From Madrid to Kuching: new places, new sights, & oil palm plantations

I am nearly at my final destination. The little town of Sukadana in West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) is only two more hops away, either a flight or bus ride, followed by a speedboat ride down the west coast of Borneo, a ride that passes through mangrove swamps and over muddy sea water.

At the moment I am in the city of Kuching (Cat City), in Sarawak, Malaysia. The Indonesian border is to the south and east, not far way, hidden by mountains and clouds. The province takes its name from the slow moving Sarawak river that runs through Kuching. As you might imagine, this part of the world is heavily boat centered.

River boat on the Sarawak in Kuching, Malyasia

The trip from Madrid to Kuching was an extension of the now ludicrous collection of hiccups, trials, and frustrations that have ridden on my coat-tails ever since I was nearly prevented from boarding the plane from Los Angeles to Madrid. Fortunately, these obstructions have only added spice to an unexpectedly fantastic voyage so far, full of delightful surprises, wonderful people, excellent food, and meat for a rich assortment of unbelievable stories.

I took Qatar Airways from Madrid, paying more in baggage fees than for my ticket (moving over-seas has even more unexpected expenses than regular moves do), caught the sunset from 35,000 feet over North Africa, a glowing pink/purple-amber layer of clouds that swiftly fell into gray, then black, and changed planes in the Doha airport. The flight path dodged and jinked in order to stay out of, let’s say “difficult”, airspace.

Qatar Airways flight path from Madrid to Doha

From Doha to Kuala Limpur, through immigration, then on Malaysian Air to Kuching.

One of my first views of Malaysia was of the vast oil palm plantations surrounding the Kuala Limpur airport.

Oil palm plantations are increasingly wide-spread through South East Asia

The world appetite for palm oil is vast and ever growing. China and India use it for cooking, the US and Europe use it in shampoos, hand lotions, and face creams. All over the world is is added to foods, often called “coconut oil”, an act of creative labeling.

Enormous regions of diverse tropical forests are logged, razed to the ground, and replanted in monoculture stands of oil palms, stands that reach to the horizon in many areas. As one might imagine, the once great biodiversity of these areas drops precipitously.

Processing oil from the oil palms is labor intensive, requiring machinery that locals cannot afford and the process is only effective at a large scale. Thus, any money that is made from the oil palm industry remains in the hands of the investors and wealthy, with a miniscule portion of it dripping down to the people whose homes and land have been taken and transformed.

This is one of the great conservation concerns for the well being of both the people and biodiversity of South East Asia.

The plane lifted swiftly from Kuala Limpur, hiding the oil palm plantations under a dense layer of clouds that thinned once over the waters of the South China Sea. Several hours later I had my first sight of Borneo, my new home.

Mt Santubong, a small coastal mountain in Sarawak

Just near the small mountain of Santubong, lies a town, not unlike the town that will be my new home.

The small town of Kampung Buntal in Sarawak at the base of Mt Santubong

I avidly peered out the window of the plane, in that awkward combination of a hunch and twist that you are forced into to see out of the tiny, smudged plane windows.

The rivers fascinated me. This part of the world receives an astounding amount of rain and even short rivers are wide with tremendous volumes of flow. Enormous amounts of sediment are carried by the waters, turning the sea around much of Borneo the color of hot chocolate. Some of the rivers originate in the flat areas and are nearly back from tannins released by decomposing vegetation. Each of these rivers leaves a swirling mark where it enters the ocean, and all twist and meander on their way to the sea.

Deep meanders as the rivers approach the sea

Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, the southernmost province of Malaysian Borneo. It is a low, wet city with rainfall approaching 4.5 meters a year (depending on what source you read). This makes it one of the wettest cities on the planet, this morning and last night the thunder was frequent, shaking the buildings, and the rain violent in its path to the ground.

The riverfront has a nice park with shade trees and wide walk-ways. The humidity and heat lends itself to a rich collection of plants, of which ferns are well represented. Most of the river-front trees have climbing ferns creeping up them, some trees are completely covered by them.

Climbing ferns covering a small tree on the Kuching waterfront

Ornamental stands of Lipstick Palm (Cyrtostachys renda) add color to the walkways.

Lipstick Palms (Cyrtostachys renda) are planted in small stands

Bronze river dragons guard the banks of the Sarawak.

River dragon

And Chinese temples have their own collection of guardians as well.

Chinese dragon guarding a Buddhist temple

The internet connection at my hotel is growing erratic, so I will pause here and continue with another entry later.

I will be in Kuching for several more days, then, if all goes well and there are no other complications, on to Indonesia for both work and language school.

 

Segovia: sandstones and granite

I have always loved things made of stone, especially ancient constructions.  The stone-masonry I have done has only increased my respect for the strength, vision, and talent of past masons.

Small garden wall of Panton Shale for a friend in Vermont

Most of my stone projects have been small in scale.  The largest project was a 180 foot long retaining wall standing between 2 and 6 feet high, using 30 or 40 tons of stone.  That seems large when you’re doing it by yourself, but that’s a tiny project, barely larger than the little garden wall in the photo above.

In Peru there were some truly astounding pieces of megalithic engineering, many of them little known like Lanche and Kuelap, others well known like Saqsaywaman.

Walls at Saqsaywaman. For scale zoom into the center of the full-size image to see the person.

Two days ago I went to the small Spanish city of Segovia and got to see several astounding pieces of stone-based architecture.  The first of these is the ancient Roman aqueduct.

The aqueduct in Segovia

The aqueduct runs about 15 km from the mountains into Segovia, with a 683 meter long raised section running through town.  The tall double arch of granite blocks is impressive enough by modern standards, even more so when you consider that it was built in the 1st or 2nd century, that the granite had to be carried in from the mountains, and that it is a dry-laid structure (no morter holding the blocks together) that has been standing for 1800 or 1900 years.  Clearly, this is a place with few earthquakes.

Granite is a favorite building material for many people.  It is an igneous rock that bubbles up in volcanic flows and cools in place.  The size of the crystals in the rock give an estimation of how long it took for the rock to cool and how much water there was in the melt.  The colors tell of the mineral content.  This granite is pale, with moderately large crystals weathering out, leaving the exposed stone extremely rough to the touch.

Due to the way it forms granite has no preferential cleavage plane, meaning that, given the right tools, it is easy to shape into whatever form is needed.  It is a dense and strong rock as well, another reason it is often used as a foundational material.

The blocks of stone making up the aqueduct are large, not enormous, but large, hundreds of pounds each.  At its highest point the aqueduct is 29 meters tall (that’s about as tall as a 4 or 5 story building).  Nearly 2 thousand years ago those blocks had to be hoisted up and set in place.  Clues as to how the Romans did so are carved into the blocks.

Lifting divots on the granite blocks

Each block was lifted into place with a pair of metal pincers, like those people used to carry ice-blocks with.  Divots were carved into the stone to prevent the pincers from losing their grip.  Presumably the divots were carved at the balance point of the block as well, a calculation I would be very curious to know how was done.

Supposedly Segovia was a “small outpost” when the Romans ran things in the area, though the effort and cost of building the aqueduct makes me question that assessment.  Small outpost or no, very little happened in the area for a long while, then in the 1200s the town began to grow and with that growth came the buildings that Europe is so well known for.

Castles and Cathedrals.  Segovia has impressive examples of both, the castle being the inspiration for Walt Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty, and the cathedral being on the of the last of built of the great Gothic cathedrals.

Segovia cathedral

Construction of the cathedral began in the 1500s, but took more than a century to complete.  The massive building looms over the city, glowing golden in the sunlight.

The first thing that struck me was neither the size nor the the tremendous amount of fine detail.  It was the color.  A warm, yellow/orange, not the color one associates with Gothic architecture, or with goths in general.  The castle, cathedral, and much of the rest of Segovia is made from this stone, not from the granite the aqueduct is made from.

The town of Segovia rests upon an outcrop of calcareous sandstone (sandstone with the grains cemented together by calcium rather than silica) and the land around rises and falls, exposing the bedrock in numerous small cliffs.  Sandstone is a sedimentary rock, a class of rock at the opposite end of the formation spectrum as granites and other igneous rocks.

Sandstone tends to have horizontal cleavage planes, refection the initial depositional patterns, and is often soft and easy to carve.  The sandstone in Segovia seems made for carving and the cathedral  builders took full advantage of this.

Cathedral detail carved from sandstone

Sandstone weathers and erodes easily, especially in the presence of water.  Segovia, despite being a dry region by my standards (about a half meter of rain per year) is considered a wet place in comparison with nearby areas.  As such the builders took pains to protect the soft sandstone, making their waterspout gargoyles of the more resistant granite.

Cathedral gargoyle rain-spout

Statues of sandstone have not weathered as well as those of granite.

A royal lion slowly weathering away

The the level of fine detail in the cathedral architecture is reflected elsewhere in the town.  The older buildings and the castle are covered with patterned façades.  In the past these patterns seem to have indicated which family owned the building and in a few cases older patterns could be seen under the more recent ones.

Old wall pattern, the material looks and feels like reconstituted sandstone.

The castle, the Alcázar de Segovia, has a more simple pattern, but each intersection is studded with fragments of volcanic rock.

Looking up the castle wall to the battlements. the small black studs are fig sized pieces of vesicular volcanic rock brought in from far away.

Like many European castles the one at Segovia has gone through a number of iterations; fort, castle, palace, prison, artillery college, and museum.  It still serves the latter two roles.

The castle commands a wonderful view of the countryside in all directions.  One of the most magnificent views is of the cathedral:

Segovia cathedral from atop the Alcázar de Segovia battlements

In the opposite direction an old Templar keep and the sandstone cliffs much of the stone was quarried from to make the city are visible.

Templar keep and sandstone cliffs above the river below the castle

This has been a less science based post than most, but the trip to Segovia was far too interesting to keep all to myself.

The castle, aqueduct, and cathedral are the largest of the attractions, but not the only ones by far.  The food is delicious, mockingbirds flit about the city, interesting small plants grow from the old walls and on the red tile roofs, and great architecture abounds.

Small church in Segovia