The Mahakam River is long, obviously not nearly as long as the great rivers of the world, but long enough to do some cruising. It reaches right up into the heart of Kalimantan, and though it sounds like a ‘Heart of Darkness’ experience, it isn’t. Being rather big means all kind of river traffic can make its way up, and that in turn makes it easy to exploit the natural resources along it. And exploited they have been and are still being. Coal is the main resource, followed by timber, and, so it seems, gold. With rapids only really restricting access to the last third, the rest has been up for grabs. As you take a passenger ferry up or down it you will pass a lot of coal barges, and a lot ports serving the ... read more

Sabah likes to advertise itself as some kind of real life Eden, a nature paradise full of wild and fantastic creatures. And to reinforce that image you have the Lonely Planet, which has this to say about Sabah: ‘Malaysia’s state of Sabah proves that there is a God, and we’re pretty sure that he’s some sort of mad scientist. Sabah was his giant test-tube, the product of a harebrained hypothesis. You see, on the seventh day, God wasn’t taking his infamous rest, he was pondering the following: ‘What would happen if I took an island, covered it with impenetrable jungle, tossed in an ark’s worth of animals, and turned up the temperature to a sweltering 40˚C? The result? A tropical Eden with prancing mega-fauna and plenty of fruit-bearing trees. This ‘land below the wind’, as it ... read more

You get a tan in the days, It's sunny in the rays, but meantime South of the river, you stop and hold everything A man is callin' prayers double four times, You feel alright when you hear his voice ring... And now you step inside, but you don't see to many faces, Comin' out of the sun to hear the muezzin go down, Competition in other holy places... Oh but the faithful are blowin' that sound, Way down south, way down south BSB town You check out Sultan Bolkiah, he owns all the oil, But he is strictly Muslim, he don't want to make it shine or bling They say a grand ol' palace is all he's got for all his toil, With only 1800 rooms to do his thing And Bolkiah doesn't mind if he ... read more

As I lay sweating on a matrass, with unseen bugs dropping on me or crawling over me, and confused roosters crowing loudly at random hours of the night, while less confused dogs kept howling and barking at intruders only they could see, I asked myself why I had thought it was a good idea to pay top dollar for this particular experience? Here I was in a semi-traditional longhouse, on a river close to Batang Ai National Park; with me were two Australians who were clearly just as delusional as me, since they too would, by the end of it, be paying a lot of money for what can only be described as self-inflicted torture. I had met Sarah and Tom in Kuching, where we had hatched this strange plan which involved, what we all silently ... read more

A long held ambition has finally been fulfilled. It has been something I have been thinking about for years, but somehow I never managed to actually get down to it. There was always something that got in the way of me and my fishy business. Money more often than not, or lack of water, a key ingredient when one talks about our watery friends. Ever tried to do a diving course in Central Asia? It is easy, you don’t need to wear any air tanks, you can walk on the bottom of the Aral Sea without the need of any protective gear. Of course, you won’t see much in the way of fish, except maybe a dried out example or two. But I am not in Central Asia anymore and so the time has come where ... read more