I have been working. In London. For money. Five days a week. I haven't been contractually obliged to work five days a week since 2003; and I haven't worked a rigid five days a week since 2001. So it has been a shock to the system, and I have been too exhausted to blog, or do anything else but stare at the wall.

There hasn't been any travel recently, as I am dead broke, so what do I write about? I want to write about New Guinea, but have determined that that will be the end of the blog. Meanwhile I haven't got time to write about anything else, so here are some words that I have been enjoying recently: cozen, malapert, eldritch, baluster, martingale, sneck, endued, oneiric, apocope, omnifutuant, nugacity, ithyphallus, orts, diastemic, apotropaic, champaign, messuages, pyknic, chrism.

No, I don't know what some of them mean either.

Finally, here are some butterflies I saw in Lisbon in May.

A red admiral:

A Cleopatra, just emerged from its chrysalis:

One of three emperors contriving to mate:

Wage slave remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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It is certainly not true of Javanese dancing. You need a 16-inch waist and arms like pipecleaners, and its practitioners at the palaces are relatively young.

With age, women turn to singing.

So the western woman in the ensemble in Solo (on a scholarship, I think) was out of place, not because of her race, but because of her thick middle. She knew all the steps, but had no chance of achieving a tenth of the grace of the other dancers.

• **

I don’t know how we got on to the subject but at Lorenso’s in Bunaken, Fabiano and Ludovica told me about a brilliantly nasty sonnet by Cecco Angiolieri (c. 1260-1312), which has been, more recently, set to music by Fabrizio De André.

Here is a translation by Leonard Cottrell.

If I were fire, I’d burn up the world;
if I were storm, I’d raise a giant swell
and drown it all; if I were God I’d hurl
this rat’s-ass circus all the way to hell.
If I were pope, how happy I would be!
I’d cheat the Christians blind and suck their blood.
To serve as emperor I might agree,
so I could chop off everybody's head.

If I were death, I’d go to see my dad—
of course with mother I would do the same.
If I were life, I’d run from them like mad.
If I were Cecco, as I was and am,
I’d take the lovely and the lively dames
and leave for you the ugly and the sad.

And here is the original.

S’i’ fosse foco, arderei ’l mondo;
S’i’ fosse vento, lo tempesteri;
S’i’ fosse acqua, io l’annegherei;
S’i’ fosse Dio, mandareil in profondo.
S’i’ fosse papa, sare’ allor iocondo,
Che tutt’i cristiani imbrigherei;
S’i’ fosse emperator, sa’ che farei?
A tutti mozzarei lo capo a tondo.

S’i’ fosse morte, andarei da mio padre;
S’i’ fosse vita, fuggirei da lui;
Similemente faria da mi’ madre.
S’i’ fosse Cecco com’i’ sono e fui,
Torre le donne piu belle e leggiadre,
E zoppe e laide lascerei altrui.

• **

One of the things I have been doing since returning to the UK is reading up on natural history and Darwiniana. Thus: two trips to the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum, trips to the Cambridge Museum of Zoology and the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, and reading:

The Single Helix, Steve Jones
Physiology Demystified, Dale Layman
Anatomy Demystified, Dale Layman
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Almost Like a Whale, Steve Jones
How to Read Darwin, Mark Ridley.
Life in the Undergrowth, David Attenborough.

Other books:

The Shape of Water, Andrea Camilleri
The Terracotta Dog, Andrea Camilleri
Un italiano in America, Beppe Severgnini
The Black Swan
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, James Thurber
What’s Bred in the Bone, Robertson Davies
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, John Mortimer
Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano
Gods, Mongrels and Demons, Angus Calder
The Fall of Carthage, Adrian Goldsworthy
Hadrian’s Wall, David Breeze and Brian Dobson
Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
The State Counsellor, Boris Akunin
Throwim Way Leg, Tim Flannery
World War One: A Short History, Norman Stone
A Month in the Country, JL Carr
Dissolution, CJ Sansom
Farewell Britannia, Simon Young
The Roman Empire, Colin Wells

Solo dancing remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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We were shown around by a guide, who had published a book on Prambanan. Because I asked questions and looked interested, he accompanied me around the entire site and sold me his book, which I no longer have. From what I gathered, Prambanan was built around 850 AD during the Shaivite or Sanjaya kingdom, which was a Hindu kingdom in competition with the Buddhist Sailendra kingdom, which lasted from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. King Sayanendra’s (Sailendra’s) granddaughter – Buddhist – married his grandson – Hindu – and tensions between the two kingdoms fell. She built a Buddhist complex and he built a Hindu one nearby; his father built Borobudur.

In 928 the kingdom moved to East Java because of a huge eruption of Mount Merapi. Prambanan was abandoned in 1006. The site was rediscovered in 1773 (cf Pompeii in 1748) and was first restored in 1885. Restoration was completed, temporarily, in 1953.

In 2006, an earthquake measuring 5.8 Richter shook the land. Quite a number of people died, and Prambanan was badly damaged. Bricks and carvings fell from almost every structure, and most of the buildings became unsafe to enter. So there is not as much to see as there would have been a few years ago. Certainly, Borobudur is much the more impressive.

There are 242 pras (small shrines) on the perimeter, in concentric rows, of which only two still stand. Half of the original stones have disappeared; as always, they were used for building.

In the central zone there are eight larger candi, or temples. The three largest were dedicated to Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva. The shrine in front of each is dedicated to the god’s vehicle: Nandi, the bull, vehicle of Shiva; Angsa, the goose, vehicle of Brahma; Garuda, vahana of Vishnu.

The temples are decorated with pumpkin-shaped things. Each is a lingaratnapatma – a fertility symbol.

As far as I can recall the only temple that you can enter is the temple of Vishnu, inside which is a statue of same, and a yoni and linga. There is a central chamber, and four chambers facing the cardinal points.

Prambanan is also known as the temple of Lara Jonggrang. If I remember the story correctly, Lara Jonggrang was an unenthusiastic bride who, as a precondition of marriage, required her prospective bridegroom to erect 1,000 temple statues in a single night. (Her bridegroom had killed her father, so her qualms are understandable.) The bridegroom got spirits to help him, but still managed only 999 before the cock crowed, and he was so enraged at her punctilious refusal on grounds of non-performance that he turned her to stone. She became the thousandth statue. She is, supposedly, the image in the Durga cell of Shiva’s temple.

It being a Hindu temple, you can find naughty reliefs if you look. Of course you look.

Prambanan remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Penang was an English development. In the eighteenth century the island, at the northern entrance to the Melaka Straits, was very sparsely populated. Capt Francis Light thought it would be an ideal place to built a staging post for English ships sailing between India and China (England controlled the silk trade at the time). He obtained permission from the sultan to build a base there.

Capt Light hired some locals to build a fort at the point where he first landed, in 1786. It was the East India Company’s first base in the region. The first version of the fort was built, in 1793, in palm. Light named the fort after Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India, best known now as the man who surrendered at Yorktown. Around it grew George Town, now the capital of Penang. It is now a city rather than a town, but a few monumental buildings of the colonial era - the town hall, city hall, the museum, and Fort Cornwallis - survive.

This is the town hall.

This is St George’s church, built in 1818.

An old cannon, cast by the VOC, points over the walls of the fort. Local women now visit it to pray for fertility. It is a hefty cannon.

Penang, like those other trading towns Melaka and Singapore, has a large Chinese population. As in those cities, Chinese immigrants formed themselves into families or clans. Each clan had a kongsi, a building where people could meet; also a temple. In Penang, for example, there is a temple, built in 1924, for the ancestral deities of the Yap clan, originally from Fujian. It is guarded by lions, of course.

The clan has 700 members in Penang. The Yap name dates from 439 BC, when Shen Zhu Liang defeated the Qin army and helped to restore the Chu dynasty. He was awarded a title and a piece of land called Yap district, so he took Yap as his surname. Rather like the Windsors.

The Khoo clan also has a kongsi, the largest and finest in the city.

In the central hall are some lovely pictures.

Next to the central hall of the Khoo temple are two halls of fame. Any Khoo with a foreign qualification gets a shiny board on the wall; there are quite a few Khoos at Middle Temple, which is my Inn, and one or two at the other Inns of Court.

There are other Buddhist temples in town, too: a Thai one and a Burmese one. This is a columbarium at the Wat Chaiyamangkalaran.

And here is the Buddha at the Burmese temple.

George Town and Melaka are the two “Historic Cities of the Straits of Melaka”, which recently obtained a World Heritage Listing. The reason they are historic is that they have a lot of old shophouses. (The style is not unique to Penang and Melaka. There are a fair number in Kuala Terengganu, and some in Kota Bahru, as well as in Singapore.) But Penang has 1,700 of them.

The style is said to mix Portuguese, Dutch, Malay and Chinese influences. I could not discern anything Portuguese. Shophouses are two-storey trading houses, the ground floor open to the street. They are built on a simple plan with a rather plain façade, introduced by the Dutch, with more elaborate motifs coming from Malay and Chinese styles. As in Vietnam, the plot is long and thin. The living quarters and the kitchens are at the back, with an air-shaft in the middle.

The first floor typically has three louvred windows. (We were told in Melaka that there was once a tax on glass windows, but I’m not convinced.)

In George Town it is possible to group them into styles:

• Early shophouse style, 1800-1850. Two-storey, built right on to the street edge with a recessed ground floor forming a pedestrian walkway. Usually simple and small in scale, the upper storeys sometimes no more than four feet high. The upper wall has continuous panelled or louvred shutters. The upper floor is timber and roof tiled.
• Early Transitional, 1840-1900s. Built with a five-foot pedestrian walkway. The balcony is simply decorated, eg glazed green vents. Tuscan or Doric pilasters. A continuous range of shutters above.
• Early Straits Eclectic, with glass in the shutters for the first time. The shutters are no longer continuous. The roof overhangs become wider after 1900, because of the availability of reinforced concrete.
• Late Straits Eclectic, 1920s-1940s, notable for spectacular ornamentation. Three windows, with very little wall space in between. Columns or pilasters of stucco, with Chinese panel frescoes.
• Neoclassical, influenced by Anglo-Indian architecture, high ceilings, large porches, portico, colonnade, cupola, strict classical orders.
• And finally there is some Art Deco from the 1930s to the 1950s.

One of the buildings in George Town was the headquarters of Sun Yat-sen’s Tung Meng Hooi party, which in 1910 plotted the Cantonese uprising. (Dr Sun duly became president of the republic in 1911.)

In George Town the buildings are used, in general, as they always were - as shops. In this respect George Town has the advantage over Melaka. It feels real.

But Melaka, to the south, has the history. Unlike Penang, Melaka was an extremely wealthy and thriving port before the Europeans came. In fact it has the most interesting history of any town in the peninsula. Melaka is at the meeting point of the southeast and northeast monsoons. Merchants could wait in Melaka for the monsoon to change. Between April and October, the southeast monsoon blew ships towards China and Japan; between November and April, the northeast monsoon blew them back.

Melaka is on a river, home to huge water monitors, tiled like the Hôtel de Dieu in Beaune. We went on an enjoyable boat trip along the river and were regaled with entertaining but questionable history along the way. Dilapidated godowns still flank the river.

The town was the base of the Melaka (Malacca) sultanate between 1400 and 1511. The founder was Parameswara, a Sriwijayan prince from Sumatra. He embraced Islam in 1414 and called himself Raja Iskander Shah. Like the conversions to Christianity in eastern Europe towards the end of the first millennium, this seems to have been a political decision: he needed allies. Islam then spread from Melaka throughout the Malay world.

The Malay sultanate imposed a 6% ad valorem tax. Melaka was at its busiest between December and March, when ships from both west and east Asia arrived. Boats came from Java and the Spice Islands during the northern hemisphere summer. Traded in Melaka were especially textiles from India, commodities from east and west Africa, and Chinese silk and porcelain. Eighty-four languages were said to be spoken in Melaka.

Zheng He stopped here several times in the early fifteenth century, and built a trading post – he may also have converted Iskander Shah - and there have been Peranakans (Chinese) here ever since Hang Li Po arrived in, perhaps, 1459 to marry Sultan Mansur Shah.

From the Malay perspective, it was downhill after the Portuguese arrived. Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, where he heard about Melaka, and it took very little time for the Portuguese to discover the rest of Asia. The Portuguese arrived in Melaka to trade in 1509 and conquered the town by force in 1511, initiating the process of European colonisation in southeast Asia. The sultanate moved elsewhere. Paradoxically, it was the Portuguese capture of Melaka that triggered the Islamisation of the entire region.

The Portuguese imposed a government monopoly system. Naturally, they tried to monopolise the trade in nutmeg and mace from Banda, pepper from Kedah and tin from Perak. Many local merchants therefore went elsewhere, to Aceh, Brunei and Johor. The Portuguese also imposed an ad valorem duty of at least 5%, with 10% on Chinese goods, and 8% on goods from Bengal. (The exposition in the Maritime Museum was highly political, hugely pro-Muslim, and quite confused on the economics. It is certainly not obvious why the sultanate’s VAT was good and the virtually identical Portuguese VAT bad; or why both a monopoly system and free trade should have been the very thing designed to destroy Melakan trade. The real reason was probably that the Dutch and British simply wanted to base their trade elsewhere, at Batavia and Singapore respectively, because by they came into possession of Melaka they had already established these latter towns as their trading bases.)

The Dutch took the town in 1641 from the Portuguese after a siege. By then they had made Batavia the political and trading centre in the east, and they imposed heavy taxes on shipping in Melaka and diverted ships towards Batavia.

In the late eighteenth century the Dutch had to retrench, because the country was occupied by the armies of France, and in 1795 the British moved in, effectively holding it on trust for the Dutch for the duration of the war. But, like the Russians in Georgia recently, the British blew up the Dutch fort, so that when the Dutch came back they would not be able to defend it. The Dutch never came back, though, and under the Treaty of London 1824 the British swapped Bercoolen (Benkulu) in Sumatra for Melaka.

The British remained in Malaya until 1957, not counting the three years of Japanese occupation. They neglected Melaka, since Singapore was their commercial base in southeast Asia; Penang to the north was also more important. Certainly trade in Melaka diminished rapidly around the time Singapore was founded. Melaka dwindled and became a small, dilapidated town. The estuary silted up. In the nineteenth century Melaka had to start focusing on agriculture, and became an exporter of green pepper and rubber, as well as livestock, rattan, timber, gold dust and fish. No-one after the Melaka sultanate made any money out of the place.

Melaka has the oldest buildings on the peninsula. In its original version, the church of St Paul’s dates from 1521, when it was called Nosa Senhora. It was enlarged and renamed after the Annunciation in 1556, and then renamed again and turned into a Protestant church by the Dutch. St Francis Xavier, who visited regularly, was buried here for nine months before his remnants were transferred to Goa. (There is a miracle associated with this if you are into that sort of thing.) A number of old Dutch gravestones remain.

The Dutch built Christ Church opposite the Stadthuys in 1753, after which they stopped using St Paul’s, which fell into ruin. The pragmatical Brits used the church to store gunpowder.

St Paul’s is faced, as the fort was, in laterite, which is a concentration of insoluble minerals resulting from erosion of rock by heavy rainfall and given its colour by iron oxides. The other old buildings of the town are painted dark red to mimic it.

The Dutch also built the Stadthuys in 1660, which now houses a history museum, worth visiting if it is raining.

One interesting place to visit in Melaka is the Flora de la Mar, a 110-foot long replica of a Portuguese nau, fat and tall like a three-masted galleon, but less stable. The Flora de la Mar sank in January 1512 in the Straits of Malacca on her way to Europe. The replica was inaugurated as a maritime museum in 1994.

What was the nationality of the first person to sail around the globe? Malay, perhaps. Ferdinand Magellan purchased Panglima Awang as a slave in Melaka in 1511, and he accompanied Magellan back to Europe. He was christened and named Enrique. Magellan then mounted an expedition to sail around the world, and Panglima Awang went along as interpreter. As I mentioned before, by the time the ships reached Cebu in 1521, Magellan was dead; but Panglima Awang had sailed around the world.

There are still quite a few trishaws, bedecked in flowers, in Melaka, but they are an expensive way to get around, catering solely for tourists. In Indonesia they remain an important medium of public transport in most places outside central Jakarta.

The first floor overhangs the street by a few feet. In Penang and Singapore, the overhang is supported by pillars, and since the plots are contiguous this creates a sidewalk: a five-foot way. Since both commercial and family life takes place largely on this patch, it is not always possible to walk down it.

But in Melaka, for reasons that remain occult, the front patios are often separated by walls with portholes. The patios cannot be used as a path, so you have to walk in peril in the narrow streets, which carry heavy traffic.

In Melaka, the five-foot ways are confined to a fairly small Chinatown area. Many of the premises are now given over to touristified souvenir shops and restaurants. These masks are not Melakan.

It’s less satisfactory than George Town or Singapore. Melaka has the most interesting history in Malaysia but perhaps the least interesting Chinatown. In any case, the place is worth visiting for the food alone.

Five-foot ways remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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• ***

In Constantinople, in the time of Justinian, gangs used to fight in the streets. Nominally linked to chariot teams at the hippodrome, the Blues fought the Greens in a daily Old Firm derby. Aspirant politicians were connected to both mobs, and once they combined to try to bring down the Emperor.

In Thailand, the reds have been fighting the yellows, and now the mysterious blues have turned up. The PM has declared a state of emergency. It’s business as usual, then.

• ***

Tradition has it that Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 by U Thong. In fact there was already a town called Ayodhya on the east bank of the river, where the oldest wats are to be found. But when his town, Lopburi, was hit by an outbreak of smallpox, U Thong founded the new town in a strategic location entirely surrounded by three rivers. Ayutthaya is no mere eyot: the island, which is very nearly square, must be two miles across. Canals used to run through it.

By Thai standards Ayutthaya is a fairly new town. Indeed ‘New Town’, Chiang Mai, is older, being founded in the thirteenth century. Sukhothai dates from the twelfth century, Nakhon Si Thammarat from the eleventh, Nakhon Pathom from the sixth, U Thong from the third.

King Ramathibodi (or maybe Boromoratcha II) II of Ayutthaya captured Angkor in 1432, at which point it was the dominant power in the entire region. (Alliances, as always, were cemented by marriage. Ramathibodi was the son-in-law of the Emperor of China.) Six years later Ayutthaya finally acquired Sukhothai, and thereafter concentrated its energies in the Malay peninsula, where it constantly tried but failed to take Melaka. The Portuguese got there first. Ayutthaya became the capital of Siam in the fifteenth century, and remained so until sacked by the Burmese army in 1767.

At the centre it was a strong and centralised state, where the king possessed absolute power. He was much more remote than the kings of Sukhothai, and he was, of course, a devaraja, and an incarnation of Vishnu. There was no law of succession - there still isn’t – and so civil wars were very common. There were 33 kings of Ayutthaya between 1351 and 1767, belonging to several dynasties.

Ayutthaya controlled dependencies all over Siam. From the north came hard wood, sappanwood, eaglewood, molasses, iron, hide, rhinoceros horn. From the south came spices, pepper, tin, gold, seafood, salt and jaggery. From the east coast came spices, pepper and gems, from the northeast forest products, silk, cotton and tin, and from the west tin, spices and pepper. From the delta of the Chao Praya came fish, rice and fruit.

From the sixteenth century Ayutthaya constantly came under threat from the expanding Burmese kingdom, which expanded into Chiang Mai and Laos. In 1569 Ayutthaya was taken, and Ayutthaya became a vassal state of Burma, a Pétain being installed on the throne. This state of affairs did not last very long, though, as one of the princely hostages taken back to Burma organised military resistance upon his return to Ayutthaya. This was King Naresuan the Great.

The Burmese army marched to Ayutthaya and fought the Ayutthayan army at Nong Sarai. Naresuan defeated and killed the Burmese crown prince, Maha Uparaja, in a duel on elephantback. Like jousting, or man-to-man challenges in Greek and Roman times, this was the honourable/chivalrous way of going about a fight. Elephants were used as war machines and as pack animals. A hundred and fifty elephants are still kept in the kraal in Ayutthaya.

In the late afternoons you see them, dressed up, carrying tourists around town. I had had enough of elephant rides by then.

Ayutthaya became a great centre of international trade. Ayutthaya traded with China, Japan, Champa, Melaka, Java, Annam, Persia and Mocha in Yemen. Each nationality had its own enclave there were, at least, Chinese, Cochins, Malays, Makassarese, Japanese, Chams, Mon and Khmer. Indians came to sell textiles and to buy elephants, ivory and tin.

The Portuguese arrived in 1511, fresh from taking Melaka. They were granted permission to trade in 1516. The Dutch received permission to trade in 1592. The newly-founded VOC arrived in 1604. They found a thriving port city with goods for sale from all over Asia. They were looking for a water passage to China, but stayed on to trade. The VOC established a factory there, where they bought hides, sappanwood, tin and pepper. Jerome van Vliet, head of the VOC factory, wrote an account of the usurpation of the throne by Prasat Thong in 1629.

Other Europeans also began to arrive in the 17th century. King Narai allowed many countries to establish factories at Ayutthaya. Bizarrely, his foreign minister was a Greek, Constantine Phaulkon. After 1664 Narai decided he no longer wished to rely too much on the violent Dutch, and he turned to France. He allowed French missionaries in, to run hospitals and schools. Envoys from Louis XIV arrived at the court of King Narai in 1685; there is a picture of the event at the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Narai sent an envoy back, and Kosa Pan was received by Louis XIV at Versailles in 1686. The English East India Company maintained factories here from 1612-23 and 1675-89.

All the foreigners had enclaves because they came to trade but had to wait for the monsoon. Each settlement had its own kapitan, who handled judicial matters. The foreigners were free to keep their own religious laws and customs.

Golden times. In 1765, however, Burmese armies invaded Siam. In 1767 they besieged Ayutthaya, which capitulated in 1767. It was looted and burned, and its priceless libraries, artworks and archives destroyed. That was the end of it. When Taksin got Siam back together, he built a new capital south of Ayutthaya at Thonburi.

On the east side of the river, the Wat Yai Chai Mongkol (or Mongkhon) was founded by U Thong, the first king of Ayutthaya, in 1357 and enlarged by King Naresuan in 1592. In 1766 Ayutthaya was sacked by the Burmese army. The wat was destroyed and abandoned, and only re-established in 1957. The wat was rebuilt on a smaller scale in 1979.

It is surrounded by Buddhas in the defeating Mara position.

The huge chedi was built by King Naresuan in the sixteenth century to commemorate his victory against the Burmese in 1592.

The Wat Phanang Choen is a Chinese-Buddhist temple, and much-used. It is easy to tell the difference: there is Chinese lettering everywhere; a lot of red; lots of subsidiary shrines within the building; no space; and people stick gold-leaf sheets on to all the statues.

These are offerings to Ganesh.

The main image is a very large Buddha. As I arrived an enormous orange cloth was unravelled to cover the heads of the congregation. Dunno why.

The wat is on the bank of the river, and you can walk down to a jetty and buy food to feed the catfish. They hang around in such large numbers that they make the river boil.

Wat Na Phra Mane was built in 1499 AD - by Indra, apparently. It hosted a peace conference between Siam and Burma in 1569. In 1760 the Burmese King Alongphaya, then attacking Ayutthaya, fired a cannon from the wat at Ayutthaya. It exploded, and the king was seriously injured and died on the way back home. So it’s a place with patriotic overtones and the Buddha image within is believed to have saved Ayutthaya; it takes a negligible stimulus to produce a patriotic response in your average Thai person.

In the gable at the front is a teak carving of Narai riding on a garuda, stepping on Naga’s head. The Buddha inside is 6.60m high, in early Ayutthaya style. In Ayutthayan style, the Buddha is relatively slim with a V-shaped torso and figure-hugging Batman robes. Buddha may have renounced his wealth, but he was a prince, and Ayutthayan Buddhas are often dressed royally and crowned; the kings of Ayutthaya liked to emphasise the power of the monarch.

Next door, in the viharn noi, is a nice Dvaravati Buddha from maybe the sixth century AD. It is held to have come from Sri Lanka. Buddhism arrived in Thailand by the second to third centuries AD at the latest. In central Thailand there was a kingdom known as Dvaravati (from Sanskrit), which flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries. The artistic style known as Dvaravati was employed throughout Thailand between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Quite a few stucco-covered stupas date from this era. In the Dvaravati era there were also a lot of images of Avalokitesvara, lord of the six syllables: om mani padme hum.

There was a Wat Maha That in every provincial city. It always contains a stupa with a Buddha relic in it, and is the most sacred place in town. In Ayutthaya the relics appeared miraculously, just when they were needed. Royal ceremonies were held there and it was considered the centre of the city.

In Ayutthaya the presiding stupa was a Khmer-style prang, but there are chedis and prangs all over the place; it is a large site. Most of the chedis are reduced to brick, but you can see that they used to be covered in stucco.

The wat was founded under the third king of Ayutthaya, Borromaratchathirat I (phew), in 1374, and completed under Naresuan, who reigned 1388-95. It was originally 44 metres high, but collapsed during the reign of Songtham (1610-28). It was renovated in 1633, after which it was 50 metres high. It was badly damaged in 1767, and the wat destroyed, and the prang collapsed again during the reign of Rama V in 1911.

It feels a bit like Pompeii. Subsidiary prangs lean at angles.

It is in the grounds of the Maha That that the iconic image of Ayutthaya is found: the Buddha head in the bodhi roots. The bodhi tree has grown around the head so that now it is incorporated into the tree.

The Fine Arts Department excavated only in 1956. Six nested stupa-shaped reliquaries were found buried 17 metres under the prang. The actual Buddha relic is perhaps a third the size of a grain of rice.

With the reliquaries was a lot of treasure, among which was a gilded stone container in the shape of a fish, inside which were 19 beautiful gold offerings. There were also images made of gold, silver, bronze and tin. Votive tablets were found, too, made of tin, clay, and gold and silver foil, all dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

They are now in the museum in Ayutthaya, and naturally the relics are part of a shrine. While I was looking at the objects I was given a banana by the museum staff. This had been part of the offering to Buddha earlier in the day, and I was told it would bring health if I ate it. All the staff were eating bananas.

Maha That was the first place in the country that Buddha relics and treasure had been unearthed, and this sparked a wave of chedi robberies. The crypt of Wat Ratchaburana was robbed in September 1957. Inside the crypt was a gold prang, originally a metre high, which may have contained a Buddha relic. The robbers had torn it apart to make it easier to transport. The robbers were arrested but only a few pieces were recovered. It was only then that the Fine Arts Department was instructed to excavate the crypt.

Also in the crypt were Buddha images in Pala, Dvaravati, Sriwijaya, Lopburi, Sukhothai, U Thong and early Ayutthaya styles, which is pretty much all of them. There was also a set of royal utensils (jars, trays, boxes etc) including betel nut set, and a water pot with a lid topped with the faces of Brahma; and jewellery. These are also beautiful objects. Gold objects were inscribed variously with Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Arabic scripts. Royal regalia were also found. Five items symbolised kingship: crown, sword, walking stick, fly whisk and slipper. The sword was found.

The wat was founded in 1424. On the site itself there are two newer chedis. Boromaratcha II built the chedis to commemorate his brothers, who had managed to kill each other in a duel on elephantback.

The site was badly damaged in 1767 but the prang is in perfect condition, decorated with garudas, nagas etc.
You can go down to see the crypt, which was decorated in a dark red mural.

The ubiquitous mynah.

The Wat Phra Mongkhon Baphit houses a huge Buddha, 12.45 metres tall, in bronze. It is also in early Ayutthaya style. Its head and right arm were broken during the catastrophe of 1767. The viharn was restored in 1956, and it still looks very new.

At the centre of Ayutthaya, the Grand Palace was a gargantuan complex. Three concentric walls surrounded the king’s residence. There was an administrative and ceremonial area in the middle part, and Wat Phra Si Sanphet, the royal wat, stood in the outer layer. Almost nothing now remains. It housed the Phra Si Sanphet, the largest standing metal Buddha ever known. Now the Wat Phra Si Sanphet contains three chedis in a line. They were built to house the remains of three Ayutthayan kings.

It was at Si Sanphet that I finally received my own usnisha.

City of Kings remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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On Monday I walked from Manor Park to Epping via Chingford. The second part of the walk is more rural and more pleasant. The route goes through Epping Forest, which was used as royal hunting grounds from at least the twelfth century until the late Stuarts, who didn’t care for hunting much. Queen Victoria gave it to the nation in the last century, to provide a rural recreation area for the growing working population of East London. While walking I saw lots of crows, magpies, tits and robins, and a jay, a woodpecker and a skylark. Here is a peacock at Wanstead Flats.

On Tuesday, down the river from Kew to Hampton Court via Ham House. Ham House was built from 1610 and retains some interesting décor and paintings from Tudor times, and some interesting old-fashioned formal gardens.

There were snake’s head fritillaries, our only native fritillary. They grow wild at Magdalen College, Oxford, but are usually cultivated.

The first part of the path, between Kew and Teddington, is much prettier than the second. Almost all of it used to be attached to one royal palace or another, and much remains Crown land. I saw about twenty cormorants, including a group just roosting in a tree, which I have never seen before, as a fox strolled by beneath it annoying the crows.

And well over a dozen grey herons. This one was in Richmond.

All along the river from Ham House onwards you can see and hear rose-ringed parakeets in the trees. They – and the other wild parakeet species in the southeast - are descended from captive birds liberated forty or more years ago; there is a story that they escaped from Shepperton Studios during the filming of The African Queen, or were set free by Jimi Hendrix, or escaped from a container at Heathrow. All of these could be true, but there were certainly escaped parakeets in England from the nineteenth century. The ancient Greeks kept the Indian subspecies as pets, and the Romans likewise kept the African subspecies, and there are feral populations along the Rhine and in Barcelona, and in Japan and Florida. They now range, in their thousands, from Croydon to Esher; they have even been seen in Peckham. They are very pretty and very jolly, but it is likely that they displace local species such as woodpeckers, nuthatches and starlings. Like many invaders, they thrive partly because they have no natural predators.

The gardens in Hampton Court are covered in flowers right now.

Here is a deer in Bushy Park, which used to be the hunting grounds for Hampton Court Palace. The winter fur is just being moulted and the antlers are growing. There are so many deer in the park that the ground is carpeted with deer droppings.

Another heron, in Bushy Park.

On Wednesday I walked over the cliffs from Hastings to Cliff End and then along the Royal Military Canal to Winchelsea. Hasting and Winchelsea are two of the seven (yes) Cinque Ports. Hastings is kiss-me-quick hats, bingo, amusement arcades and mini golf, but also a good place for cockles, eels and whelks.

The cliffs above are covered in gorse, currently in flower.

The path goes through Fairlight, a windy place on top of the cliffs, where every cottage has a ceramic nameplate on the wall. Union and St George flags fly on poles. The natives are friendly, so long as you’re white I expect. It is part of the constituency of Hastings and Rye, which, surprisingly, has a Labour MP with a majority of 2,000. Until 1997 it was a thumping Conservative majority. The local district council has a large Conservative majority, and the local ward elected three Conservative councillors.

Winchelsea is an interesting place. You pass through a medieval gate and then have to walk half a mile to the village itself. The village used to be one of the most important ports in England, and was then much bigger. But the meadows upstream were reclaimed and farmed and the river consequently silted up.

It has an interesting church, which is merely the chancel of a much larger church. Mmm, lichen on gravestones, isn't it?

It is not clear whether the nave was ever built, as around that time the French kept on coming over to Winchelsea and sacking the place. Here, in the church of St Thomas, is Edward II, above the tomb of an admiral of the Cinque Ports.

• ***

And here are some more pictures of Nha Trang, Vietnam. A purveyor of sunglasses.

A view towards the sea.

Outside Nha Trang is a well-preserved Cham temple, called Po Nagar. It sits on a hill.

The other tourists there when I visited were Vietnamese.

It is still used, although converted now to Buddhism.

Pics of Nha Trang remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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It is slow progress. As Wallace found in Makassar:

The time of the women was almost wholly occupied in pounding and cleaning rice for daily use, in bringing home firewood and water, and in cleaning, dyeing, spinning, and weaving the native cotton into sarongs. The weaving is done in the simplest kind of frame stretched on the floor; and is a very slow and tedious process. To form the checked pattern in common use, each patch of coloured threads has to be pulled up separately by hand and the shuttle passed between them; so that about an inch a day is the usual progress in stuff a yard and a half wide.

Inevitably technology and the tourist market have changed the nature of the textiles used. Cloth was made of cotton or banana, both grown locally. Now many ikat weaves are of rayon or polyester. Modern dyes predominate too, and understandably so: they are brighter and easier to handle. Traditional dyes are indigo (for dark blue); chilli (red); saffron (yellow) and clay (brown). It is only tourists who see the old dyes as more authentic. But the very concept of authenticity is problematic, even inauthentic. Are our cars less authentic than they used to be? If local people use cloth dyed with modern dyes, are they less authentic?

The village is laid out in two parallel lines. On the left are the houses, all with horned roofs. The oldest are four hundred years old or more, and they are built without nails. All the wooden panels are carved and decorated, but the paint has faded. The roofs are thatched with bamboo, which lasts a very long time; it only has to be changed once a century. Vegetable matter grows freely in it.

Many of the houses boast columns of buffalo horns on the verandah. (Some of the houses in Flores have just the same decoration.) A pair of horns must be added each time a family member dies.

Opposite the line of houses are smaller buildings in a similar style, the rice barns. Modern Torajan houses and barns are still built in the same style. The only difference is that they are now roofed with corrugated iron.

The following day I went for a walk with Rudi. He was wearing white plimsolls and carrying nothing, which I correctly took as a signal that the walking would not be too hard.

From Lempo we again pass a lot of rice barns. They are in good condition: one states that it was built in 1905, restored (‘renopasi’) in 2006.

Each barn has a door with a buffalo design on it.

Each panel around the barn is decorated in swirly patterns, which look abstract but convey meaning; apparently they tell the story of the owner and the family.

Even in this remote village in the middle of Sulawesi flags and posters promoting the local political wannabes proliferate. A general election is approaching. Rudi, an educated man, is favourably disposed to the rule of Suharto and other generals. He says Indonesia needs a strong man to run it, and better security. SBY is too weak, so it is time to return to the family of Suharto; there will be no terrorism and plenty of jobs. [The most famous relative of Suharto is his son Tommy, who ran the state-owned car firm, Timur Putra Nasional and diverted its funds to his own companies. In 2002 he was finally convicted for the murder of a supreme court judge, but was released after only four years in 2006. Thankfully he is not running for office.]

We walk from Lempo to Berurang, where there is a church, then across the padi fields and up towards Batutumonga (‘stone look upwards’). Rantepao is surrounded by hills. The view on the walk to Batutumonga is lovely. Walking down from Batutumonga towards Pana we walk down the slopes of the highest mountain in the region, Sesean.

Every now and then we passed palms with notches cut into the trunk to enable the nimble to climb them. You see these everywhere in the region, as coconut trees are carved in the same way. Under the crown, where branches have been lopped, are bags for stoppering the flow of sap, or collecting it. These are sugar palms, Arenga saccharifera, from which palm wine and palm sugar are made. I have seen them before in Java and elsewhere. A little to the south of Tana Toraja, near Bantimurung, Wallace used to hang around the dripping sugar palms, collecting flies.

Ascending to Batutumonga Rudi’s bronchioles start whistling like a harmonica. He is asthmatic, but as an Indonesian man it is his moral duty to smoke. He talks about giving up, but with little conviction.

Heading down was quite a scramble. If there was a path, it lay elsewhere. We walked and hopped down the terrace walls, as I had done eight months before in Sapa.

At Pana there are some ancient cliff graves. The graves are carved into cliffs, perhaps to deter robbery. The doors covering the graves are very simple and very old. Each door has a buffalo design, which means that the person entombed had sacrificed 25 buffalo. Some have a human being on the front; this means that the buried person had, in life, fought bravely.

Some of the graves are so old that the doors have fallen off. Inside the niches you can see rolled up blankets. Inside the blankets are bones.

Most of the graves are about 500 years old, says Rudi; 1,000 years, says the village head. In those days, and indeed until recently, Torajans were animist. Every year the family would come and open up the door for a ceremony with the ancestors. When the time came that the hole needed to be reused by a younger occupant, the old bones would be moved to coffins, lying on the ground at the bottom of the cliff. And they would sacrifice a pig or dog or two.

Near the graves we took coffee with the kepala desa, the village chief. He has six children. Inside his house he showed me old wooden beams, and doors with carvings of people. The human figures are similar to the tau figures on the banana scarf I bought in Sankompong Sadan. They are made of jackfruit wood. They were taken inside to prevent them being stolen.

Naturally the conversation moves into Torajan language and my attention wanders towards a butterfly the size of a bat, black and white with an orange patch: a Troides species, probably. When we speak in English, they tell me that my accent is difficult to understand. It is easier for them to understand French or Italian people who speak English. I have a strong accent, they say.

A lot of antique grave doors are offered to tourists in Rantepao. They have been covered in fats and oils, and buried for a few months to antiquate them. The real antique doors are very valuable, and are kept in the houses of families or village chiefs; they are probably not for sale. And if they were, you would need an export licence.

In mid-afternoon the heavens opened and we stopped in a pavilion for Rudi have a much-needed cigarette or two. Rudi tells me that Torajans eat monkey and dog in order to get wood.

After the Bali bombing, tourism in Toraja stopped. There was also a civil war in central Sulawesi, a little to the north, which cannot have helped. The tourists have not come back in anything like their old numbers. Hotels have closed and people have lost jobs. Tourists used to visit all year round; now there is a strong peak in July and August and not much at other times.

Rudi has a degree in economics, and his wife has one in management. Yet he is a rice farmer and doesn’t like it. He wants to move his wife and children to Makassar when the two children are a little older; then he and his wife can try to get government jobs and send the children to good schools. (You would have the same aspiration in France. Not in the UK.)

The following day I go to see the livestock market at Bolu, just a few miles from Rantepao. Approaching the livestock market you pass lots of people selling vegetables on blankets by the side of the road: courgettes, spring onions, garlic, all sorts of chillis, cacao beans, aubergines, cabbage, long beans, bananas, avocado, sweet potato, carrots, ginger, tomatoes, mint, rocket, dried pigs’ fat, potatoes, taro, eggs, peanuts, squashes, limes, oranges, coconut, tobacco, Torajan coffee, betel and lime, rice (black, red and white). And that’s just what I can recognise.

Was once the beauty Abishag:

Many of them sell tuak in hollowed out bamboo cups. And most have a chicken or two on sale too.

After the groceries, you get to the market proper: pigs, trussed funereally, and cattle, washed and shining.

Each buffalo has a ring through its nose, and an attendant dressed like a cowboy.

We are only a few degrees south of the equator, and well above sea level. The white cattle suffer from sunburn.

From Bolu I took an ojek to Nanggala, where once again I saw traditional houses and rice barns. This village was more touristy than others, in that several houses were set up to sell knick-knacks. One thing the Torajans are very good at is carving wood, and I would happily have bought several of the carvings.

They were planting rice on the day I was there. Knee-deep in mud, a line of adults swept slowly up the field planting green bundles.

In another part of the field, children collected snails. It is hard work.

Afterwards, I think, I walked to Marante, where I saw a lot of well-dressed funeral figures, pretty much life sized.

These predate Christianity and are made with more seriousness than the tau tau at the funeral.

The bones go into communal coffins, and these have rotted and split to reveal gruesome piles. Sometimes a large tree trunk, carved on the outside, will be used to contain bones.

Skulls and long bones lie everywhere.

Too necromaniac: let's have some more cowboys.

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Incidentally - and obviously irrelevantly, but I am the editor here – the most famous of all ‘living fossils’ is of course… the coelacanth. (Perhaps ‘the fern’ is perhaps a better answer. Half a point for the crocodile, the shark or the ratfish, a point for a lamprey or hagfish.) The youngest fossil coelacanth is 80 million years old, and they were thought to be long extinct, but a coelacanth was caught off South Africa in 1938. (A beautiful example of how a single data point can sometimes disprove a theory.) The same J L B Smith who described the experience of being stung by a stonefish in one of my previous posts spent much of his career studying the coelacanth. Understandably, it was thought to be very rare, but at the turn of the millennium a coelacanth was found in a market in Sulawesi; and it turns out that coelacanth is present in large numbers off the coast of northern Sulawesi. Since the Indian Ocean and most of the Indo-Malay archipelago lie between these coelacanths and South Africa, the Sulawesi version may well be a different species; it is certainly a different colour.

Unlike most modern fish, coelacanths are lobe-finned fish. They are related to lungfish. It was an ancestor of the lungfish that first went walkabout on land.

Makassar was not particularly interesting, and so I soon decided to head north to Tana Toraja, where the Torajan people live. In the province of South Sulawesi (SulSel, as it is known locally), there are Buginese, Makassarese and Torajan people, and they all think they are the best, naturally. Buginese and Makassarese are Muslim; the Torajans are Christian, but not very.

While in Lombok, Alfred Russel Wallace heard about a man running amok, and the gates of the compound in which he was staying were closed. It turned out to be a false alarm. Wallace described it as a form of honourable suicide.

Macassar is the most celebrated place in the East for "running a muck." There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten, or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is the national, and therefore the honourable, mode of committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows out his brains with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages to one suicidally inclined. A man thinks himself wronged by society--he is in debt and cannot pay--he is taken for a slave or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery--he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on, with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at everyone he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets. Spears, krisses, knives and guns are brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can--men, women, and children--and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excitement of a battle. And what that excitement is those who have been in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the law into his own hands and too hastily revenged himself upon his enemy? In either case he chooses rather to "amok."

Emil, the fixer at the hotel in Makassar – spoke reasonable English, arranged tours and taxis for a sizable fee, offered repeatedly to pimp for me – offered to do a tour of Tana Toraja for me, driving me around in the hotel’s SUV. Emil was Torajan and he knew what he was talking about. But I didn’t have the budget to be driven around in a car on my own for several days, and it was no surprise that his fee was too high. Emil would have charged about $500. In the end I think the entire trip, including return transport and hotels, cost $100 or so.

So I took a bus to Rantepao: a twelve-hour ride, perfectly comfortable except for the aircon. If the bus has aircon, the ticket is more expensive and the aircon must therefore be used – even when you are in the hills and the sun has set.

The first part of the journey led up the west coast. Not far to the east, fantastic limestone outcrops burst from the earth. I had seen them from an aeroplane and they were even better at ground level.

To the west of the outcrops, the landscape is flat, and covered in paddies, egrets and buffalo, just like most of Vietnam.

The primary crop is rice. Tana Toraja is hilly country, and so the rice is cultivated in terraces. Indeed, the landscape closely resembles the countryside around Sapa in northern Vietnam.

But Toraja’s most famous crop is kopi, coffee. Indeed, if there is anything that Sulawesi is famous for it is coffee, and that coffee comes from Toraja. Most of the exported stuff is arabica, but robusta is drunk in Indonesia. In Indonesia it is ground into the finest powder, added to piping hot water and simply stirred. If the water is hot enough the grounds sink. I am constantly invited to find Torajan coffee the best in Indonesia, although in reality that in Java and Bali seems just as good to me.

I stayed in a little compound of wooden buildings run by Martin, and through him I arranged to go walking with his friend Rudi. I refused the offer of a driver and demanded an ojek – a taxi-motorcycle – which kept the cost down. I think it cost about $8 a day to hire an ojek. It is a better way to get around anyway, unless it is raining.

The most common form of public transport in Indonesia is the becak, a tricycle rickshaw. In Rantepao they are attached to a moped and are called sitor.

On the eve, I was approached by an Italian couple who asked whether they could tag along. Certo, as we shared the price of the guide. Marta works in an ethnological museum in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, not far from Milan, and Daniele works in a hotel in Rimini. Both take very good photos.

Rudi took us first to a field of megaliths and grave houses at Kalimbung Bori. Torajan graveyards are a little different. The dead stay in their own houses. A grave house is called ‘a house with no smoke’ in the Torajan language.

A traditional Torajan house is extraordinarily handsome. The roof is convex, with a saddle point in the middle, the highest points reminiscent of buffalo horns – given the buffalo fetish, this seems to me the likely source – and the gables at each end are very steeply pitched, perhaps 70 degrees.

The roof, traditionally, is covered with thick grass shoots, and replaced every few years. It is a form of thatching. The grave house is a miniature version of the same thing.

There are some Torajan objects in Marta’s museum, and so she quizzed Rudy on the symbology. I wandered off and chased butterflies at this point.

However, from what I remember, the chicken and circle symbol – which you see on every building – is called a katik. The cockerel is a symbol of liberty for the Torajan people. The circle is the moon.

The quantity of kupu kupu – butterflies – does not match those at Bantimurung to the south (qv), but they’re still impressive. Rudi tells me that kupu kupu malam – ‘night butterflies’ – does not mean ‘moths’ as you would expect, but ‘prostitutes’.

Other remains are stored in caves hollowed out of the rock. It takes weeks and many dollars to chisel out a cave from the hard rock. The bones are buried with belongings. At the entrance to the cave, to deter robbery, is a carved door. These doors are wonderful objects. More often than not, they depict a buffalo, but sometimes they have human figures.

If I ever get a grave door I want Spiderman on it.

After visiting the graveyard we attended a funeral at Malakiri. The Torajans are famous for their funerals, and it is easy to understand why anthropologists find them so interesting. A funeral is not merely a big event. Expenditure on funerals dominates everything else. A family that has to choose between a lavish funeral and the education of a child has no choice but to spend the money on the funeral. Torajans travel in large numbers, especially to Makassar, in order to earn and save lots of money – to pay for funerals.

The largest funerals last for three days. The big party is held on the second day, and this is what we visited.

Rudi taught me a few words in Torajan but I have forgotten most of them, along with about half of my Indonesian. But “thank you very much” sounds like kuré sumanga. A big house is a tongkonan. A funeral ceremony is tomate.

As in the Baliem Valley, although to a far lesser degree, pigs are important. They are sacrificed by the dozen at funerals. A tax is paid on every pig killed; 70% goes to local government, 30% to central government. The price of a pig depends, of course, on the size, and also on colour. An adult black pig costs Rp 2 million or more: over £1,000.

But buffaloes are the Torajan obsession. They are perhaps the main store of wealth. Torajan men famously take much better care of their buffaloes than their wives. You see people washing their buffaloes. Swap cow for car and it’s like walking around Surrey of a Sunday afternoon.

A buffalo, if black, will fetch Rp 40 million. A black and white buffalo is much more valuable: it is worth Rp 150-170 million: £10,000. That is, of course, a vast amount of money in the rich world. In Toraja it buys tracts of land; but the cow is more important. A black and white cow is a symbol of nobility. If a black and white cow is sacrificed, it means a high-caste person has died.

The conspicuous consumption of the obsequy challenges belief. It is as if the members and guests drove cars to the funeral and set fire to them.

We heard the funeral well before we saw it. Around a clearing, which contains old and holy stones, is arranged a set of temporary buildings shaped like an eye. In the middle of the clearing is a wooden tower. This used to contain offerings to the spirits; now, in the Christian era, it houses an enormous speaker system.

Opposite the reception area is a man in traditional gear – most guests are formally dressed, as you would expect at a funeral - and he yells into a microphone. His commentary issues from the loudspeakers at a volume sufficient to melt your entrails, and he never stops. He is like a salesman on a cable shopping channel. It is quite an art; I assume he is a funeral professional.

As we arrive he is reading out names. Each family attending brings livestock as presents. The animals must be registered for tax purposes before they can enter, and there is a large queue outside the funeral area. He announced when the formalities are over and a family can enter.

A queue: o wonder! I have not seen one all trip. It brings a nostalgic tear to the eye. Later on, the guests also queue with admirable discipline to pay their respects.

Most of the gift-animals are pigs. A buffalo is one thing: you can lead it around by the nose.

But pigs don’t cooperate, so they are trussed, so tightly that they cannot move a muscle, and carried by bamboo rods over the shoulders.

All are trussed by the same recipe. Two poles are laid down parallel to the pig’s spine, one above and one below the trunk. Bamboo planks are strung between the poles to support the pig. Then the pig is tied, very tightly, with bamboo strips. A strip goes along the body, and other strips restrict the neck, chest and waist.

The restrained pigs lie still with their eyes closed, on the whole. Every now and then a pig begins to kick and scream at great volume, and then many of the others join in. It is a piercing and distressing sound. The combination of the amplified commentary and the screaming pigs amounts to an oppressive aural siege.

Around the enclosure are the temporary buildings. There are perhaps a thousand guests in sixty or more numbered enclosures. An extended family occupies each enclosure. They have brought along their own food and booze; it is a long day. Pigs are seared in the clearing; much of the food eaten is pork.

We are invited into one of the pavilions. We are fed items prepared by the women of the party: ikan mas (‘gold fish’, probably a carp), eel, pork and vegetables, accompanied by an utterly delicious red rice. The drink of choice is tuak: rice wine. The tuak is egg-white in colour and tastes a little sour, like wine on the turn. But you get used to it.

The family of the deceased – greatly extended – are dressed in black, dripping with gold jewellery. Others are not; they are dressed in finery woven with gold.

They queue – again – and parade past the tau tau, which is dressed in a red jacket.

These days, the Torajans, being Christian, the tau tau is a crude effigy, the sort of thing they burn in Patna when slightly cross about someone. In the past it would have been a fine statue.

The queue continues past the tau tau, past the area where the animals are sacrificed – all is caked in blood and excrement – to be received in the pavilion opposite.

First, the women. Each wears a red necklace and a hat like a Vietnamese limpet hat.

But these are special funeral hats, very finely made; indeed, they are beautiful objects.

In the pavilion are hostesses – family members? paid hostesses? – dressed in gold. They receive the guests, at which point the women remove their hats. As an offering, they carry betel nuts in rather nice velvet bags.

Then come the men. They are dressed with less formality on average, although most are in sarongs. In place of betel nuts they carry cigarettes.

The name tau tau is interesting. Tau refers to the human figure in ikat woven in Sumba. The figure represents ancestors. It is a common and ancient motif in Austronesian art, and appears elsewhere in the region. The Torajan tau tau is the same thing in three dimensional form.

After the long queues pass by the pavilion, like mRNA at a ribosome, a group of women from the village offer coffee, tea and cake. Afterwards, the bereaved family moves to the second resting place. Before that, the family read out the names of all those who have donated pigs.

Traditional Torajan society is caste-based. There are three castes: high, middle and low. The low used to be slaves - no surprise there. Even low-caste families with wealth cannot have funerals like this. That’s what a caste system means, after all.

People invariably used to marry endogamously, within the caste. Nowadays Romeo and Juliet can marry between castes – although it is difficult. Such marriages raise questions. To which caste to the offspring belong? What do you do if your father supports Liverpool and your mother Everton?

Alliance between high and low is particularly frowned upon by the noble in-laws. “Don’t shove shit in my face,” they say, nobly. Their own status is reduced, they feel, if they must attend the funeral of a low-class person. I’m not completely bewildered in such society: it’s like visiting Harrogate.

Low-caste funerals last a day, and take place the day after the death. Later on, a single buffalo will be sacrificed. At a middle-class funeral, at least fifteen buffalo will be sacrificed, if I have got it right.

In Tana Toraja, as in old England, a churl can pay to become a thane. In the north you must pay 7,777 objects to the local nobles. (Objects are – you guessed it – pigs, buffaloes, etc.) In the south the magic number is 100. So the vulgar rich subsidise the impoverished nobility, like everywhere else.

We leave. It is odd that we can shut our eyes but not our ears or nostrils; so most claims in nuisance relate to noise or smell. Many other mammals are better equipped. As we leave, we pass the place where the pigs are being butchered. Blood and tripes are everywhere.

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In England, until 1752, New Year’s Day was celebrated on 25 March. It is surely a much better time of year to celebrate it than circumcision day.

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On the tour of Papua, after walking in the Baliem Valley, we spent a few days on the island of Biak (the ‘k’ is hard), a little north of New Guinea. At 45 miles long and 20 miles wide it is the largest of the islands of Cenderawasih Bay, in northwest Papua.

Upon arrival we were met by Filip, a rotund, voluble Christian. He is our fixer on Biak. Filip, it turned, out, was obsessed with Israel. His dream was to promote Biak as a tourist destination for Israeli tourists. On the wall of his house there fluttered an Israeli flag. He was planning to change the name of his company to the Zion something or other.

Our trip to Biak turns out to be a bit of a farce. Filip lies more easily than he walks. The prices we are quoted are quite absurd. He tells us, for example, that it costs $120 to hire a minibus for the day, for example; $30 would be fair. Another example: I have been looking forward to diving in Biak, but Filip quotes a price, through the only dive operation, of $180 ($50-$70 is normal for two dives). And all the while he preaches evangelical Christianity at us.

We are taken by minibus from Biak Town to the beach at Bosnik, at the southeast point of the island. The south coast is dominated, a few hundred yards inland, by raised coral cliffs. People visit Bosnik from Biak Town at weekends, and the beach is covered in broken glass. Behind the beach looms the skeleton of a resort hotel, abandoned during the economic crisis of 1997. Two people sit in a cabin by the beach. They try to charge us $5 each for the privilege of using the glassy beach – OK for the Riviera, perhaps, but not here. If the locals pay anything, it is not $5. It is just an ad hoc attempt to fleece us; it happens every time you try to pay for anything in Biak. We decline to pay anything. By this stage, we are as a group in effect refusing to deal with Filip, and were generally inclined to be cynical in dealing with any of his associates.

Some of us went snorkelling at the beach. I was expecting great things: Biak is in the middle of Cenderawasih Bay, north of New Guinea, and there is little reason for the marine life to be much disturbed. As it was I was very disappointed. Perhaps the marine fauna were affected by a tsunami, which hit in 1996. The whole experience is lame.

On the way back we visit a bird park, which is better than expected. Cassowaries wander freely throughout the park. I am very wary of them: they have strong legs and long claws, and can disembowel people quite easily. Cassowaries are native to New Guinea as well as to Australia; indeed they are the largest indigenous animal in New Guinea. Most of us give them a wide berth.

We see hornbills, cockatoos, lories and parrots, crowned pigeons and pheasant pigeons. We’re east of the Wallace Line: the cockatoos, parrots and lories would be considered Australasian birds by Wallace.

Plenty of butterflies fly around. I go chasing them and lose contact with the rest of the group.

We also stopped at a Japanese war memorial. A concrete crescent is the memorial itself. Inside it is a corridor, containing half a dozen large, shiny steel boxes. Until recently each contained the ashes of a fallen Japanese soldier; last year the ashes were taken back to Japan by the families. In front of each container are photographs of the soldiers and of their families, and prayer papers. Some of the photos are fairly new; they must be children and grandchildren.

Biak was an early stage in Macarthur’s plan to roll up the Pacific from New Guinea. Biak was strategically important, as there three airfields on the south coast. One of the airfields is now the civil airport, the transport hub of the region. The main airport, and the objective of the US operations, was the airfield at Mokmer.

Allied reconnaissance estimated that there were 2,000 Japanese soldiers on the island. In fact there were over 10,000 defenders, with tanks, and field and antiaircraft artillery. But on 9 May Japanese Imperial Command in effect abandoned it strategically, withdrawing the perimeter defence line to Sorong and Halmahera; Biak was left to its fate and the orders were to defend it to the last man. (Two days after the invasion the imperial command changed its mind and drew up plans to reinforce Biak. A few reinforcements got through.)

After three days of heavy bombing, Allied forces landed at Bosnik on 27 May 1944 with 12,000 troops and 12 tanks and 28 artillery pieces. They were allowed to land unopposed, but it was a trap. Most of the defences were concentrated around Mokmer. Once the invaders got to Mokmer they were attacked hard, and some units were forced to withdraw by sea.

(The strip was only captured on 7 June and Japanese mortar attacks kept it unusable for another week, so that the invasions of Palau and Yap did not use Biak as an airbase as originally planned. It was, however, used in the invasion of the Philippines.)

Unknown to the Allies, the island is woodwormed by coral caves and tunnels. There are tunnels to the west and north of Mokmer. Japanese forces based themselves in the caves, stockpiling food, ammunition and water, and carried out hit and run attacks. As at Iwo Jima, the fighting was slow and grim. American forces used heavy bombs and flamethrowers to capture or bury the caves.

The battle for Biak lasted from 27 May to 20 June 1944. Six thousand Japanese died, and only a few hundred prisoners were taken. The US forces lost 474 killed and 2,400 wounded, with 3,500 cases of fever.

We also visited Gua Binsari, now known as Gua Jepang, which was home to several thousand Japanese soldiers.
Between three thousand and five thousand (surely an overestimate) were killed by bombs in the cave. The hecatomb is a dismal, cold, dripping place.

Near the entrance to the cave are a few burned-out planes and guns, and a jeep.

Across the road is a room-museum where the relics have been collected: grenades, mortars, machine guns, pottery, glass bottles. Dirk recognised the helmets of Japanese officers.

As everywhere else in Indonesia, much of the land is off limits and occupied by the military. On Biak there is a large naval base.

The following day we charter a crowded minibus to Wandos, where we stay in a small stilt house for a couple of nights. Filip does not accompany us, of which we are glad.

Wandos is a nice location. The owners of the house charge us a lot of money to cook for us, but they do well by us, as we dine royally on fresh grilled snapper.

It turns out to be not worth snorkelling, as the barrier reef is too far away to reach and the intervening lagoon too shallow to swim in. We spend the time walking down the beach, on the lookout for murderous falling coconuts. They land every now and then nearby with a great thump.

Amanda walks on water at dawn.

Maurits meditates.

There are tens of thousands of hermit crabs on the beach. Every shell on the beach has a tenant. The shells are those of sea snails, and the crabs behave much like snails. They congregate wherever there is corruption, organic matter or excrement. They congregate especially on logs. They run away or retreat into their shells as you approach.

Duncan, who was nearly as keen on the crabs as I was, recently informed me that they make popular pets. There are hermit crab owners' clubs in the UK and US. Owners write tributes to their deceased hermies.

Inland is a jungle-covered hill, from which emanate raucous noises. The hill is home to cockatoos, parrots and crows.

A pair of (perhaps) sulphur-crested cockatoos patrols above the hill, squawking loudly.

Especially at dawn and dusk, red and blue parrots collect in the coconut palms by the shore and argue noisily. It is difficult to see, but there is one in this tree.

As everywhere on the coast of southeast Asia, an eagle patrols.

One morning we walk up the hill. After an hour we have seen nothing and are not at the top but the guides decide that they want to go back. But three of us press on with two guides, and I am left by default as the makeshift interpreter, without being asked. I am not happy. It is very hard walking through dense forest. You cannot see a thing; there is no chance of seeing the birds that we can see from the foot of the hill. We can only see butterflies.

There are also spiders. This an orb-weaver, Argiope species.

In Biak Town I dropped a bog roll in the mandi by mistake and abandoned it. Dirk, amazingly, retrieves it and dries it in Wandos. After his years in a prison camp he does not waste anything.

Just behind the house is a cage in which a booby sits forlornly. Every now and then it is allowed out to catch fish for its owner.

On the way back from Wandos we stop at some waterfalls. Again, it takes some negotiation to fix a price that is not ludicrous.

Some locals jump from the top for our amusement. I am not especially amused.

Our stay in Wandos is pleasant enough, without being special. It seems a strange use of our time after our trip to Baliem. The tour blurb says that there is a botanical garden near the beach, and that we can walk up the hill to see the birds. Neither is really true. Indeed the blurb on Biak as a whole is perhaps sufficiently inaccurate to found a case for misrepresentation. Kate, our tour leader, has to work absurdly hard to make anything happen, and all the prices are hyperinflated. We feel as though the locals want to strip us of cash instantly, without regard for the future. It is such a sad contrast to Bali and the rest of Indonesia, where tourism is more developed and tourists are warmly welcomed and treated well.

Biak would benefit from tourism, but at this rate it will not get much. We advised the tour company not to take any more tours there.

Biak remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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The collection was founded by Robert Grant in 1827. (Grant later taught Darwin when Darwin was studying medicine at Edinburgh.) At that time the university had no collection for teaching purposes, so Grant created one. By the time he died, in 1874, the collection had 10,000 specimens. More were added by later curators, and sadly the Museum also holds the collection of T H Huxley, which resided at Imperial College until Imperial closed its zoology department in the 1980s. The collection is now the only one in London still used for the teaching of comparative anatomy.

It is largely a collection of bones and specimens in spirit jars. You don’t go there to learn a lot about zoology. It is in some ways more interesting to the connoisseur of museums: as an exhibit in its own right. It is the epitome of the Victorian Museum. It is small, and packed with skeletons in glass cases. The exhibits are of probably limited didactic value for schoolchildren. Most specimens are anciently and illegibly labelled. Few extraneous facts are given. The cast of an Archaeopteryx specimen refers to the original specimen as being in the "British Museum". Yet it is many years since the large Victorian cathedral of science in South Kensington has been referred to as the British Museum (Natural History) rather than the Natural History Museum, although formally its name changed only in 1993.

Some of the labels in the Zoology Museum in Cambridge are equally old: one of the stuffed birds of paradise – Prince Rudolf’s bird of paradise - is labelled as coming from British Central New Guinea.

There are ten known specimens of Archaeopteryx, all from the Solnhofen limestones in Bavaria. The first, a single feather, is now in the Humboldt Museum, Berlin. It may not be from Archaeopteryx at all. The first skeleton was found in 1861 and sold to the Natural History Museum. Both the slab and the counterslab are in display, in different rooms. The counterslab has a jaw with teeth.

Most of the other specimens remain in Germany. One has gone missing. They may not all be the same species.

Some of the specimens are of extinct animals.

There are a couple of central rock rats in a jar. These Australian rodents have not been seen alive for years and are probably extinct.

There are some long bones and vertebrae from a dodo. The dodo, Raphus cucullatus, became extinct in the 1680s, well before the museum was founded, and there is no museum with a complete dodo skeleton.

There are also a couple of examples of the quagga, Equus quagga quagga, an animal like a zebra. Darwin writes about them in The Origin of Species (1859) in the same way he discusses the zebra and the ass; they were still alive. They were hunted to extinction, the last quagga dying in captivity nine years after Grant was extinguished. The only quagga photographed was at London Zoo in 1870. One of the skeletons was part of Grant’s collection; the specimen in a few pieces in a spirit jar was dissected by T H Huxley.

And there is a skull of a thylacine, also known as a Tasmanian tiger (but actually a marsupial predator closely resembling a dog) which became extinct in 1936.

And there are some other interesting exhibits:

Quite a few sea mice, with what looks like iridescent fur. They are actually marine polychaete bristleworms, Aphrodite aculeata.

An elephant heart, which weighs between 20 and 30 kilos.

A bell jar full of moles.

An egg of an elephant bird. These went extinct, in Madagascar, in the 1700s. I would estimate it to be eight times the size of an ostrich egg.

• **

In Hanoi, a few miles from the city centre, is the Ethnology Museum. It is well worth a trip. It is popular with Vietnamese, some of whom to have wedding photos taken.

Vietnam has fifty-odd peoples within its borders – although one of these, the Kinh (or Việt), is top dog. The Kinh make up 86% of the population of the country, and are in the majority everywhere except in the highlands of the north, where there are more Tay, Hmong and Dao.

At the museum, people are defined linguistically and split into Austroasiatic; Austronesian; Thai-Kadai; Hmong-Yao; and Sino-Tibetan. I met plenty of all of these on my trip.

The Austroasiatics include speakers of Viet-Muon and Mon-Khmer languages, and there are about 80 million of them in all. There are two national languages in the group: Vietnamese and Khmer. Twenty-five ethnic groups speak these languages in Vietnam. There are nearly a million Khmer in Vietnam, largely in the Mekong delta (which is just downstream from Cambodia).

Austronesian languages are spoken in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Micronesia, New Guinea, Polynesia and Taiwan (the last being where they radiated from). There are about 200 million speakers, but only 9 million on the mainland of Asia. Most Austronesian speakers in Vietnam live in the central highlands. The language of Champa was Austronesian, as are the Ê Ðê and Gia Rai languages.

In all there are about 75 million speakers of Thai-Kadai languages, mainly in Vietnam, China, Laos, Burma, India and Thailand (look at a map and you can see that none of these countries is far from the others). Originally the language group came from China. The group includes Thai and Lao. They are said to be distantly related to Mon-Khmer and Vietnamese languages. In Vietnam its languages are spoken by eight ethnic groups, mainly in the northern hills.

Hmong-Yao languages are spoken by about 8 million people in Vietnam, China, Burma, Laos and Thailand. The Hmong, with 6.5 million people, are the largest group in the family. They are also largely in the north.
Finally, the Sino-Tibetan group is, not surprisingly, the world’s largest, with 1.2 bn native speakers. There is not much point trying to say where it is spoken; perhaps it is not widely spoken in Antarctica. Most within the group speak Han (Sinitic) languages. The Tibeto-Burmese branch has only 56 million speakers. In Vietnam the Chinese are known as Hoa; there are nearly a million of them, half of whom live in Saigon.

It is confusing enough – as my blog on Sapa showed – but without visiting the museum I would not have had a clue.

Within the grounds are quite a number of authentic buildings.

One highlight was a longhouse built by the Bahnar. (I saw several very similar on my trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.) Around the buildings swarmed schoolchildren: “hello!”.

Another was a huge communal longhouse built on site by Ê Ðê people. It is over forty metres long. It is modelled on a longhouse in the region of Buôn Ma Thuột. Some longhouses were 200 metres long in the past. Sadly, the longhouse tradition has disintegrated since the 1980s.

Like most tradition buildings in southeast Asia, the building is supported on stilts. You enter by climbing up a tree trunk with notches in it. There is a verandah at each end, and the main entrance faces north.

When people sleep in it, they have to keep their feet pointing west. The main utensils and stores of value seem to be the large pottery jars, in which wicked rice wine is kept – and gongs.

Another interesting building was the Giaray funeral house, built by five Giarai Arap villagers in 1968. Around the sides are wildly pornographic sculptures carved from tree trunks with adzes and cutlasses. They symbolise fertility and birth, of course. It is built for just one funeral, and abandoned afterwards. I like the expression on this guy’s face.

The Cotu tomb was built in 2005. It is built for the second funeral of a high-ranking dead person. The coffin is exhumed and placed on a carved tree trunk. On the top of the tomb and elsewhere are handsome carvings of buffalo heads, blackened with dye made from charcoal, brown tubers and sugarcane juice.

Ethnology Museum remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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In three days in Ayutthaya and Sukhothai I visited twenty-odd wats and three museums. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Ayutthaya is nearer Bangkok (80 km or so north; two hours by commuter train; 15 baht) and I visited it first, but I’ll mention Sukhothai first because its golden age preceded that of Ayutthaya. Sukhothai is a long way further north of Ayutthaya, at 17º N 100º E.

In the ninth and tenth centuries the Khmer kingdom, which took over the area now corresponding to Cambodia in the first half of the ninth century, pushed into Vietnam, Laos, China and northeast Thailand. Their culture was Hindu, although the Khmer leaders converted to Mahayana Buddhism in the late twelfth century. Their religious architecture therefore includes the usual Hindu pantheon, particularly Shiva and Vishnu. Like the Chams in Vietnam, they often worshipped Shiva in his impersonal form as a linga. The most notable architectural style is the prang, a tower shaped like a cob of corn. Again like the Chams, and like the later kings of Ayutthaya, the king was a remote, all-powerful devaraja, a god-king, a living embodiment of Shiva.

During the period when northeast Thailand was within the mandala of Angkor, ethnic Tais pushed down in large numbers from southern China into what are now Thailand and Laos. The land became known as ‘Syam’.

Jayavarman VII reigned from 1181 to 1219, and he spent so much on temples and monks that the economy “overreached itself” (I’m not sure what this means exactly; it wouldn’t have been a property bubble, since these wats would not have been traded. There was cash money, but the economy was not highly monetised. More likely, therefore, that the state’s use of the main factor of production – by corvée - crowded out other activities, particularly those that required a food surplus, such as military defence). Shortly afterwards the empire began to fall apart. The collapse was finally provoked by the invasion by Kublai Khan’s Mongol hordes between 1215 and 1250. The fact that there was bubonic plague at the time may also have contributed, as it did to the decline of the Roman Empire – for which see the entertaining Justinian’s Flea.

The Mongol invasion also forced the Thais to unite among themselves to face the threat. At this time Sukhothai, which is now in the middle of Thailand, was the main Khmer outpost in the region. Two Thai princes joined up to force the weakened Khmers out of Sukhothai. One of the princes became king Intradit and founded a dynasty known as Phra Ruang. At first it was as local as the Capet kingdom in the Île de France, but it expanded under the reign of Intradit’s youngest son, Ramkhamhaeng, ‘Rama the bold’. Ramkhamhaeng expanded south along the Chao Praya valley and, mainly by marrying his children wisely, gained supremacy over most of Thailand, and parts of Laos and Burma.

Several momentous events occurred in the reign of Ramkhamhaeng. The earliest example of Thai script is on a stone from Sukhothai dating from 1292. In it Ramkhamhaeng records how he came to the throne, what a wonderful ruler he is and what he has done. “Sukhothai is ranked in the top six places in the world for ease of doing business”, he says. "The green goods sector is the sixth largest in the world. We have one of the lowest rates of work-related deaths and injuries in the known world." Or something.

He also records that in 1283 he invented a script for the Thai language. This was not the first writing to be used in Thailand, as Pallava script is found from the seventh to the ninth centuries, Khmer script from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, and Mon from the eleventh century to the present day. But it was the first Thai writing, Lai Sue Thai, and in 1992 its 700th anniversary was celebrated with great ceremony.

The early Sukhothai script had 39 consonants, 20 vowels and two accent signs. Unlike Pallava and Khmer, and modern Thai, the vowels were incorporated into the main line of consonants, rather than floating over or under. The letters and words are therefore easier to distinguish than in modern Thai, which has 44 consonants, 26 vowels and four accent signs. The Sukhothai stone is so important that it is on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, whatever that is.

Ramkhamhaeng also started building temples, and he espoused Theravada Buddhism instead of the Mahayana Buddhism then practised by the Khmer leaders. Ninety per cent of the population of Thailand are now Theravada Buddhists. In 1284 he ordered the building of a chedi at Si Satchanala. The wats at Lopburi, Sukhothai and Si Satchanala date from this time until the fifteenth century.

Sukhothai – and therefore Thai - Buddhism is syncretic. It encompasses large parts of Hinduism. So not only were the Khmer temples in Sukhothai converted to Buddhist use, but the Hindu icons remained. Even now, Thais worship Hindu gods, especially Vishnu (including his seventh incarnation, Rama), Shiva and Ganesh; the Ramayana was reworked into the Ramakien, as I have mentioned before; and garudas and nagas are seen all over temples in Thailand.

Ramkhamhaeng possessed great influence, but the alliance fell apart soon after his death, and by 1320 Sukhothai was back to being a merely local kingdom. It became a mere province of the kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1438, six years after Ayutthaya had captured Angkor.

After the Burmese invasion of 1766-7 Sukhothai was abandoned, and the local administrative centre moved at some unknown date to a new town 12 km to the east, known, confusingly, as Sukhothai. That is where most of the tourists stay and it is a nice place, full of Italian tourists.

Sukhothai also gives its name to an architectural and artistic style. Sukhothai Buddhas have oval, androgynous faces, relatively slim bodies and long fingers - about four feet long in this case.

His robes cling diaphanously. And the Buddha has a serene, not to say positively happy, expression. The Buddha may have achieved absolute renunciation of earthly desires, but he seems to be chuffed to bits about it.

Before the development of figurative images of the Buddha, in the early centuries of the common era, the Buddha was indicated by symbols: the Dhammachakra (Wheel of Law), umbrellas and footprints. The Buddha’s footprint, the Buddhapada, is found in India and Sri Lanka from the second century BC, and the tradition of footprints began in Thailand by the seventh century AD. There are quite a few around Sukhothai. Here is one at Wat Tra Phang Thong, which dates from 1359 AD.

Although seated Buddha images are more common, the image for which Sukhothai is known the walking Buddha in the round, which depicts the Buddha returning from preaching to his mother in Tāvatiṃsa heaven. He has one foot forward and one hand raised in the policeman’s ‘stop’ position. These Buddhas are known from the 13th/14th centuries onwards.

In a day in Sukhothai I rented a bike and visited eight wats and two museums.

Within the precincts of the town is the Heritage Site, which has been extensively reconstructed. Much of the restored Sukothai is on the water, and there are bright flowers everywhere: it is reminiscent of Augusta National, and indeed it could be a grand golf course, but for all the temples.

Wat Phra Mahathat is a wonderful, very extensive site. It was the royal temple of Sukhothai, and it grew to be so big that it had one bot, ten viharns, eight mondops and over 200 chedis. All of these were made of red brick or laterite, and covered in stucco.

At the centre, and still-standing, is a late Sukhothai innovation, the lotus-bud chedi.

On each side of the main chedi are two very large walking Buddhas.

Also visiting the wat was a party of a hundred monks from Sri Lanka. Thailand got much of its Theravada tradition and practice from Sri Lanka, and the religious links are close. The monks were toting cameras and buying souvenirs like any other tourist.

They were due to go to Bangkok for a ceremony at the royal palace over New Year. I chatted to one of them – it was nice to meet a Buddhist monk who could speak English fluently – and he gave me his card and we agreed to go and watch some cricket in Colombo one day.

Wat Si Sawai dates originally from the twelfth centuries, predating the Sukhothai kingdom. It has three Khmer prangs built in Lopburi style, with low bases and decorated with stucco, decorated with nagas and garudas.

The prangs are made of brick with stucco, and the pillars are of laterite. There were images of Hari-Hara (a combination of Vishnu and Shiva) and of Vishnu as a linga. The later Buddhists simply built a viharn next to the prangs and turned it into a Buddhist temple. Little remains of the viharn.

Wat Traphang Ngoen is another lotus bud chedi, with four niches for Buddhas.

There is a viharn, and a nearby bot surrounded by water.

Wat Sa Si is a brick bell-shaped chedi in Sri Lankan style.

Wat Sorasak is a heavily restored bell-shaped chedi. Its base is surrounded by elephant buttresses.

Wat Phra Phai Luang was, like Wat Si Sawai, a thirteenth-century Hindu prasad later converted into a Buddhist temple. It was probably the centre of the old Khmer town. Again there used to be three prangs, of which only one remains.

At Wat Si Chum an enormous square mandapa almost entirely surrounds a large seated Buddha, again in smiley Sukhothai style, late thirteenth century.

The mandapa has a staircase, which allows one to climb to the level of the Buddha’s face. In principle the staircase could be used to project a voice from the level of the Buddha’s head down to worshippers below. Indeed, there is a tradition that this Buddha speaks to certain privileged people. One of the kings of Ayutthaya, King Naresuan, assembled his troops here before marching on Sawankhalok in the mid-fifteenth century, and he probably got the Buddha to do his talking.

Excess wattage remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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• ***

It is not often that Ambon is in the news, but a new species of frogfish has recently been discovered there. It has white stripes on a caramel background. It is shaped like other frogfish – round, with hand-shaped pectoral fins – but it bounces around the bottom of the sea like a rubber ball. There is a video here.

Of Ambon, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote

Passing up the harbour, in appearance like a fine river, the clearness of the water afforded me one of the most astonishing and beautiful sights I have ever beheld. The bottom was absolutely hidden by a continuous series of corals, sponges, actinic, and other marine productions of magnificent dimensions, varied forms, and brilliant colours. The depth varied from about twenty to fifty feet, and the bottom was very uneven, rocks and chasms and little hills and valleys, offering a variety of stations for the growth of these animal forests. In and out among them, moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusa floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a coral sea. There is perhaps no spot in the world richer in marine productions, corals, shells and fishes, than the harbour of Amboyna.

Sadly, this is no longer true of Ambon Bay. It is a filthy, rubbish-strewn environment, full of plastic. On the Pelni ferry from Banda we had watched from the café at the stern as tons of refuse were thrown over the side during the twelve-hour journey. Put your rubbish in a bin and the bin is thrown over the side. Much of the rubbish floats. Ambon Bay is a narrow, dactylic inlet, and the refuse accumulates. So the coral has mostly gone. But it is a very good muck dive spot.

As I mentioned before, it was Pieter Bleeker who collected nearly 800 species of fish from the bay, and Wallace met him. (He refers to him as Dr Blecker.)

I went on Sunday, by invitation, to see a collection of shells and fish made by a gentleman of Amboyna. The fishes are perhaps unrivalled for variety and beauty by those of any one spot on the earth. The celebrated Dutch ichthyologist, Dr. Blecker, has given a catalogue of seven hundred and eighty species found at Amboyna, a number almost equal to those of all the seas and rivers of Europe. A large proportion of them are of the most brilliant colours, being marked with bands and spots of the purest yellows, reds, and blues; while their forms present all that strange and endless variety so characteristic of the inhabitants of the ocean. The shells are also very numerous, and comprise a number of the finest species in the world. The Mactras and Ostreas in particular struck me by the variety and beauty of their colours. Shells have long been an object of traffic in Amboyna; many of the natives get their living by collecting and cleaning them, and almost every visitor takes away a small collection. The result is that many of the commoner-sorts have lost all value in the eyes of the amateur, numbers of the handsome but very common cones, cowries, and olives sold in the streets of London for a penny each, being natives of the distant isle of Amboyna, where they cannot be bought so cheaply. The fishes in the collection were all well preserved in clear spirit in hundreds of glass jars, and the shells were arranged in large shallow pith boxes lined with paper, every specimen being fastened down with thread. I roughly estimated that there were nearly a thousand different kinds of shells, and perhaps ten thousand specimens, while the collection of Amboyna fishes was nearly perfect.

The problem with preserving fish - or any animal - in spirits is that the colours are largely lost. The reef fish in spirit bottles on display at the Cambridge Museum of Zoology are unrecognisable from colour alone, and the same is true of the snakes on display at the Snake Museum in Bangkok.

Wallace found the extraordinary, iridescent blue Papilio ulysses to be “absolutely common” in Ambon. No longer, although you do see this butterfly pinned and mounted everywhere in SE Asia. It, the Priam birdwing, Ornithoptera priamus, and the Atlas moth are the centrepieces of many of these mosaics.

Wallace also picked up specimens of the crimson lory, Eos rubra, and of “the fine racquet-tailed kingfisher of Amboyna, Tanysiptera nais, one of the most singular and beautiful of that beautiful family.” The latter was a new species.

The main town of the island, Kota Ambon, is a rather ugly place and I never learned to like it.

Apparently it used to be much cleaner and friendlier place, but the internecine violence at the turn of the millennium scarred the fabric and the psyche.

I was happy to get out of town and head a few kilometres south to Maluku Divers. There is good reef diving and muck diving in Ambon. As for the reef diving, it is worth paying an extra $20 to dive at Pulau Tiga, where there are some thrilling dives with significant currents, more interesting diving than the reefs on the south coast. And the muck diving in Ambon Bay is absolutely excellent. Great detail follows.

Hukurila Cave. This would have been a very nice dive if the dive guide had taken his time in the cave. But I was not very happy with my equipment – couldn’t keep the regulator in my mouth and was overweighted – and we went deeper than I am comfortable with, particularly without a dive computer – to 35 metres. Saw a big green turtle and some snapper, a couple of nudibranchs, lots of filefish and tobies, some two-tone dartfish, juvenile red-finned rainbow wrasse, and big spiny lobster, but fish not really present in the vast quantities of Manado or the Bandas.

Tanjung Hukurila. A small lionfish, lots of small shrimp (mainly banded), several nudis including a pair of Phyllidia ocellata and a tiny black and green Nembrotha. Quite a lot of red-tooth triggerfish sleeping in niches. A hawksbill, resting, up close. Very big for a hawksbill. Some very big anemonefish. Nce colourful coral. Visibility ordinary. Two-tone dartfish and fire dartfish. A big scorpionfish.

Hata Ala, Pulau Tiga. A thrilling dive. Down to the depths (34 m) with a strong current, hold on and watch. Lots of pelagics: mainly dogtooth tuna, wahoo, and a big Napoleon up close. Lots of emperor angelfish. They also see reef sharks and barracuda here, but not today. Visibility adequate. Swimming, against and across the current, into the shallows: saw a very small yellow moray with orange nostrils, a purple scorpionfish, millions of red-tooth triggerfish (the lunate tails are crossed, and they stick out of the holes in which they sleep).

Pulai Lain. Headed down to a cliff edge at 30m and held on against the current. Another great spot. Watched big fish playing like birds in the current. Two Napoleons, one clown triggerfish, lots of black surgeonfish and silver unicornfish. A big scorpionfish and a couple of cowries right behind the spot where I hung on. One of the Napoleons seemed to be sheepdogging a school of surgeonfish. Lots of great soft coral in the shallows, and blue and gold angelfish.

Rhino City, Ambon Bay. An amazing dive, to 25 m, some currents. Right at the beginning, a kind of silvery-coloured lacy scorpionfish, Rhinopias aphanes, with eyes like mirrors. A fingered dragonet, Dactylopus dactylopus. Blue-lined tang. Big black stonefish. Purple scorpionfish. Yellow/orange leaf scorpionfish. A school of ten squid, changing colours. A little seamoth, probably Eurypegasus draconis. Lots of hinge-beak shrimp and banded boxer shrimp. Two ribbon eels, one in the middle of changing sex (they change from male to female). A huge, probably a pregnant map pufferfish, just sitting there. Lots of little pufferfish and burrfish. A juvenile angelfish, possibly blue-ringed. Juvenile dragonet, tiny, less than 1 cm, white with a red patch. Several tiny yellow boxfish, about 1 cm across. A very long black pipefish. A giant frogfish, black, with a tiny white lure. Thornyback cowfish. A big solar-powered nudibranch. Two Jorunna rubescens nudis, one chasing the other, its mating organs already out. A long dark red nudi, Ceratosoma gracillinum. A Nembrotha rutilans, white with brown patches. And two other types of nudi.

Laha, Ambon Bay. Current, poor visibility at 15 m or so. A sea horse, dark brown, unresponsive. Three lionfish, of two different kinds, one a black version of common lionfish, the other smaller, possibly zebra lionfish. 1 small purple scorpionfish. An urchin crab, Zebrida adamsii, living on a fire urchin. Lots of fire urchins, which are very attractive. Two ribbon eels. A small moray, apparently guarded by a flutemouth. An octopus in a niche. A flounder. Three big fish, perhaps Spanish mackerel. A school of razorfish with a cornetfish in the middle. A thorny-back cowfish with a cornetfish swimming permanently above it. Lots of burrfish. Squat shrimp. And seven species of nudibranch: possibly scrolled Hypselodoris, H. infucata, Flabellina bicolor, Favorinus pacificus, Phyllodesmium longicirrum, Ceratosoma miamiranum, and Mexicilromis.

Amboyna remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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From Lovina we travelled to Gunung Batur, the second-highest peak in Bali. On the way we stopped at Gitgit waterfalls.

On the Java-Bali-Lombok tour we climbed to the rim of Rinjani, Lombok’s highest mountain; visited a temple on the slopes of Gunung Agung in Bali; climbed Gunung Batur in Bali; and climbed Mount Bromo in the Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park in East Java.

All of these mountains are volcanic. Every hill of any size from the north of Sumatra to the eastern tip of Nusa Tenggara is a volcano, and most of them are active. The biggest eruption in the recorded history of the world took place in the area – and it wasn’t Krakatau.

The big eruption was Mount Tambora on Sumbawa, in April 1815. 160 cubic km of ashes and rocks were ejected, and the energy released was four times that released by the eruption of Karakatau in 1883. The height of the volcano fell from 4,200m to 3,090m in one day – now it is 2,850 m - and over 50,000 people died. 1816 became known as the year without a summer, as ash from the eruption blanketed the Earth, and it was the worst famine in the nineteenth century. Incesant rainfall in Switzerland in July forced Mary Shelley's holiday party to stay indoors and make up horror stories. (Hers was partly inspired by the work of Erasmus Darwin.) The dust-reddened sunsets were nice, though; they may have inspired some of Turner's paintings.

The eruptions and earthquakes are caused by the collision between the Indo-Australian Plate and the Asian Plate. The former is subducted under the latter, which creates very deep trenches south of Java – more on this another time, perhaps.

We stayed on the rim of the caldera of Batur at Kalibaru, about 1,500m above sea level, in a nice hotel called the Lakeview Hotel. Indeed, most of the hotels on the Java-Bali tour were splendid. The hotel is ugly, faced in pumice and looks like a castle or a prison, but there is a balcony looking over the caldera, and a really nice bathroom.

In the caldera is a lake and a volcano, Batur, which last erupted in 1994. The valcano has several vents.

The slopes facing the hotel are dark and bare. The lava looks new, but in fact it dates from 1963. Next to the 1963 flow are older flows, including one that submerged a village; the inhabitants relocated to the caldera rim.

We rose at three o'clock in the morning to climb the mountain. Contrary to the claims of some members of the party, it was an easy climb. It took less than an hour to get to the coffee post, where we watched the dawn.

Then it took us another 45 minutes to climb the loop path around the highest crater. On the walk around the summit we passed fumaroles and hissing, hot rocks.

Around the coffee post macaques fought each other or just admired the view.

The following day we stopped at Puri Besakih, the holiest temple of Bali.

The puri is actually a large series of Hindu temples. Entry to the temples themselves is not permitted to non-Hindus. We encountered another procession.

The temple is situated under Gunung Agung, Bali’s highest mountain.

Gunung Agung erupted catastrophically in 1963, killing thousands. The lava flowed all the way to the sea. As so often happens, the eruption was taken to be a judgment of the gods: the catastrophe also coincided with the most important festival in the Balinese Hindu calendar for a century. It is a mystery why the gods persist in speaking elliptically.

We also stopped off at Semarapura, usually known as Klung Kung. The remnants of the Javanese Majapahit state moved to Bali in the sixteenth century, and their descendants moved here in 1710. Here was the last capital of the last kingdom in Bali, the Gelgel dynasty. In April 1908 the Dutch decided to take over Bali properly rather than running it as a client state. They attacked the palace at Klung Kung. Rather than surrender, the king and all the inhabitants of the palace committed a puputan (a mass suicide), by walking en masse towards the Dutch guns. The Dutch destroyed the palace, and little is left standing.

But there is a museum and a couple of bale (pavilions), with wayang-style pictures that have, necessarily, been heavily restored: pictures fade very quickly in this climate.

Lovina to Semarapura remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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• ***

After leaving Ubud we went to Lovina, and on the way we visited three temples.

Taman Ayun is a Hindu temple dating from 1640. It is designed in three circles, each surrounded by a moat. It has 11 pagodas, representing 11 mountains. In Bali, good spirits live in the mountains and bad spirits and the dead live in the sea and on the beaches.

As we entered there was a procession, with chanting, drumbeats and song.

Not all visitors were welcome.

Tanah Lot is a Hindu temple on the coast and a big tourist destination.

The swell hits the rocks and bounces up dramatically.

The temple is on an island that is accessible at low tide. A lot of worshippers dressed in yellow and white brought offerings. In return for a donation, I was blessed and dabbed with rice on the forehead, on the temples and in the jugular notch, and a frangipani flower was poked on to my ear. I don’t believe in it, of course, but a frangipani in the ear is always a good thing.

At Tanah Lot there some people offer tourists the chance to be photographed with pythons. A big fruit bat hangs outside a shop.

For 1,000 rupiah you can feed it some mango, and everyone is a winner. When the bat ate the mango it closed its eyes in apparent ecstasy.

At Ulun Danu Batur, a temple on a lake, we encountered Russian tourists wearing virtually nothing: a skimpy bikini covered by a transparent shawl. This is not how you dress in a temple in Indonesia. Time was when Russian tourists were arguably the most cultured in the world, possessed of a Soviet education that was second to none except in matters of religion and economics. There weren’t many Russian tourists in those days, of course. Russian tourists in Bali are the lowest of the low: blond, crewcut rottweilers.

Ubud to Lovina remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Cyclos at rest

Fujian assembly hall.

Incense spirals at the Fujian assembly hall.

Old town shophouses.

Ferry.

Ferrywoman.

Umbrella.

Tourist group from Bangkok.

On the river.

Kite.

No FT, no comment.

Hội An: further pics remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Here is a paddy field somewhere on the north coast of Bali.

Ubud receives large numbers of tourists, but succeeds in retaining its own character. One place, however, that is overrun is the central market, which sells items only to tourists. The woven items are often rather nice.

Others I am less sure about.

There are a number of temples with very attractive sculptures. Each temple is guarded by sarong-wrapped spirits such as Barong.

This is the old royal palace.

Sometimes the statues seem to be evil spirits. This is Rangda, the demon queen.

The Monkey Forest is full of macaques.

There are about 300 of them in the forest, including 35 adult males, living in three clusters.

Their canines are huge.

They are used to humans. They see humans as a source of food, and they hunt in packs. They will mug anybody, robbing them of any item they consider interesting.

A monkey stole Dick’s videotape while we were looking around the Pura Dalem Agung.

I ran after the monkey and tried to grab the tape back. The monkey bared its teeth and its friends arrived. The monkeys will scratch and bite, and some monkeys in Indonesia carry rabies, so I bravely ran away.

Ubud remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Rower seeks punters.

Japanese covered bridge.

Roof tile, Japanese covered bridge.

Dog guardian, Japanese covered bridge.

Roof decoration at a Chinese temple.

Waterfront of the old town.

Painted turtles at the Quan Cong temple.

Carp gargoyle at the Quan Cong temple. The carp is a symbol of longevity.

Quan Cong temple. There are a lot of temples to Quan Cong in Vietnam. He was, apparently, a Wu general of the Three Kingdoms Period, who died in 249, a talented and virtuous general, celebrated for loyalty, courage, piety and moderation. He is also – and here I am quite lost – the embodiment of Thanh Long (Blue Dragon) and Bach Ho (White Tiger).

Chinese checkers outside the Chaozhou assembly hall. As in many places in southeast Asia, each Chinese congregation in Hội An has its own assembly hall, a combined temple and social club.

Many of the assembly halls are decked with gaudy, indeed kitsch, ceramic roof decorations. They are also pretty lively in Saigon and in Bangkok. Here is the Chaozhou assembly hall.

A street in the old town.

Hội An: more pics remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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In 1611 the governor of the VOC, Pieter Both, sent a big fleet to Banda. They built Fort Belgica, at vast cost, on the hill above Fort Nassau. (Indeed, Fort Nassau is an eccentric place to build a fort, since it is more or less at sea level, and overlooked by the hill next to it. Belgica still stands, and has been restored. Nassau is in ruins, destroyed by the guns of Belgica.) The fleet sailed to Ternate before launching any attacks. So it was the next governor general, Gerald van Reijnst, who was ordered to complete the control of the islands.

In 1611, encouraged by Hudson’s reports of a fertile land, the first Dutch traders arrived in Manhattan, wedged between the two English colonies in Virginia, in land which King James regarded as belonging to England. They lived in shacks and did not stay long. But in 1623 the Dutch West India Company transported colonists to the area it now called New Holland. Soon the Dutch built a fort, a copy of Fort Belgica in Banda Neira. Its outlines included Beaver Street, Broad Street, Pearl Street, Broadway, Park Row and Fourth Avenue.

By 1611 the East India Company had factors all over the east, looking for markets for English goods. But they rarely stayed long, usually fell sick – the life expectancy for a factor was three years – and the survivors often went bankrupt.

In 1613 John Jourdain sailed to Ambon, where he suggested to the Dutch that he might buy cloves from them, and was denied in strong language. In Seram he met Jan Pieterszoon Coen for the first time (they had a blazing row), and managed to trade a little. In Bantam he found that the English factors had split into two groups that did not talk to each other. He was himself appointed chief factor of Bantam by the commander of the tenth Company expedition. He saw Banda as the future of the spice trade, and tried in vain to get the Company to send more ships there.

In 1614 Jourdain sent two ships with the intention of leaving English factors on the islands. They arrived at a time when the Dutch governor general was there with over a thousand soldiers. Cokayne was told that the Dutch had the right to all the Banda islands. Ball and Cokayne sailed to Ai and the Dutch were unable to follow owing to contrary winds. The islanders immediately consented to the building of a permanent factory. Sophony Cozuke, possibly a Kazakh, was left behind with a few other men.

The new governor general, Gerald van Reijnst, sailed in 1615 with an army of 1000 men. He demanded the entire crop of the islands; the Bandanese demanded that he level the forts. Van Reijnst, unable to tolerate the English presence, ordered the invasion of Ai for the morning of 14 May 1615. A thousand Dutch soldiers and Japanese mercenaries were landed against Ai’s 500 defenders. But the defensive fortifications were designed to be abandoned in modular fashion, so that as the Dutch took each fortification they remained under fire from higher up. The islanders’ marksmanship was far more accurate than expected. (It seems the English had trained the islanders and designed the fortifications.) The Dutch took the island on 14 May, all except for a fort at the top of the hill. The “Bandanezars” counterattacked during the night, and drove the invaders. The Dutch force suffered 36 dead and 200 wounded. What a humiliation. Reijnst died several months later.

So in 1616 the VOC sent Admiral Jan Dirksen ‘t Lam to the Bandas with twelve ships and over a thousand men. His sole instruction: to take Ai. Sophony Cozucke sailed to Bantam with one of the local headmen to plead for English reinforcements. In return he offered an English monopoly on the spice of Ai. Jourdain sent Samuel Castleton with five ships in January 1616.

Lam immediately ordered the invasion of Pulau Ai. At this point Castleton realised that his adversary was the same man who had assisted Castleton in an action against the Portuguese three years earlier. Sensible of his obligation, he offered Lam a deal: he would leave the islands in return for freedom of trade with Ai once the invasion was complete. Deal done, he sailed to Seram to deal in cloves. Castleton must have thought this an honourable solution, but it was a shameful act that sold out the islanders of Ai and went against the interests of his employer and his country.

The islanders of Ai and Run formally surrendered their islands to the last English factor on Ai, Richard Hunt. It was a desperate act. The Dutch invaded anyway and took the island after two days of fighting. Most of the defenders escaped to Run, but many capsized in rough waters and over 400 people drowned.

Lam built a fort on the island, named it Fort Revenge and installed a garrison. Only a part still stands, next to the remains of one of the grand plantation villas. Lam drew up an agreement with the Ai islanders, leaving only Run outside their formal authority. To pick the nutmeg he brought in slaves from Siau, north of Halmahera, and from Solor. But nutmeg has to be picked at precisely the right time, then dried in the sun or in a kiln. The slaves concentrated their energies on trying to escape, so the Dutch received little nutmeg.

Although the two countries were not formally at war, their two Indies companies behaved as if they were. In 1613 representatives met to draw up a peace agreement. Among the Dutch representatives was Hugo Grotius, the great scholar of international law. Grotius argued that a country must erect a some building before it could claim possession of land; the Company said that landing was the key, and it got to Run first (and this was also the basis of the king’s claim to the east coast of North America, which the Cabots had visited in an expedition sponsored by Henry VII).

During the second conference the VOC team proposed a merger, which would have been an early version of Unilever or Royal Dutch Shell. (It was a good idea. The combined monopoly would have driven the Spanish out of the area and bought spices as a monopsonist. Naturally, the English company rejected it.) By 1615 the talks broke down.

In October 1616 Jourdain sent Nathaniel Courthope to Run with two ships. He was to meet the islanders and ask whether they stood by their former surrender of the island to Richard Hunt. They did, and they confirmed it in writing, binding over Run and Ai to King James and promising to sell nutmeg and mace only to England. The flag of St George was raised and a two-day feast was held.

So Courthope set about organising Run’s defences against the inevitable attack. He fortified the islet of Neijalakka, connected to Run at low tide, and built a fort on the cliff above the village of Run. The forts were armed with cannons from the ships.

The Dutch, when they found out about the batteries, did not attack for a long time. It was easier to blockade the island, which was not self-sufficient in food and had no source of fresh water.

One of Courthope’s ships, the Swan, was taken by the Dutch as it sailed back from receiving the formal surrender of the islanders of Rozengain to England. That left Courthope with one ship, and soon none. Some of his own men sailed the Defence to Neira, surrendered, and gave the Dutch information about the defences of Run.

The governor general, Laurens Reael, called Courthope for a meeting. He offered to restore the captured ship and prisoners and to allow Courthope to sail with a full hold of nutmeg, so long as he left and signed away the rights to Run. Courthope said he would sail away if Reael allowed the matter of sovereignty to be settled in Bantam or in Europe. Reael refused and said that he would have to take the island by force.

In 1617 Courthope sent six of his men in a hired boat to Bantam, where Jourdain’s successor (Jourdain had been shot by a Dutch marksman while carrying a flag of truce) refused to despatched any of the six ships available to him to relieve Courthope. Finally, in 1618, three ships were sent to Banda. They were intercepted by a squadron of Dutch ships and, after a fierce fight, they struck.

In 1617 Reael offered the VOC a tactical resignation, which the VOC promptly accepted, appointing Coen in his place. His orders are astonishing:

“The inhabitants of Banda must be subjugated, their leaders must be killed or driven out of the land, and if necessary the country must be turned into a desert by uprooting the trees and shrubs.”

That was always Coen’s plan: to take the islands by force, kill or transport the native population and replace them by slaves.

In January 1619 Courthope received a letter from Sir Thomas Dale, the man who had brought Pocahontas to England in 1616. He was bringing a huge fleet and promised to expel the Dutch from Java and then relieve the men on Run. It was around this time that Coen moved the Dutch headquarters from Bantam to Jakarta. Dale formed a pact with the local sultan to attack the Dutch fort at Jakarta, and Coen withdrew most of his men to the ships. Dale’s fleet attacked Coen’s fleet on 2 January 1619. After a fight that lasted all day, the Dutch fleet retreated the following day, and Dale, eccentrically and disastrously, allowed them to sail away. He then somehow failed to take the Dutch fort and sailed off to Coromandel, abandoning the Run mission. Coen returned to Jakarta from Ambon with reinforcements and burned the entire city to the ground.

At this point Courthope had been on Run for three years and had no chance. He should certainly have surrendered. In October 1620 the people of Banda Besar rebelled against the Dutch. Courthope decided to row to the island to help organise the rebellion. But a Dutchman on Run warned the Dutch forces and Courthope was ambushed at sea and killed. The remaining English forces, sensibly, surrendered. The Dutch landed on Run, pulled down the forts and required the islanders to submit to Holland. They also ‘extirpated’ the nutmeg trees of Run to ensure the English did not return.

In 1619 the English and Dutch companies finally signed a Treaty of Defence, under which captured ships and prisoners were to be returned, and the English company was to contribute one-third of the ships and men in the region in return for one third of the revenues. Coen was appalled, and cleverly caused the English to break the agreement in 1621, by calling for a massive naval expedition just as all the English ships in the region were at sea. He then told the English that he would proceed without them. He sailed to Banda with 1,700 Europeans and 100 Japanese mercenaries, and prepared to invade Banda Besar, which the Dutch had never fully occupied because of its rugged topography. A patrol ship came under accurate fire and the Dutch became convinced that they had spotted numerous English gunners.

On 11 March 1621 the Dutch invaded with 1,655 European soldiers, plus the Banda garrison of 250, plus a hundred Japanese mercenaries, and took the island. The leading orang kaya visited Coen on his ship and sued for peace. They agreed to destroy their fortifications, hand in their weapons, recognise Dutch sovereignty, to present their sons as hostages, and to sell only to the VOC.

Inevitably, they did not abide by these harsh terms, and Dutch soldiers were periodically ambushed. Coen gradually demolished recalcitrant villages and herded refugees out of the hills. In April he sent out parties to Banda Besar to burn the villages. Those who surrendered or were captured were transported to Batavia as slaves. Many islanders chose to jump off the cliffs rather than face capture. The number transported is not known, but of the original population of 15,000 or so, no more than a thousand were left in the archipelago when Coen was finished with them; they became slaves. (Not all of those massacred or enslaved will have been locals. Since the islands were trading posts, there would have been Arabs, Malays and Chinese traders too.) Some refugees made it to Seram, Kai and Aru. There are still Bandanese communities in the Kai islands.

Coen seized 45 prominent orang kaya and kept them in chains on his ship. He had them tried for conspiracy to kill him, submitted them to torture and had 44 of them put to death (one committed suicide). They were herded into a bamboo pen, where Japanese mercenaries beheaded and quartered the eight chief orang kaya and then all the rest. Their heads and quarters were impaled and displayed on bamboo poles. Then they were dropped down a well.

The English factors on Banda Besar were then imprisoned (even though Holland was at peace with England). Three Chinese assistants in the employ of the English factors were beheaded.

Coen then invited applications for grants of land in the Banda Islands. Applicants had to agree to settle permanently and produce spices only for the VOC. The VOC were to buy all spices produced, would provide rice at cost, would transport slaves to work the concessions, and would guarantee security. The slaves came from New Guinea, Seram, Timor and Borneo. The 68 concessions did not include Run. There were 34 on Banda Besar, 31 on Ai and 3 on Neira.

Sixty-eight men were chosen to farm the perken, or concessions, and they became the original perkeniers, whose families lasted on the Bandas until well into the twentieth century. Each perk was given 25 slaves, which turned out not to be enough. The perkeniers were prohibited from buying private slaves. They were also prohibited from fornicating with or marrying the locals; the perkeniers typically converted some (nominally) to Christianity and kept them as mistresses. They had mixed-race children; some were free, some were slaves, some were freed slaves.

And the VOC did not successfully provide security, since they failed twice to prevent the English from occupying the islands. The VOC was to collect ‘a tithe’ of the crop, which turned out to be an eighth. They paid the perkeniers half a stuiver for prime nutmeg that they sold for 61 stuivers in Amsterdam.

Nevertheless many of the perkeniers did well for themselves. They built mansions along the main road of Neira, and maintained smart European fashions. Many of the larger buildings in the islands date from colonial times.

Several hundred of the Bandanese shipped to Jakarta as slaves had to be repatriated later because no-one in the Bandas knew how to pick nutmeg.

[Coen was for a long time a colonial hero in Holland. There is a statue of him in his birthplace, Hoorn. His portrait adorns the banknotes of the Dutch Javanese bank. It was only recently, as European countries began to question the morality of shooting natives, that his reputation declined somewhat.]

The English kept up their claim to Run, and visited it in 1636, 1638, 1648 and 1662. But the English Company’s revenues inevitably declined as trade with the Indies dropped to near zero. Meanwhile the Dutch exported nearly a million pounds of nutmeg and mace a year. In 1657 the Company entered into voluntary liquidation. But Cromwell and the Council of State would not have it, and Parliament duly passed an Act that gave the company a new charter to trade as a joint stock company. Three quarters of a million pounds were raised in new subscriptions in a matter of months, and the Company turned its sights to India.

In 1654 the Anglo-Dutch War was ended by the Treaty of Westminster. A small amount in damages was to be paid to the Company and £4,000 to the families of those massacred in Ambon. Run was restored to England. The Dutch governor in Java refused to allow the transfer, and the English only managed to retake possession in 1665. Great Britain and Holland almost immediately went to war again and the Dutch retook Run, where they again chopped down all the nutmeg. At almost the same time the King’s brother James, the Duke of York, sent a fleet to take Manhattan. Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, plainly acting under duress, signed away the Dutch rights to Manhattan in 1664.

The whole mess was only sorted out by the Treaty of Breda in 1667. The treaty recognised the adverse possession of both islands: England got Manhattan and Holland Run. Theoretical right amounted to nothing.

Milton’s thesis is, it seems to me, flawed. The sub-title of the book is ‘How one man’s courage changed the course of history’. How he changed the course of history is not really expressly stated but the idea seems to be that Nathaniel Courthope, by enduring four years of siege on the island of Run, cemented England’s claim to the island, eventually enabling it to be exchanged for Manhattan. The trouble is that he didn’t change the course of history in any way. The claim arose from a document entered into by the islanders of Run, voluntarily assigning the island to England. They did so in order to avoid the fate of the other islands of the group, which had been occupied and fortified by the Dutch. But Courthope could have confirmed the agreement and withdrawn honourably in the face of far greater numbers, while England maintained the claim.

The English never managed to establish permanent factories anywhere east of India. The Dutch in the East Indies – particularly Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Herman van Speult - behaved with a complete absence of humanity, massacring large numbers of Bandanese and selling the rest into slavery, and torturing and massacring smaller numbers of Englishmen in Ambon and elsewhere (the English in Ambon were subject to waterboarding before they were murdered). However, they achieved their aim of taking over the Spice Islands and cornering the world market.

The English made a lot of money on some of their trading expeditions in the early seventeenth century, but they went to trade. They never sent anything like sufficient ships, men or guns to the East Indies to defend their factories from hostile competitors. They expected their few factors to trade in competition with garrisoned Dutch ports. (The Dutch sent 14 expeditions in the first few years of the seventeenth century alone.) The factors and the occasional expedition coped well in the circumstances, but never had a chance in the long run. Frankly, it seems that the Dutch behaved vilely and the English incompetently. And the English might have been just as vile had they been competent.

Courthope did not succeed in holding the island of Run. The Treaty of Breda ended up recognising Holland’s occupation. And Courthope didn’t prevent Dutch monopoly either. It was another English captain, Captain Cole, who broke the monopoly by taking the Banda Islands one night in August 1810. He handed the islands back to the Dutch seven years later, but in the meantime he had transported nutmeg trees to Singapore, Ceylon, Bencoolen and Penang.

A history of the Bandanezars Part 2 remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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In the fifteenth centuries the spices of Banda would have been bought by Malay, Chinese and Arab traders, and some of the crop was shipped to the Persian Gulf, carried by caravan to the Mediterranean and shipped to Constantinople. Banda was also an entrepot like Makassar, and sold bird of paradise feathers from Aru, cloves from Ternate and Tidore, medicines and slaves; they imported rice, textiles, ceramics and Chinese medicines. In western Europe, Venice had a monopoly on spices via its trade with Constantinople (although another source says that Genoa received the spice too).

In 1471, the Portuguese crossed the equator. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, where he heard about Melaka. In 1511 Alfonso de Albuquerque took Melaka, and a few months later, in 1512, Antonio de Abreu reached Banda via Java, Nusa Tenggara and Ambon. Abreu’s party stayed a month and bought nutmeg, mace and cloves. They left ten people behind, under Francisco Serrão, to explore the area. He soon ended up back in Ambon, from where he was invited to visit Ternate, where he stayed. (Ternate is well to the north, even now a day’s journey by ferry.)

So Ternate became the first foothold of the Portuguese in the Spice Islands. They concentrated on cloves and only visited Banda now and then; instead they bought their nutmeg and mace from intermediaries. Within a few years the Portuguese had built forts on Ternate, Tidore, Ambon and Seram.

The Portingale Fernando Magellan sailed to the East Indies as a young man and returned in an expedition to Banda sponsored by Charles V of Spain in 1519. The expedition was to sail west. In October 1520 Magellan passed through what are now called the Magellan Straits and saw the Pacific. The expedition endured months at sea – scurvy and starvation taking many of the men – before reaching the Philippines, where Magellan was killed on 27 April 1521. The survivors reached Tidore, south of the Philippines, in November of that year and traded with the Sultan. They bought cloves (26 tons), nutmegs, cinnamon and mace. On the way back more than half of the remainder died from dysentery, but 18 survivors brought the spices back to Seville in 1522, under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, having circumnavigated the globe. Their calendars were a day behind.

In 1529 Captain Garcia of Portugal landed on Banda Neira and, without seeking permission, began to build a fort. The locals drove him out. Little else is known of the Banda Islands from Portuguese times; it seems they decided that the Bandas were not worth the bother, since they could buy spices in Melaka.

Naturally, Spain and Portugal argued over possession of the rights to the East Indies. In 1594 Spain and Portugal had split the non-European world in two by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which was approval by Pope Julius II in 1506. It defined a north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Portugal got the eastern part (and the route around Africa). After their discovery in 1512 Spain claimed ownership of the northern Moluccas, arguing that the Tordesillas meridian included the anti-meridian on the other side of the world, and the Spice Islands were within the Spanish hemisphere. Of course, no-one knew where the line went. The Tordesillas line was expressly extended around the world by virtue of the Treaty of Zaragoza 1529. But at the same time Spain relinquished claims to the Spice Islands in exchange for 350,000 ducats. However, Spain still went on to colonise the Philippines, which lie directly to the north.

Equally naturally, the Papal Bull of 1506 was not regarded as effective within England, and Francis Drake set off in 1577 to conclude trade treaties with the people of the Pacific, and with a secret licence from the Red Queen to plunder any Spanish possessions along the way. He followed the Magellan route via the northern Moluccas, but ended up in Ternate, across the water from Tidore, at the invitation of the sultan. He bought tons of cloves, but they were of less value than the Spanish bullion and gems that he had plundered. His ship, the Golden Hind, was so overloaded as he left Ternate that it hit a sandbank, and Drake threw overboard eight cannon, some of the food, and three tons of cloves. He reached England with a boat stuffed with precious items and was knighted by the Queen at Deptford.

In 1582 the merchants of London sent an expedition to trade in the spiceries under Edward Fenton. He was instructed to sail by the Cape of Good Hope. But he had his own ideas: he wanted to crown himself king of St Helena and attack Portuguese shipping in the Atlantic. He never left the Atlantic.

In 1583 the insanely courageous Ralph Fitch headed for the spiceries with four partners. They sailed to Tripolis in Syria and then overland to the Euphrates, where they bought a boat. They were imprisoned in Hormuz and shipped to Goa, where an Englishman provided sureties for them and they were freed. Only Fitch continued the journey, leaving Goa in disguise. After eight years travelling he eventually reached Malacca, from where he returned to London. It was a success only of intelligence.

The second English expedition to circumnavigate was that of Thomas Cavendish. He attacked a Spanish galleon on the way home, the Great St Anne, and arrived back in England and glory two months after the Spanish Armada was defeated. But he didn’t go to the spiceries.

In 1591 the Queen granted to the merchants of London a licence to trade in the East Indies, and they sent an expedition under James Lancaster, a trader who had been brought up in Portugal. He sailed with three ships from Plymouth in 1591. They took the eastern route, and soon suffered the usual horrors of scurvy, diarrhoea and starvation in the South Atlantic. Soon after leaving Table Bay there was only one ship left, as the Merchant Royal had been sent home with the ill men, and Penelope was lost with all hands in a storm. The expedition kidnapped a ‘negro’ in Mozambique when they heard he had been to the East Indies. He wasn’t much use, though, and they missed the Laccadive Islands and Nicobar. By the time they reached Penang only 33 men were still alive. Lancaster then attacked a Portuguese ship heading from Goa, and then headed towards Ceylon. On the way his men mutinied and demanded to return home. In the West Indies all but five of the crew headed to shore when they found land; the remainder cut the moorings and abandoned them. A month later they were picked up by a French ship and eventually returned home. Only 25 men out of 198 had survived the journey. Two ships were lost and one came back with no goods.

In the decade to come, about five expeditions followed from England. All ended in disaster.

In 1595 three merchants from Amsterdam financed an expedition to the east. When they eventually reached Bantam in Java, the chief merchant, Cornelis Houtman, became angry at the escalating cost of spices, and they decided to teach the pesky locals a lesson. They bombarded the town with cannon fire, took prisoners and killed them. When they reached Madura, an island of the north coast of Java, the local prince rowed out with a flotilla of perahus to welcome them, and they rowed ceremoniously around the Dutch ships. Houtman’s ship opened fire and slaughtered all but twenty of the welcome party, including the prince. The expedition never made it to the spiceries, and took home only a tiny quantity of nutmeg – which was enough to pay for the expedition and more.

The Dutch sent 14 expeditions in just a few years after Houtman’s return. In 1599 Jacob van Neck returned to Amsterdam after a successful expedition to the spiceries, the second expedition of the Compagnie van Verre, the forerunner of the VOC. Van Neck simply bought his spices in Bantam and returned home with nearly a million pounds of pepper and cloves, and tonnes of nutmeg and mace and cinnamon. Van Neck made up for Houtman’s previous behaviour in Bantam by conspicuously paying over the odds in order to cement the relationship with the locals.

While he was at Bantam two other squadrons of the fleet – which had become separated from the main fleet around Madagascar – arrived. One captain, Jacob van Heemskerck, had discovered an island east of Madagascar and named it Mauritius. Van Neck sent Wybrand van Warwyck to Ternate to buy cloves, and Jacob van Heemskerck to the Bandas – which no Dutch or English had yet visited.

Van Heemskerck arrived in the Bandas, with two hundred soldiers and merchants, on 15 March 1599 and the islanders’ troubles began. At this point Gunung Api, the volcano (half the volcanoes in Indonesia are called Gunung Api, which means fire mountain, or volcano), became active for the first time in centuries, and the Bandanese took it as a bad sign. Van Heemskerck anchored off Banda Besar, introduced his party as enemies of the Portuguese, and petitioned to trade. They paid the orang kaya (the ‘rich men’, who were also the headmen of the villages) and the syahbandar (port master) and set up two trading posts.

Van Heemskerck started buying spices. On average they paid five stuivers for every ten pounds of mace, and half a stuiver (less than an English penny) for every ten pounds of nutmeg. One of the Dutch units of currency at that time was the Rijkdaalder, also a reeal, or piece of eight. It was divided into 48 or 50 stuivers, of which 19 or 20 made a guilder, or florin. The guilder was divided into 100 duiten. (So in old money the guilder was a bit like a crown, and the stuiver like a shilling.)

It took a month to fill the two ships. Van Heemskerck departed in July, leaving behind 22 men on Banda Besar and Neira, under two traders. They were told to buy spices in preparation for the next visit.

The Portuguese tried to organise an attack, but had not carried it out before a second Dutch squadron arrived on 9 May 1600. Van der Hagen converted the trading posts into fort-factories and palisaded the living compounds. He also built a fort on Hitu in Ambon.

In 1601 James Lancaster returned to the east. This time he was captain of the first expedition of the Governor and Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies, formed in 1599. (One of the documents forming the basis of the expedition was a legal refutation of the claim that the Treaty of Tordesillas bound anyone but Spain and Portugal. Not difficult, one would think.) The five ships’ main cargo was textiles: broadcloth and woollens, for which there was never a market in the East Indies. Fortunately they also took bullion. The fleet took 36 factors. Only on Lancaster’s boat, the Red Dragon, did the men not fall victim to scurvy. This was because Lancaster insisted that they be given lemon juice. Unfortunately the effectiveness of antiscorbutics was forgotten until Captain Cook rediscovered it nearly 200 years later.

In 1602 he reached Achin in Sumatra (Aceh). He presented a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the sultan. It expressed friendship, hoped for trade, and slagged off the Spanish and Portuguese. The sultan – who thought Queen Elizabeth a great warrior for defeating the Spanish armada - was delighted. Shortly afterwards, the Red Dragon took a Portuguese carrack, the Santo Antonio, loaded with calico and batik – exactly what he needed to trade for spice. Then he sailed to Bantam in Java where he established a factory and bought spices, mainly pepper. He left eight men and three factors, to stay behind in Bantam and buy pepper for the Company’s second expedition. He instructed them to sail to the Banda Islands in the forty-foot pinnace that he also left.

In September 1603 the Lancaster expedition returned to England. All five ships returned, carrying over a million pounds of spices. Only half the men had died. Lancaster was duly knighted. It was the first truly successful English expedition, and one of the last.

The factors sent the pinnace to the Bandas as ordered. It was shipwrecked and washed up on Run, the westernmost island. The natives gave them a friendly welcome, and the English began to buy nutmeg and mace immediately. The Englishmen were allowed to build a warehouse on the north coast, and they also established an outpost on Pulau Ai.

The second Company expedition sailed with four ships under Henry Middleton, who had sailed on the first Company expedition. They arrived in Bantam in December 1604. Of those men left behind by Lancaster, only one lived to see the second fleet. Middleton immediately loaded two of the ships with pepper and sent them back to England. Only one ship made it, and that only just. Middleton left behind more factors in Bantam, including Gabriel Towerson.

Landing at Ambon he found that trade was forbidden without the permission of the Portuguese garrison. Middleton told them that the two countries were now at peace – something he could not have known – and permission was granted. But while he was there a huge Dutch fleet arrived and took Ambon. Middleton split the fleet, taking the Red Dragon north to Ternate and Tidore, the clove islands, and sending Ascension south to the Bandas.

While in Ternate, Middleton obtained a licence to trade from the sultan, but hours later a Dutch fleet took Tidore and threatened Ternate.

The Ascension, under Captain Colthurst, sailed to the Bandas trailed by a Dutch flotilla. He anchored in the sound between Banda Neira and Gunung Api and dined with the Dutch commander. (He took along a chicken pie, because he disliked Dutch food.) The meeting was amicable. Colthurst sailed away shortly afterwards with his holds full of nutmeg and mace, and Colthurst and Middleton sailed back to England after another successful expedition, arriving home in 1606. Middleton was knighted.

The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) was formed in 1602, granted a total monopoly on trade in the East. It immediately sent several expeditions. According to Hanna it was Admiral Wolpert Hermanszoon who, on 23 May 1602, signed a contract with some of the orang kaya that granted a complete and perpetual monopoly over the produce of the Banda Islands to the Dutch. According to Milton it was Steven van der Hagen. (I believe Hanna.)

Whoever it was, the headmen did not take the treaty seriously - for one reason, the islands relied on imported rice and sago, which the Dutch did not sell - and they traded with an English fleet almost immediately, but for the Dutch it served as a pretext for genocide. In fact, like the English, the Dutch did not generally offer anything useful. The Bandanese wanted to buy Javanese batik, Indian calico and Chinese porcelain, metal and medicine. Furthermore, the Bandanese had been trading with Javanese, Buginese, Arabs and Chinese for centuries and saw no reason why they should desist. The deal was utterly fanciful in their eyes.

Indeed, one theme that lasted all the years was that the Dutch always tried to enforce a trading monopoly; the English just traded. Probably as a result, the islanders consistently preferred the English. As some English doggerel of the time ran:

In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch
Is giving too little and asking too much.

According to Hanna, van der Hagen arrived in 1605. He was the one who had driven the Portuguese out of Ambon and Ternate. When van der Hagen knocked on the factory gates he was greeted, not by one of the Dutch factors, but by an Englishman, Christopher Colthurst. There were also English factors trading merrily on Run. Van der Hagen learned that all the Dutch factors had been murdered after a blood feud. He signed a second contract with the Bandanese orang kaya, much like the first. The contract also fixed prices.

The Dutch made themselves unpopular in another way – by refusing to bargain, which is to this day not merely the only way to conduct business in southeast Asia, but a social necessity. (American tourists are often criticised for the same omission.)

In 1607 the English East Indies Company sent its third fleet to the Indies. In charge of the fleet was William Keeling, but David Middleton, brother of Henry and John, pressed on ahead at about twice Keeling’s pace. Middleton had returned to England by the time Keeling reached the Spice Islands.

Middleton headed via Bantam to Tidore, where he wined and dined the Spanish and Portuguese but somehow managed to avoid getting involved in their fights with the Dutch. The Spanish refused permission to buy spices, but Middleton found it easy to do secret deals with the locals. Just off Sulawesi Middleton encountered a junk fully laden with cloves, bought the lot, and headed straight home. The cloves that he had bought for £3,000 were sold at home for £36,000.

Keeling, meanwhile, driving in the slow lane, reached Bantam in late 1608. He bought a shipload of spices in Bantam and sent the Red Dragon home with them. He pressed on in Hector to the Bandas and anchored off Banda Besar. Naturally the Dutch were there in force. Keeling presented a letter from James I to one of the local chiefs, and began buying nutmeg. Three Dutch ships arrived in March 1609. While outwardly friendly to the English, they hatched plans to take Keeling’s ship. Keeling received word of the plot and sailed west to Pulau Ai, where he made a secret deal with the local headman. Unfortunately for him, the Dutch were in on the secret, and within the week six more ships arrived, so that Keeling’s sixty-two men faced a thousand or more hostile Dutch. The Dutch told him to be gone immediately without even collecting any debts.

Before he complied, another Dutch fleet of 14 ships arrived in April, under Peter Verhoef. Verhoef had been instructed by the VOC to win the Banda Islands ‘either by treaty or by force’. He summoned all the chieftains to a meeting on Banda Besar, read them a script accusing them of breaking their contract, and said that he intended to build a fortress on Neira ‘to defend the country from the Portugals’. The headmen, naturally, were appalled. But there was nothing they could do, since they had no control over Neira. On 25 April Verhoef landed 750 soldiers on Neira. Verhoef’s men started building the fort, Benteng Nassau, on the site of the old Portuguese fort.

The people of Neira abandoned their houses and moved into the hills. The headmen of Neira called Verhoef to a meeting on 22 May 1609. He attended accompanied by his captains, merchants, and some English prisoners in chains. The Dutch party was ambushed and massacred. Twenty-eight were killed on the spot, and others were killed running away. Verhoef’s head was displayed, mounted on a lance. In the long run, it was a bad move: Jan Pieterszoon Coen was in the Bandas at the time, and he took his revenge fourteen years later.

The Dutch blamed Keeling, although he was on Pulai Ai at the time buying nutmeg. They took a couple of prisoners, who promptly escaped, and the Bandanese killed two Dutch merchants on Banda Besar.

In July the Dutch declared war against the islands and started to loot and burn villages, destroy boats and murder any locals they could find. On 26 July the Dutch attacked Celamme on Banda Besar and were beaten back with nine dead and seventy wounded. At this point Admiral Hoen changed tactics and blockaded the islands.

In August 1609 the Dutch signed a peace treaty with some of the orang kaya, which placed Neira under Dutch protection in perpetuity; henceforth there was to be a Dutch governor. The orang kaya promised that the islands would trade only with the Dutch thenceforth. The treaty purported to bind all the islands. There was still no way that they could adhere to this promise. The Dutch regarded this as a binding contract, but it should have been obvious that the orang kaya were not in a position to make promises binding other villages or islands, particularly those of Ai and Run. There was no single authority, which the Dutch never really understood, probably conveniently.

Hoen sent a letter to Keeling informing him of the treaty, and Keeling rightly ignored it. He loaded a shipload of spices and left a factory on Ai. (At exactly the same time, Henry Hudson entered Delaware Bay. He suspected it might be a passage west to the Indies. In the event he reached Albany.)

David Middleton arrived in the Bandas shortly after Keeling left. He was told by the factors in Bantam that the Dutch had left behind a governor in Fort Nassau. No foreigner was allowed to settle without a Dutch permit and all shipping was monitored. Even trade between the islands was forbidden unless authorised. But of course the Bandanese regarded this as unenforceable and ignored it, as did Middleton, who anchored off Neira and fired all his cannons. He soon struck a deal with a trader in Ai, who promised to sell all the spices he could get. In what became a common wheeze, the men of the other Banda Islands shipped their nutmeg to Ai as well, in order to avoid selling it to the hated Dutch. The Dutch were left with two half-filled ships and no more nutmeg.

So Middleton based himself in Ai and enjoyed irritating the Dutch. He wrote to the Dutch governor informing him of the deal, reminding him that the men of Run and Ai had signed no agreement, and challenged the governor to act. In the manner of the day, the two men then spent a very pleasant dinner together. Middleton based himself in Seram and sent his assistant in a pinnace to Ai, where he set up a temporary factory. The pinnace shuttled between Ai and Seram with nutmeg and mace. As Middleton set sail for home, the Bandanese again rose up against the Dutch and massacred all they found outside the walls of the fort.

A history of the Bandanezars Part 1 remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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The map makes the errors usual for the time. Southeast Asia is too big in comparison to India and China. There a pars continentis Australis just south of Java, which is itself too round. Persia is too big, Borneo too small, Sumatra too wide. Timor is too far north. Sulawesi is cigar-shaped and roughly the same size as Halmahera. Surprisingly, Singapore is on the map; it was then but a backwater, in decline after its golden age.

Most informatively, the Spice Islands are too large. Seram, inaccurately labelled “Ambon”, is huge. Banda is listed as being southwest of Seram – in fact it lies to the southeast – and it is far too large.

The "1607" map shows southeast Asia alone. It is, I believe, by Hondius in 1606, created for Mercator's Atlas. Its plan of Indonesia is in general similar to the earlier map, but the Philippines have improved, and so have Java, Nusa Tenggara (although Lombok is missing) and Borneo. The Dutch had, after all, established operations in Tidore, Ambon and Banda by then. But Indochina has got worse; and Singapore is far too large.

Seram seems to have been duplicated, and Banda is now south of the correct Seram, which is labelled Cenaon. Banda Besar, Run and Ai seem to be shown, although only Banda is labelled. Again, the Bandas are far too large.

This is so for a reason. Maps are social statements. The map is a bit like the famous New Yorker map of the world: it depicts importance from a particular perspective. By the time the map was produced, it was known that the world’s entire supply of nutmeg and mace came from the tiny Banda Islands, so they had to be shown. Their surface area is only 180 square kilometres – a fraction of that of London. On a modern map to the same scale they would not feature at all.

Why was nutmeg so important? Spices were in demand, mainly as medicines. Cloves, for example, were worth their weight in gold. Columbus sailed west in order to find their source. Nutmeg was also a preservative (slowing the oxidation of meat) and a medicine. The Romans used nutmeg as a preservative; so even 2,000 years ago there must have been a complex chain of trade stretching from the Bandas to Rome. It was used as a cure for flatulence and the common cold. In Elizabethan England medics began to claim that it protected against plague.

Although it was not known in Europe until the Portuguese arrived, the nutmeg grew only in one tiny archipelago between Sulawesi and New Guinea: the Banda Islands. Each of the islands occupies only a few square kilometres. The central island is a volcano, Gunung Api, a perfect green cone 650 metres or so high. It is periodically active, and was so for much of the islands’ Dutch history. Today you can see a couple of lava flows down the mountain, where things still do not grow.

Just across a narrow channel, curving slightly around the volcano, is Banda Neira. The main town of the islands, Neira, faces the volcano. It is in fact part of the caldera of Gunung Api.

The other side of Neira, to the south and east, is the largest and hilliest island, Banda Besar (Great Banda). This is where much of the nutmeg was grown, as it still is.

To the east of Banda Besar lies a small island known in the seventeenth century as Rozengain, and now called Hatta after one of the heroes of independence. A few miles to the west – crucial miles, when ships could not sail against the wind – is Pulau Ai. A few miles west again lies Pulau Run. Ai and Run also had a lot of nutmeg plantations.

I visited the Banda Islands in December. After a very bad start – my wallet stolen and my trousers slashed with a knife – I grew to like them very much. They are your archetypical tropical islands, covered in green trees and surrounded by white sand and coral reefs.

Many of the trees are nutmeg. As described by John Cameron in 1864, the leaves of the nutmeg tree are like bay leaves. The tree is thirty feet high and thirty feet wide at the crown, and flowers all year round. The blossoms are small, thick, waxy bells. The fruit looks like a peach. When it ripens it splits open and reveals the mace. Eventually the nut and its surrounding caul of mace fall to the ground.

The mace is dried in the sun. It is an attractive dark red reticulum.

Then the nut itself is split. The nutmeg is the kernel. A good tree yields six hundred nuts, or eight pounds in weight, per year.

Dotted around the islands are kenari trees, Kanarium commune. They provide shade for the nutmegs. They are fine, very tall trees, with dark red dipterocarp buttresses, producing nuts that taste like a cross between an almond and a hazelnut. These can be eaten raw, or chopped and baked into delicious bricks with sugar or honey. The best local dish is baked aubergines in a spicy kenari sauce, which is also lovely.

Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited in 1857, 1859 and 1861, found few interesting animals in Banda, and his chapter mostly comprises an extremely eccentric defence of the Dutch monopoly system. (He is not remembered for his economic analysis.) But he wrote of the fruit pigeons which “eat the nuts whole and digest the mace, but cast up the nut with its seed uninjured.” He had earlier seen the same bird in the Kai islands, to the southeast. By the time he wrote The Malay Archipelago he had described the species. In his entry on the Kai islands he writes of it as

A magnificent bird twenty inches long, of a bluish white colour, with the back wings and tail intense metallic green, with golden, blue, and violet reflexions, the feet coral red, and the eyes golden yellow. It is a rare species, which I have named Carpophaga concinna, and is found only in a few small islands, where, however, it abounds. It is the same species which in the island of Banda is called the nutmeg-pigeon, from its habit of devouring the fruits, the seed or nutmeg being thrown up entire and uninjured. Though these pigeons have a narrow beak, yet their jaws and throat are so extensible that they can swallow fruits of very large size.

There were plenty of large pigeons on the islands, but I cannot now remember if they were the same species; I had lost my Wallace and could not check. I suppose they were.

For a few days I stayed in a guesthouse in the main town of the islands, Neira, on the island of the same name. Also staying in the guesthouse were Vera, Niek, Hans and Bruno, all from Holland, and Robert, from Austria. These were the people who lent me money and thereby saved my skin.

(It is a mild paradox, although not unexpected, that I found the best social life on the trip in the most remote places. In Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia you are rarely far from tourists. Where there are crowds of tourists, they do not acknowledge each other or talk to each other very much, any more than you would if you happened to bump into an Englishman in the West End of London (which does happen sometimes). East of Lombok, though, if you see a white face you probably talk to it. So I spent most of my time in Vietnam on my own, while in Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara and the Moluccas I was rarely alone.)

The guesthouse was near the port and the water was a little paraffinny, but it was nevertheless worth dipping in with a mask. For under the piles of the house next door were mandarinfish, a most extraordinary goby. They are rather shy but tend to come out around dusk. Some people travel a long way to see a mandarinfish; when I saw a mandarinfish in Malaysia my dive guide said he had dived a thousand times before seeing one. Here there were dozens. Robert took photos and we discovered that behind the adults, which we had seen, were lots of juveniles hiding in crevices.

We went snorkelling at several locations around the islands. On one occasion, as we returned from snorkelling, the captain of our chartered boat caught a beautiful fish of the mackerel family, possibly a wahoo. He was delighted, and gave us half of the fish, which we ate barbequed in the evening. It was extraordinarily tasty, possibly the best fish I have ever eaten.

We ate wonderfully on Neira. On another occasion, returning from Pulau Ai, we ran into a man with half a dozen lobsters in a bucket. He was going to Neira to sell them, so we bought them and Data from the guesthouse cooked them. They were, however, nowhere near as good as the wahoo.

Nutmeg is also used for food, as you might expect. The fruit is used to make jam (aromatic, spicy, moreish) or turned into a spicy cordial. Or you can eat the fruit dried, as I am doing right now. It tastes almost like a panforte, with flavours of nuts, spice and dried apricots.

Neira town faces Gunung Api and consists mainly of two streets running parallel to the sea. Until the 1960s the road by the sea was an attractive gravel street shaded by trees, but the trees were cut down, and now it looks much like any other road. Farther inland are the villas in which Syahrir and Hatta resided during their internal exile. Another colonial villa held the expats’ social club. There is a single block on the islands where a mobile signal can be found, so people congregate on the verandah of a public building to use their phones.

In the same area are the remains of the two forts, Nassau and Belgica. Fort Nassau, built in 1607-09, is in a romantically ruined state.

It was destroyed by Captain Cole, an Englishman, in 1810. He captured Fort Belgica first and then turned its guns on Fort Nassau. This is Fort Belgica, built in 1611 in the form of a five-pointed star, and extensively restored. I kept on meaning to undertake the ten-minute walk to see it, but somehow never got around to it.

The day after being robbed I tried to book a ticket on the weekly plane back to Ambon through the headman. In the event, however, the plane did not fly owing to bad weather in Timor, so I stayed on the islands for a little over a week. There used to be three flights a week to the Bandas, but the religious violence that hit the Moluccas in 1999 also disfigured the Banda Islands. Churches were burnt, and Wim Van den Broeke, the ‘last perkenier’ was killed in the violence along with five female members of his family. (He was a descendant of Pieter Van den Broeke, a governor of the Bandas in the early seventeenth century. His portrait, painted by Frans Hals, hangs in Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath.) Most of the Christian population fled to Seram. Tourists stopped coming – partly because the government would not let them, I suspect – and the tourist trade has almost disappeared.

Down the coastal road to the south is the old governor’s residence, known as the Istana Mini. It was originally built in 1611. It is not in bad shape, but it is unused. The doors are locked. It stands next to a barracks – half the buildings in Indonesia stand next to a barracks – which was, perhaps, the VOC Authority headquarters. There is a sign warning that the maximum penalty for trespassing is ten years, if I remember rightly. So I walked up to the guard post and asked for permission to enter, and the captain accompanied me to the governor’s residence. We walked around a bit and he offered to unlock the place. What is inside? I asked. ‘Kosong’ – ‘empty’. I declined. If there was any significant tourism they would do well to turn the building into a museum.

Wandering around the back of the barracks, next to the soldiers’ bikes, I found the old bust of Stadhouder Willem III. It was thrown into the sea during the Dutch-Indonesian conflict of 1950, but later retrieved.

Down the road in the other direction is a set of three large square openings filled with sea water. It is a sort of aquarium. It is in a sad, dilapidated state, and the water level is very low. This is a black-tipped reef shark.

Like Indonesian, Bandanese Malay contains a lot of Dutch loan words, but it also contains a few Portuguese words. But there are more Portuguese words in the dialect of Ambon, where the Portuguese had a more permanent presence. As Wallace recorded:

The following are a few of the Portuguese words in common use by the Malay-speaking natives of Amboyna and the other Molucca islands: Pombo (pigeon); milo (maize); testa (forehead); horas (hours); alfinete (pin); cadeira (chair); lenco (handkerchief); fresco (cool); trigo (flour); sono (sloop); familia (family); histori (talk); vosse (you); mesmo (even); cunhado (brother-in-law); senhor (sir); nyora for signora (madam). None of them, however, have the least notion that these words belong to a European language.

After a few days we all relocated to Pulau Ai. To a Brit this island is even more historically significant than Neira. It was here that the English, on several occasions, bought the entire crop of the islands from under the noses of the Dutch. It was the scene of the fierce battles of 1615 and 1616. Nutmeg used to cover the island entirely.

Ai is a lovely place. There is no mobile network, no internet, and almost no tourism. There are probably three guesthouses, all apparently run by the same family (try getting permission to do anything if you are not related to the headman). Four of us stayed at the Green Coconut, which looked out on to the sea.

There is nothing to do. You can wander around the village and see the old cemeteries, tended by goats.

And next to the remaining corner of an old plantation mansion is the bastion of a fort, all that apparently remains of Fort Revenge. That is about it. So we spent most of the time snorkelling or sitting and staring at the Banda Sea.

The snorkelling in the Bandas varied from the excellent to the terrible. Even the same site varied from the interesting to the dull.

The primary reason is simple. The environment is excellent for marine life, but whole stretches of the coastline have been dynamited. You drift over dead and shattered coral, devoid of life, an underwater desert. Dynamiting a coral reef to obtain fish is like chopping down an apple tree for the apples. It destroys the reef and the corals and algae that live in it; as a consequence it takes away the foundation of life in the reef. It seems amazingly shortsighted (although it could just be a consequence of common ownership of a resource). But people all over Indonesia actually believe that they have to harvest coral. They believe that unless it is harvested, it will grown to block navigation channels. In fact coral regrows painfully slowly, over decades, even without the hindrances of global warming and carbonic acid.

Where the snorkelling is good, it is very good. The best soft coral I have seen anywhere was on Pulau Hatta. There are several nice drop-offs; not far from the Banda Islands the sea is 6.5 km deep.

Pulau Hatta: notable for the best soft coral I have ever seen. Not very good for large fish though. I saw five different kinds of unicornfish in large numbers. Five Napoleon wrasse. Huge numbers of black triggerfish and many pink-tailed triggerfish, lots of titans and clown triggerfish. Lots of bluefin trevally, and few bigger ones. Some crocodile longtoms, and lots of yellow trumpetfish. Lots of black snapper and big yellow snapper and sweetlips. Blue fusiliers, yellow fusiliers, batfish, bannerfish, only one starfish, very few sea squirts.

Pantai Panjang on Pulau Ai. Strong currents. Didn’t see much of interest except for an eagle ray, 3.5 m long, 1.5 m wide. It came past a couple of times and the second time is came close enough to frighten me. Its head extends forward; the head is shaped like a cuboid with a bullet projection in front, which functions as a sandshovel. It had a strange alien face, with an open mouth, and gave me the creeps.

North of the jetty at Pulau Ai: a brilliant swim. Three barracudas, a biggish Napoleon wrasse, 1.2 m or so, lots of batfish. Forty schooling cornetfish, and a weird sea snake in very shallow water as I waded back. Then half a dozen big bumphead parrotfish swam past, the biggest in the lead. Five minutes later, in only three feet of water, I saw even more: a school of 27 by my count. The adults were patrolling the perimeter, and the smaller ones were feeding on the coral. The patrols displayed aggressive defensive behaviour, swimming straight at me and raising their dorsal fins.

Pulau Run, very strong currents, two small turtles and a barracuda.

Pulau Neijalakka, little of interest.

Pantai Panjang again: not very interesting. Clouds of ebony triggerfish, black with white margins like piscine guillemots. A very large dark green moray. A few red-tooth triggerfish. Lots of snapper, some very large, and some large groupers.

Pantai Panjang again, two turtles, including a good look at one, 10m down, male, illuminated by bright sunlight. Orange masked pufferfish, three crown of thorns starfish, several bluefin trevally, yellow cigar wrasse, a small Napoleon, two bumphead wrasse, lots of big snappers and plenty of small batfish, a spiny lobster, lots of yellow-margin triggerfish, lots of humpback and brown unicornfish.

Two more snorkels on the village side on Pulau Ai, both fairly poor. The coral has been dynamited to smithereens.

By the lighthouse at the top of Pulau Gunung Api: some scorpionfish, and crabs, and a flatworm.

And in the evening the people who owned the guesthouse would cook for us. And we would each suck on a bottle of warm beer. It is illegal in the Banda islands – regarded in exactly the same way as illegal drugs, and listed as such on a poster at the police station - but one or two guest house owners will buy it. Electric power was intermittent, operating only for a few hours in the evening, so fridges were little use. We drank beer with slushy ice that melted almost instantly. On Neira we could buy beer from the Chinese shop. In principle we could also buy arak, but this was harder to get hold of as the police were cracking down. When we did get hold of some, we drank it with a nutmeg fruit cordial, which worked very well.

On 5 December it was Sinta Claas day, and Niek and Vera exchanged presents: traditional Dutch spice biscuits and hot chocolate.

In the village 100 yards away from the Green Coconut were two longboats in a shed. They were kora kora, racing boats. They are supposed to be raced annually, but in fact there had been no races for 15 years, until a race was held two weeks before our arrival. Apparently it was held to celebrate the reopening of a well. Children around the island were obviously particularly excited by the event, as we saw several kids trailing wooden kora kora toys.

Nowadays the perken are still producing nutmeg, but they are all owned by a single government-owned company. Nutmeg does not command the prices it used to, and income per head in the Moluccas is well below the Indonesian average.

Myristica fragrans remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Some statistics

How many seas and oceans have I seen, o Muse? The South China Sea, Gulf of Thailand, Melaka Straits, Sulu Sea, Celebes Sea, Java Sea, Flores Sea, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Banda Sea and Andaman Sea. Possibly more.

Countries visited: 6.

Distance travelled since arriving in Bangkok: 39, 387 km. That is measuring point to point, and is an underestimate. It is approximately the circumference of the Earth, and more than Wallace travelled in eight years in the region. But his journeys were hard.

Equator crossings: 6.

Most internet connections: Vietnam and Singapore. Fewest: Indonesia.

Locations dived, thirteen in four countries: Nha Trang, Ko Pha Ngan, Sipadan, Redang, Perhentians, Tulamben, Gili Lembongan, the Gilis, Komodo, Bunaken, Lembeh Straits, Ambon, Similan. That is quite a list.

None of these was a bad place to dive. The best reef dive sites were Sipadan (turtles, sharks, barracuda) and Komodo (large rays and giant trevally). Most honourable mentions: Bunaken; Pulau Tiga, Ambon; Similans; the Perhentians and Redang.

The best muck dive sites were Lembeh Straits and Ambon Bay.

Number of dives: 80.

Places where I swam: 27.

Take-offs and landings: 31. Flights with Air Asia, 12. As I may have said before, Air Asia is like Ryan Air, except without the psychopathic attitude. A company partly owned by Air Asia and partly by Richard Branson is to open a route between Kuala Lumpur and Stansted on March 11. Tickets for economy seats start at £99. Hopefully it will introduce greater competition into the market for flights between Europe and Southeast Asia.

Things I’ll miss:

- Cheap, tasty food, especially seafood
- Sunlight
- General friendliness and courtesy, especially in Thailand, Laos and Indonesia
- Meeting a wide selection of interesting and downright weird people
- Effortless slimness
- Diving
- Swimming in the sea
- Free Premiership football
- Big butterflies
- Frangipani, bougainvillea, Heliconia and hibiscus
- Seeing completely incomprehensible things
- Not having to wear shoes
- The aromatic leaves of Thailand and Vietnam
- The wai
- Cheap laundry
- News blackouts
- Eagles
- Geckoes, chameleons and skinks
- Street food vendors (kebab death vans don’t count)
- Trains that cost 30p for a two hour journey; buses that cost £1 for a five hour trip.
- Cheap motorbike taxis. They should have them in London.
- Vietnamese and Indonesian coffee
- Not fearing physical violence
- Well-behaved schoolchildren
- Nam pla, belacan, sambal, tom yum, roti canai, ga xao sa ơt, beef rendang, Penang curry, dried broad beans, fried rice, bananas with coconut cream, rice with every meal, and a lot more.

Things I won’t miss:

- Drain smells, especially in Malaysia
- Being hassled on the street all the time
- Gastric flu
- Lugging a camera everywhere
- Noodle soup (except cáu lâu in Hội An and khao soi in Chiang Mai)
- Cold showers
- Cockroaches, big spiders, mosquitoes, cicadas
- Durians
- Being served the starter with or after the main course
- Sweet fizzy beer
- Sweet soya sauce
- Sweet bread
- Fluorescent yellow pineapple jam
- Banging my head on lintels
- Hawking, sniffing, spitting, loud eating
- Living out of a rucksack
- Brushing teeth with bottled water
- Tuk-tuks
- Being stared at
- Being woken an hour before dawn by an amplified call to prayer
- Filthy Thai coffee
- Having to wear a hat
- Being unable to express myself
- Illiteracy (mine)
- Trying to balance heavy British plugs in Asian sockets
- Wearing the same five t-shirts all the time
- Dairy cravings
- Markets – I’m so over them
- Deet
- Asian plumbing
- Being foreign
- Open storm drains
- The process of getting from A to B.

Looking forward to:

- Seeing some people
- Frost
- Visibly deciduous trees
- The Thames
- Walking along the pavement
- The bookshop on Gower Street
- Having a debit card
- Cooking
- London tap water
- Wearing jeans
- Some really good French wine, French mustard, sherry, cheese, English family chocolate, English ale, bread, HP sauce, Lagavulin, limoncello, black pudding
- Arabica coffee in Covent Garden
- The British Museum and the Natural History Museum
- The Economist every week.

Regrets

Not seeing Angkor.
Not visiting Sarawak; Ternate and Tidore; the Kai islands; Sumatra; southern Laos; Alor; northeastern Thailand; the national parks east of Bandung.
Not finding the time to return to Luang Prabang.
Not climbing Fansipan or the peak of Rinjani.
Not seeing Mt Merapi, near Solo.
Not persevering with Indonesian.
Visiting Kon Tum.
Not getting to order spider or dog.
Not seeing mola mola in Nusa Lembongan.
Too many temples; not enough national parks.

Return remains copyright of the author Wardsan, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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