Sweetness and Light

All is not, as you may pre-suppose, sunshine and roses living in a tropical paradise.

We do not skip about, scantily clad, on glorious sandy beaches, surrounded by lush green vegetation, on a daily basis—although those beaches are there to be skipped about upon.

Our daily lives are not governed by the need to explore jungles and observe magnificent blooms nor to stroll endless paths amid the warmth of the midday sun.

You will be, no doubt, relieved to know that we are not continually dodging predators.

Our friend has seen, and measured, a pugmark nearby our house but the perpetrator of that footprint in the mud has not been seen or heard from. Tigers, known as Harimau locally, are notoriously shy as well they may be.

There are sections of the community here who regard pieces of dead Tiger as being beneficial to their health. This is in spite of evidence to the contrary, the availability of manufactured medicines and the considerable disadvantage to the health of the Tiger. The Tiger that is now in serious decline amongst us.

Perhaps it would be better for the Tigers to take refuge in our garden but, sad to say, they will find the hunting sparse there.

Many people remark that they could not possibly live ‘over there’, as if it is some mystical place that exists only in the fervid imagination of a science fiction writer, because of the ‘bugs and things’.

‘Things’?

Perhaps they mean snakes.

We do have ‘bugs’. The one that bothers us on a routine basis is the mosquito. There are several types. They all bite.

River Klang at the Front of our House

Our house is by a river. It is the River Klang near its birthplace. The considerable amount of water in close proximity means that mosquitoes abound. So people tell us.

“My word! So many mozzies!” they exclaim—almost as one.

“Really?” we answer, puzzled.

Only visitors notice them and get chewed.

There is very rarely any sort of infection here that derives from mosquito bites. The last case of malaria that I heard of was twenty years ago in a small town over in the jungle to the north of us by, maybe, a hundred kilometres (101.2, to be precise). It was a Frenchman that died.

Just to digress for a moment. An unusual event, you may observe.

The Frenchman had arrived on a tourist visa twenty plus years previously and disappeared. Immigration had no clue where he was. Until he died. He died surrounded by his family. He had settled happily into this small town and lived there until malaria caught up with him.

Life is full of these little stories of personal happiness, tragedy and loss.

There is also a thing called ‘dengue fever’ that can be lethal. A friend of mine had dengue; he was close to death but the doctors here managed to save him with the help of hundreds of people who came to give blood. Really—hundreds. There were queues stretching around the hospital grounds. Big hearts abound.

The varieties of dengue fever are spread by a mosquito that revels, inasmuch as mosquitoes ever ‘revel’, in the name of Aedes. The malarial mosquito is called the Anopheles. The Aedes mosquito has black and white stripes rather like a miniscule flying Zebra.

Aedes Mosquito

We have all sorts of bugs that are, for the most part, harmless. They are attracted to the lights over my aquarium, fall into the water and drown.

Perhaps I should purchase an Archer Fish or two (Toxotes Jaculator as they are known to us ‘fishy’ types!) to eat them.

Cicadas arrive, make a hellish noise and expire. They look like houseflies but many times bigger. They are also harmless.

Snakes? Very occasionally we get the odd snake. In the last ten years we have had one, small, tree snake in the garden. I was asked if it was poisonous. I told the enquirer that I don’t know because I didn’t eat it.

One of our neighbours has had several snakes. They appear when he is out but his daughter is at home thus requiring a telephone call to me to go and get rid of it. As if I should know anything about tropical snakes. Perhaps it is me from whom they are trying to rid themselves!

Our Neighbours

The flora and fauna notwithstanding—and the flora is sometimes quite poisonous, this is a wonderful place to live.

Except right now.

We are not all happiness and light at the moment because we have the dreaded ‘haze’.

It catches in your throat and makes your eyes water.

It happens every year when the Indonesian farmers and Corporations go about their ‘slash and burn’ practices to clear land for crops and for mass planting of oil palm plantations.

The extreme danger is that the peat that these fires rage over is also capable of catching fire. It is almost impossible to put the peat fires out and that, dear hearts, will extend this accursed ‘haze’ indefinitely.

We pray for heavy, torrential, tropical downpours—there and here. So far we are out of luck. We continue to suffer.

Pity us as we inch our way painfully up to the nearest restaurant to tuck into our repast of chicken curry, mixed vegetables, white rice and boiled duck egg in a light sauce or, perhaps, a salt egg ‘cooked’ in rock salt for two weeks so that the salt permeates the egg and makes it so delicious and so terrible for the blood pressure!

Pity us as we sip hot tea or coffee by the roadside with the tears streaming down our faces. My tears are caused mostly by getting my wallet out!

It is a passing phase.

Soon we shall, no doubt, be back to sweetness and light in the land of sweet delights.