Publisher's Synopsis
Join a journey absorbing customs and cultures on Garuda's turf in Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia and witnessing historical moments of our time. From Shiite refugees in Madura, pigs running temples in Cambodia, a Balinese slaughterhouse, Java's sex trade in a Surabaya cemetery and Sumbawa's Pompeii of the East on the slopes of Mt Tambora to Thai bombings, bat and rat attacks, MH370 in Malaysia, and a miner from New Zealand loose in Indonesia's West Java, when Garuda books his ticket to South East Asia for a grunge fix, no secret is safe... The journey among Australia's 300 million Muslim and Hindu neighbors, embarked on over a three year period, is a journey of discovery. After the culture fests, it reaches its dark point in Southern Thailand. The narrator and Anne, his traveling companion, go bird watching while embedded for in a border hotel in an area that has had civil war status for the last decade. Not content, after the narrator leaves on first day of Ramadan, he comes back for seconds. He leaves, on the last day of Ramadan, a man pushed to the brink of destruction by a car bomb. The book winds down through seditious Sikhs and the denizens of Brickfields at their nefarious work and play with the narrator spending some serious downtime contemplating humanity as he comes to grips with nearly being killed in the Deep South, and what it's like to live with constant war
