Scary landing in Borneo

The aircraft dipped its wings dropping through the cloud and there below us was the coastline of southern Borneo. Fleetingly I glimpsed a muddy estuary its broad entrance dotted with small fishing boats and larger cumbersome container vessels. Rivers and smaller tributaries reddish-brown with soil converged and emptied into this broad sluggish waterway. Inland the estuary curled and twisted into an ever narrowing corridor, here and there, spread sporadically along its meandering swampy shore were small wooden houses propped on rafts and stilts.

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Arriving in Jakarta

From the air a haze of inclement pollution obscures Jakarta. Perhaps, on closer inspection, it’s best that way. Jakarta is one of the most densely populated cities on earth, with around 23 million inhabitants, most of whom spend a great deal of their time sitting in traffic jams beeping their scooter and car horns. The city itself is a mass of old and new. The greater part is steamy, chocking, untidy and over-crowded. There are vast areas of ramshackle houses and crumbling shacks, all slowly decaying amid piles of trash: contrasting strongly with the business districts and their fabulously elegant tall glass buildings and the occasional decadent colonial splendour of Indonesia’s previous European overlords.

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