been back home for a while now, and are back into an everyday routine. Having both found employment, there are no immediate plans for another multi-month trip, but we do find ourselves constantly looking back on the last year with no regrets and memories which will surely last our lifetime. Its been an amazing [...]
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One Man and His Dog: Death of a Serial Killer
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 7 October 2010
It happened during the second gold rush they had, here in Eastern Halmahera, in Indonesia’s Wild East, back in the 90s. When parties of twenty or thirty men from the villages on the coast, with their brushed-sand streets and corrugated iron mosques, would head upriver, panning for gold, like the San Francisco 49ers. These guys? [...]
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Because Children Know No Cultural Divide
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 1 October 2010
It never ceases to amaze me how children’s friendships cross cultural boundaries so effortlessly. We spent the Idul Fitri holiday in the Togian Islands, off Sulawesi, Indonesia, at a little guesthouse on an idyllic beach. Amal, the son of the family, is thirteen years old. He was born at home, no midwife in attendance. His [...]
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#theglamoroftravel
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 18 September 2010
It was on the golden sands of Pulau Kadidiri, in the Togian Islands, Sulawesi, Indonesia, as a wave of what I would dearly like to call “social diseases” spread along the beach like glandular fever in a boys’ boarding school that just took girls for Sixth Form, that I began contemplating a new hashtag. And, [...]
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A Fistful of Dollars
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 16 September 2010
Our favoured local, back in Rantepao in the Tana Toraja, was the hangout of the local Guides Association, a Teamsteresque conglomerate of the most amiable rogues since Dick Van Dyke. Sporting various permutations of Aviators, moustaches, long hair, cropped hair and funeral sarongs as night-time outerwear, the chaps spent most of their time out back [...]
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Rafting the Maiting River
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 15 September 2010
We spent our last day in the Tana Toraja whitewater rafting. An activity, which in the mind of the child, now forms a kind of holy trinity with zipwiring and zorbing, as sheer, adrenaline-fuelled, screeching fun. As he put it, “Zipwiring is aerial. Zorbing is, ummm…, terrestrial. And whitewater rafting is the aquatic equivalent.” Or, [...]
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Souls Growing Skywards with the Trees
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 4 September 2010
At Pana, the cave graves were easy to find, half of them broken open, looming out of a granite slab in the oncoming dusk and framed by dark bamboo. The baby graves? Well, as the beautiful kids who gave us directions and made us sign the guestbook said, they were in a “big tree”. “These [...]
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Buffalo Soldiers: Living for Death in the Tana Toraja
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 2 September 2010
“Are funerals like this in London?” asks my new Torajan friend. The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”, preserved in formalin, with his family for the last eight months. Now he has left the house, he is finally dead, his soul winging its way towards the afterlife. “Not [...]
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Slik Insults: Lost in Translation
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 1 September 2010
As a language, Bahasa Indonesia, the lingua franca of Indonesia’s many different peoples, is famously easy to learn. It is not tonal, has sweet FA by way of grammar and syntax, a generally regular stress pattern and a word order and pronunciation not wildly dissimilar to English. So, having bought a dictionary in Makassar, I [...]
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Monday Photo Essay: Colours of Makassar
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 30 August 2010
Makassar, Indonesia. The capital of Sulawesi. A hectic, noisy port city, where even the scuzziest scenes are full of equatorial colour. Like these trucks, parked near the old port where the Bugis sailing ships unload. There are corrugated iron shacks on the dockfront, selling snacks when Ramadan permits, and housing entire families. As pretty, in [...]
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Lessons on Life and Death in Toraja
Blog: Around The World On The Toilet - 2 July 2010
*ANIMAL LOVERS BEWARE. THIS POST CONTAINS GORY IMAGES. “Of course death is better than life” my guide Budi stated after we just watched the sacrifice of two large buffalo for a funeral ceremony. In my time in Toraja, I could not think of a better summary of their unique cultural beliefs. It was in the [...]
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Tomohon Sulawesi: Home to the World's Most Macabre Market?
Blog: Coconut Radio - 27 May 2010
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Photo of the Week: Bunaken Island Sulawesi, Indonesia
Blog: Coconut Radio - 3 March 2010
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Death in the afternoon
Blog: I don't wash my hair - 19 October 2009
Sulawesi is not a particularly popular vacation destination back home, but if you've been there, you've heard of Tana Toraja, and if you've heard of Tana Toraja, you've heard about their funeral ceremonies. Stunning landscape, cascading rice paddies, yes, but all as a backdrop to the week-long events that secure the safe passage of their loved ones to the afterlife.
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Puppy - 1, Fish - 0 (Liburan Part Three)
Blog: I don't wash my hair - 12 October 2009
Not so long ago I made an oblique reference to the difficulties my feet have visited upon me and, because I have a habit of endowing everything, pillows, bags, ears, extremities, you name it, with feelings and personalities, I now feel the need to publicly retract that compliant. In Tana Toraja, my feet were total champs.
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Rabies is the new black (Liburan Part Two)
Blog: I don't wash my hair - 9 October 2009
From our underwater oasis in Bunaken, Katie, Jenny, Jeff and I headed for Tangkoko National Park, renowned -- or at least attempting to acquire some renown -- for its tarsier. The tarsier is a small nocturnal opossum (at least that's what it looked like to me) and the "ooohs" and aaaahs" that a tarsier sighting elicit are strong evidence of human inability to distinguish "small" from "cute." Let's be honest, this little guy looks like the coke-addled love child of a kola bear and a rat.
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Darling it's better down where it's wetter (Liburan Part One)
Blog: I don't wash my hair - 6 October 2009
On September 19th, I turned 26 years old. I feel pretty good about that age given that I spent my birthday with a dude who is probably closing in on his first century and a half of life:
Showing 1-18 of 18 results
