Word: dumai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...That may be so - but as long as there is demand for biodiesel, it seems unrealistic to expect Indonesia to stop converting forests into plantations. These days, Riau's main highway is clogged with trucks carting processed palm oil from local refineries to the Sumatran port town of Dumai. Outside one house, not far from the provincial capital of Pekanbaru, a woman weighing out heavy red palm fruit on a scale in her front yard says her family used to only sell fruit from their 200 palm trees. But with the high prices palm oil fetches these days, she says...
...journey. There's beauty, not least in the spirit of people who will without fail return a smile with a bigger smile, but most of these places don't show up on postcards. The next leg on Sumatra is a prime example: between the dusty, trashy port town of Dumai and the city of Medan some 10 bumpy hours by car to the north, the eye catches on the bare-bones shacks with their thatched roofs and cleanly swept earthen yards, smarts through the smoke of fires that eclipse the midday sun and loses focus after miles of palm...
...broken by a fluorescent-lit restaurant, its plastic tables and chairs idle; by an illuminated badminton court, its lines drawn in the dirt, its players immaculate in their whites; by an overturned lumber truck, its wheels still spinning. And finally, having finished a bag of snakefruit bought on the Dumai docks, I reach Medan, a typically crowded and polluted Indonesian city in a region that was the Deli Sultanate when the lofty sails of Zheng He's fleets darkened these skies...
Earlier in the week, government landing parties had seized control of islands dotting the mouth of the Siak River, and captured the oil terminus of Dumai. On Bengkalis Island a rebel platoon watched interestedly as an army transport steamed leisurely up to the dock like an excursion steamer, tied up, and disgorged a file of government troops who sauntered down the gangplank like tourists. The rebel platoon leader surrendered and everyone sat down...
| 1 |