Under Eastern Clouds

The rival village’s warriors could be heard before they could be seen. Their whoops and yells echoed forebodingly throughout the Papuan glen, amplified by steep crags. Down in the clearing, the singing and dancing stopped and tense silence took hold over the village of Userem.

 After much suspense, they finally loomed into view. At first only the tips of their long spears were visible against the crest of the hill. Then, suddenly, the war party loomed into view in its full dreadful aspect.

The seed that launched a thousand ships

I doubt you’ve heard of the Banda islands. I certainly hadn’t. Six coral-fringed volcanic plugs emerging from an overwhelmingly remote corner of ocean, with a combined landmass of 111 square miles. Their inhabitants enjoy a relaxed pace of life– not poor, certainly not rich – fishing and cultivating spices. But these far-flung lumps of rock had an impact on the course of world history that cannot be underestimated

The Sleeping Crocodile

Metres from Indonesia’s border with Timor-Leste, the soldier grabbed my hand. Sunlight glinted menacingly off his aviator sunglasses; his ridiculous black-and-white boots as much intimidating as eccentric. His buzz-cut comrade clasped a muscled paw over ours. A third had commandeered my camera.

The isle is full of noises

The village headman of Kelaisi Tengah surveyed us intensely as we sat in the front room of his house. It had bare bricks for its walls, our plastic garden chairs sinking into the dirt floor, but his quiet gravitas lent our surroundings the air of a sumptuous room of state.

He looked down to our offerings of sere pinang – otherwise known as betel, the mildly narcotic plant lovingly chewed all over Indonesia and beyond. Wreathed in a fragrant halo of smoke from his clove cigarette, he considered them for a moment before cracking a wry smile.

“We grow so much of it here – we don’t need any.”

We had gifted the one crop grown abundantly in this otherwise deprived village. Coals to Newcastle.

Flores: island of dragons, sharks and nuns

The boy shook my hand with far too much enthusiasm for someone who had been circumcised that day. Perhaps he was giddy with the excitement of the occasion. Or perhaps, more likely, up to his little eyeballs on painkillers. Either way, this eight-year old had, according to Indonesian Muslim custom, just passed from boyhood to manhood; and this, his Sunat, was the celebration.

Going Solo

The cow’s  head lay severed on the cobbled ground. Its eyes stared in directionless shock; its mouth gaped in a rigor mortis of anguish. The narrow, crumbling alleyways reeked of blood and faeces. The intestines of many beasts were strewn across the pavements like the tinsel of a hellish Christmas.

“Anda”. (“You”).

A gore-slimed knife was thrust into my hand. A bloodied man was insisting that I flay the cheek skin from the freshly slaughtered face. I was not in Kansas anymore.

Meat Loaf and fascist wardrobe malfunctions – a farewell to Yogyakarta

The German pastor stared at me, his eyes glazed in shock. After a pause pregnant with puzzlement and emotion, he found the words for a question.

“Are those… swastikas… on your shirt?”

I said no, of course. But looking downwards I realised – with surging horror – that he was right. I had, entirely without realising it, gone out for dinner in a shirt festooned with hundreds of black Nazi crosses.

It seemed like a nightmare – the sort that haunts the dreams of Prince Harry’s PR team. One that could barely have been worse for this particular Guardian reader, not even if I’d dreamt that I would forever be deprived of fair-trade cappuccinos and Apple technology products or that a remote Peruvian mountain village was being robbed of its precious supply of quinoa by Ronald McDonald.

 Except this really happened. To me. Last week.

Drag queens, circumcisions and chilli sauce – not necessarily in that order

The American tourist recoiled from where she sat, her face inhabiting that fine line between mirth and terror.  A man was slinking towards her, his face elegantly painted, his body covered in a shift of gorgeous fabric, his head adorned with a black wig – his appearance somewhere between a drunk beauty queen and a gorilla who’d fallen with remarkable precision into a dressing-up box and make-up set. A flower nestled daintily behind his ear.

Embarking on what seemed a graceful courtship ritual, he sidled up to her in elegant, pointed steps, turned his silk-clad back, and coyly glanced at her over his shoulder. He paused for a moment. The atmosphere lay heavy with anticipation.

After what seemed like an age, he sprung to life suddenly, swaying his buttocks towards her face, languorously at first, then unleashing into a frenzy of vertical jiggling that defied the laws of physics. The onlookers’ surprise suggested that they had not known until now that this part of human anatomy was capable of such movement. Even I – known to display a dancefloor bottom wiggle on occasion – was impressed and taken aback in equal measure.