INDONESIA - UJUNG PANDANG

Sulawesi, according to friends and relatives I'd managed to consult, was a dangerous place to visit in early 1990s. There were riots in the capital of Ujung Pandang between the Chinese and the Indonesians, resulting in a military infiltration to keep the peace, but not before a number of people had been killed and huge amounts of property burned; an earthquake in Parepare, some 100km north of Ujung Pandang, was supposed to have caused chaos; and northern and central Sulawesi was apparently on fire and full of smoke. However, like most news you hear along the grapevine, the facts had given way to fiction somewhere in the telling.

The earthquake and riots did happen, but by the time we arrived, peace reigned once again in Ujung Pandang, and Parepare was back to normal. The fires were tiny, too, but there was one major piece of news that L. and I managed to confirm in an English-language paper we tracked down: the chaotic fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan were still burning.