A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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THE WATER DOES THE WORK
Selangor – 24 March 1978 We went out in the university bus, eighteen of us, on a day the programme had billed as a look at Malaysia’s oldest industry. It turned out to be three stops that told a single story backwards: a working tin mine, the Sultan’s palace, and a pewter factory. We started…
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BEFORE THE SUN
Kota Bahru – March 1978 Kelantan sits in the far northeastern corner of the Malay peninsula, up against the Thai border, with the mountain spine of the country between it and everywhere else. I left on a bus from Kuala Lumpur at half past six in the morning and arrived in Kota Bahru twelve hours…
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THE JOURNEY TO THE (ALMOST) ANTIPODE
If you started digging a hole in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin and passed straight through the centre of the Earth, you’d come out in a patch of open water in the southern Indian Ocean. There’s no land there at all. The nearest is a pair of French specks, Île Saint-Paul…
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THE MAN WHO CLEARED THE BIG WOODS
Michael Webert, 1843–1904 PROLOGUE: A CORNFIELD IN DUNN COUNTY I was born in Southern California and didn’t move to Wisconsin until I was ten. I never quite shook the feeling of being a foreigner there. It’s probably why I left after university and spent pretty much all of my adult life somewhere else. What I…
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THE STOPPING PLACE
Kuala Besut and Pulau Perhentian – February 1978 I lay on the floor of Jaafar’s house with a map of Malaysia spread out in front of me, and let my eye wander north. Jaafar took in travellers at his home, half a kilometre back in the jungle behind the fishing village of Beserah – no…
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THREE EMPIRES, ONE AFTERNOON
Malacca, Malaysia – 17 February 1978 Malacca felt like a different country. Kuala Lumpur was concrete and traffic and the muezzin’s call; Malacca was crumbling laterite and Dutch gravestones going soft in the rain. I found St Paul’s first – walls without a roof, the sea showing clean through empty window frames where glass had…
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THE YEAR OF THE HORSE
Kuantan and Beserah – 3–8 February 1978 The yellow book did it. Tony Wheeler’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring – the traveller’s bible, already dog-eared and coming apart at the spine – beckoned me to the east coast, away from the ordered calm of the Universiti of Malaya campus in Kuala Lumpur and toward what…
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AMERICA TURNS 250. BUT MY FAMILY’S REVOLUTION BEGAN IN 1774
In 1774, at the age of 47, my fifth great-grandfather, James Ward, went to war. And never came home. Trouble had been building along the western frontier of the British colonies in America. Under the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois had signed away lands south of the Ohio River – present-day West Virginia…
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TARZAN NEVER MADE IT TO THIS JUNGLE. BUT I DID.
My earliest perception of a jungle came from the old Tarzan movies – Johnny Weissmuller re-runs, then all the other bare-chested muscular guys who followed on the big screen and television. I gathered that jungles were full of swinging vines, chimps and elephants. I didn’t know at the time that those “jungles” were mostly Hollywood…
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