Word: sarawak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have potbellies and, of course, those bulbous noses, giving them a resemblance to old drunks. They climb trees in the same way - crashing around, missing their targets and tumbling down to the lower branches. Proboscis monkeys are, in short, a hilarious sight, and Malaysia's Bako National Park, in Sarawak, Borneo, offers a chance to catch them in their wondrous awkwardness. Reachable only by boat from the small village of Bako, 40 minutes' drive from the regional capital Kuching, it's way off the beaten track, but worth...
...control the building, never mind collect taxes on the profits. But the industry is growing too big to ignore, and there are signs that it might not stay lightly regulated for much longer. Last year Malaysian forestry officials and police raided more than a dozen illegal swiftlet farms across Sarawak, a state where only two of an estimated 1,500 birdhouses have licenses. The rest contravene local wildlife-protection laws that forbid swiftlet farms in urban areas. Sarawak's once profitable industry is grounded for now. But with unflagging demand from China, and increasing numbers of birdhouses popping...
...this is Sarawak, Malaysia - not Missouri. Belaga's Main Bazaar is a row of careworn early 20th century Chinese shophouses. Between the stores and the town's stone jetty stands a giant wooden hornbill, perched on a carved totem pole, missing a wing, paint peeling on its sun-bleached casque. From the kampung a couple of blocks away floats a muezzin's soulful maghrib, mingling in the twilight with the putter of Yamaha motors on the longboats crawling their way up the Batang Rajang, Malaysia's longest river. For hundreds of years, this was one of Sarawak's most vital...
Travelers like the erudite British naturalist Redmond O'Hanlon used to come to these parts in search of untouched rainforest and unadulterated indigenous life. His Into the Heart of Borneo recounts a 1983 attempt, with poet pal James Fenton, to "rediscover" the Borneo rhinoceros near Sarawak's mountainous border with Indonesia. O'Hanlon describes wild dance parties at Dayak longhouses, fueled by gallons of tuak, a potent milky rice wine, and enthuses about jaw-dropping tangles of tropical growth along the Rajang and its watery veins, some walled in by lush, 200-ft.-high (60 m) tree canopies...
...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) in 1880 to prevent headhunting Iban from paddling upriver to attack their Kayan, Kenyah and Punan neighbors...