AD Hartley

I was thinking about my old walk to school earlier this morning, prompted by half an hour of horn honking from just down the road. The large school next to us causes loud fume-filled chaos every morning, blocking the roads in the entire neighbourhood for an hour and a half due to the persistent need of the parents to drive their children to school and drop them within millimetres of the entrance despite most living within a 3 km radius. I'm never quite sure why the parents do this because they end up stuck in the jam they create just as much as the poor commuters trying to get to work and ending up stuck behind giant SUVs instead, normally with one lone child rolling around on the back seat like a marble in a crate. I'm sure the kids would much rather walk to school. I walked past two parents not so long ago who, having dropped off their child, were now chatting away whilst double parked on the already small road making the whole jam even worse. One w...

I was recently looking through some old photos from one of my first trips to Borneo, a couple of years before I moved there full time, which has brought back a lot of memories. I had joined a Raleigh International  expedition as project manager, leading groups of 30 or so young adults over a period of three months.  The project I was leading with a colleague was to build a Kindergarten in a remote village in the centre of the Malaysian State of Sabah ; mainly an area of subsistence farming communities.  Although I have hundreds of photographs from this expedition, I had forgotten about this particular picture which was taken as we were waiting a couple of hours for some local transport to take us from the main road, where we had been deposited by buses from the local town an hour away, to the village, Paus, via some pretty rough terrain, through jungle and mountains. It being Borneo, it was thunderously hot and humid. In t...