Word: ekspress
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Good luck finding either today. The pristine primary jungle is gone, an arboreal paradise logged, and both routes into Belaga, by boat or 4WD, show the ugly scars. Smoky 75-seat ekspress boats from Kuching spume up the Rajang (in 13 hours, spread over several legs and days), juddering past sawmills, plywood factories, rusty shipyards and timber barges heading downriver to the South China Sea. The alternative is a bumpy Land Rover ride from Bintulu, a coastal oil town three hours away, much of it on a rutted logging road past denuded ocher hills cleared to make way for palm...
...arrive by ekspress in Belaga on a sweltering Monday afternoon. The fellow passengers offer a fair representative slice of the Rajang's recent social history: an itinerant Malay dentist who'll pull that blackened molar for $3; Hokkien merchants whose families came from Singapore in the 1870s as traders, glued to the John Woo DVD playing onboard; and longhouse dwellers. Some of the latter are older, with distended earlobes and inked skin, but most are young couples returning from market hubs like Kapit, where Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, built a fort (still standing...
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