Category: 1978 Southeast Asia
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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 electricity, no plumbing, a big room and a row of mattresses – and the days there had a way of dissolving into nothing much at all. That was the point of the place. But a map…
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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 never been replaced. Inside, Dutch tombstones lay flat against the walls, their lettering worn but legible if you crouched close: Dutch names, Dutch dates, a life and a death recorded three centuries before mine in a…
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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 I was convinced was the real Malaysia. Ten days of Chinese New Year holiday stretched ahead of me. It was the Year of the Earth Horse; the New Year fell on the seventh of February. I…
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FINDING CHRISTIAN
PERHENTIAN BESAR – 8 February 1978 Olympus OM-1 on Kodachrome 25. Roll 2. Frames 22 and 23. When you travel alone you are inclined to meet more people … and some of those people become your travel mates. I was hanging out during a Chinese New Year holiday at a guesthouse in a small village on the east coast of Malaysia. A tall, sun-tanned Swede and I were the only guests at the place. Christian was sole traveller and on a long-term Asian adventure. Christian and I decided to try to…
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KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH AN ALBINO
BATU FERRINGHI – 20 January 1978 Olympus OM-1 on Kodachrome 64. Roll 1 Frame 14 Every time I hear Roberta Flack sing ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ I am immediately transported back to Malaysia. Funny how our brains can so strongly associate music with time and geography. I was 19 years old, half a world away from home and drinking a beer at outdoor cafe while watching the sun set into the Indian Ocean. Roberta set the mood by telling the story of the boy who seemed as if he…
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MY FIRST SLR
SINGAPORE – 12 January 1978 I bought my first SLR camera in Singapore in 1978. I was after an Olympus OM-1, a brilliant manual camera which was smaller than most of the SLRs on the market at the time. So it was perfect to throw in a backpack. At the time Singapore was supposed to be one of the cheapest places in the world to buy cameras as it had duty free status. Even so, it was hard to beat the prices of New York mail order. I visited lots of…
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BATU FERRINGHI 35 YEARS LATER
In 1978, I was a scrawny 19-year-old teenager with a huge lust for adventure. I wanted to experience something exotic so I enrolled for a semester at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. On the weekends I would leave campus and explore parts of Malaysia. I used my thumb to hitch rides and slept wherever I could set up my tent. I immersed myself in the Malay culture and loved every minute of it. On one trip to Malaysia’s east coast I wandered into a village and was introduced to…
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TRAVELS WITH JOHN
Facebook today has reacquainted me with a long lost friend and travelling companion. In 1978, I stumbled into a losmen (guestroom) on Samosir Island in northern Sumatra. I saw this seasoned traveller there – a skinny, long haired bearded man wearing Coke bottle bottom glasses and eating porridge and bananas. John Ducedre was a Canadian and we hit it off perfectly and explored the island together. Eight months later, John showed up at my house in northern Wisconsin driving a beat up van and offered me a ride to Banff. I…
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THAIPUSAM: A HINDU EXPERIENCE WITH PENITENCE
I stood among the faithful, the air thick with incense and devotion, witnessing a ritual that blurred the line between pain and transcendence. Each step was a surrender, each chant a prayer etched in flesh and spirit. I left not as an observer, but as someone quietly changed.
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