The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

Unfortunately, my planned visit to Muara Dua and Lobo Raman in South Sumatra last week was cancelled when I came down with the Rubella virus, and I’ve had to stay put in Singapore for the moment. Rubella! I’m sure I was a vaccinated as a child. Perhaps this just goes to show the ‘tyranny of vaccination laws” as being ‘utterly powerless for good’ (borrowed from ARW’s submission to parliament on the matter in 1885). OK, so I admit that the small, but sometimes vocal, anti-vaccination lobby is now widely perceived as a crackpot fringe, but I couldn’t resist the link.

One colleague in the expedition however, Richard Geddes, was already waiting in North Lampung when I cancelled and made a short, forgettable visit to Muara Dua on Friday night. Muara Dua is now the capital of a newly formed Administrative District in South Sumatra and apparently quite a frontier town. With few western tourists visiting the area, the novelty of Richard staying in a local hotel was enough to raise the suspicions of the local constabulary, with 6 policemen knocking on his door late at night asking to see ID and to find out why he would even want to stay in Muara Dua. Apart from the disturbed sleep and high annoyance factor, nothing came of it. Richard left town the next morning. No one seemed to have heard of ‘Lobo Raman’ either, where Wallace actually did his brief Sumatran collecting, and that endeavour will have to wait for another time.