Spencer Wells
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Articles by Spencer Wells
Ask An Expert: 35MM
Sometimes I feel like the guy from Pawn Stars who is always reaching out to my more knowledgeable buddy. When I find myself down the camera rabbit hole, I always ask my friend Spencer Wells for his expert advice. He’s a professional photographer and shoots a lot of film, so he’s the perfect person to hit with a barrage of eBay links and also to dig in a bit more for all of you curious 35mm people out there. He put together a great breakdown of film point-and-shoots to consider.
Island of empires
Hello from Surabaya! The second largest city in Indonesia, Surabaya will serve as the starting point for my journey through the history of Java. Over the next two weeks I’ll visit some of the most fabled locations in the long, complex history of Indonesia. Unlike last year’s jeep expedition through Wallacea, though, this trip will be done by train — in comparison, a very civilized way to travel.
Stone sentinels of Central Sulawesi
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Stone sentinels of Central Sulawesi
After our visit to Tana Toraja in mid-August, Holly and I headed back over the mountain pass to Palopo, then turned northward and eastward around the shore of the Gulf of Bone. Overnighting in the transit town of Tomoni, we then began the long journey into Central Sulawesi, climbing up the switchbacks of the Trans-Sulawesi Highway. This is the primary road connecting the more densely-populated region in South Sulawesi to more sparsely populated Central Sulawesi.
Judas Was a Chaplain to Congress: Jacob Duche and the Revolutionary Limits of Civic Faith
The Morning of September 6,1774, found a weary John Adams attending to political duties. Arriving in Philadelphia to take part in the First Continental Congress, Adams found himself greeted with rumors concerning the British "bombardment" of Boston at every turn. While aware that the colonial press remained unreliable during even the best of times, Adams remained concerned. Prospects of familial "distress and terror" haunted his mind, and fellow delegates did little to help.
A run for the border
My apology for the delay in posting — April was an eventful month, and my silence certainly wasn’t intentional.
Suspended between life and death
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Suspended between life and death
After leaving Sulawesi’s extraordinary Lake Matano in mid-August, I headed west again to the coastal town of Palopo on the northwestern side of the Gulf of Bone. My wife Holly flew in the following morning, and after picking her up from the airport we began the long climb into the mountains looming over the west of town, headed for Tana Toraja. The drive is not for the faint-of-heart: winding, narrow roads with massive buses and trucks grinding up and down, and fog engulfing the pass at the top.
First Substack-iversary
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First Substack-iversary
One year ago I published my first Substack post. I didn’t really know where it might lead, but I decided to launch on this platform for a few reasons. First, I felt that I had left an audience hanging over on Medium when I ended a short-lived but fairly widely-read blog early on in the pandemic. I wanted to update everyone on what had happened in the intervening 2.5 years since my wife Holly and I made the decision to move to Lombok permanently, as well as to create a less Covid-centric narrative.
The land of iron
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The land of iron
Happy New Year! I will be doing a special post next week for my first Substack anniversary, but this is one of several upcoming deep dives (quite literally in this case) into some of the fascinating places I visited during my expedition across Wallacea in 2023. I hope you enjoy it, and that you had a wonderful holiday break.
The Spice Islands
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The Spice Islands
In mid-October I boarded a plane in Ternate bound for Lombok, via the cities of Makassar and Surabaya. My journey across Wallacea — from its southwesternmost point on Lombok, to its northeasternmost island, Morotai — was complete. After more than five months on the road, I was finally headed home. In the course of my journey I’ve seen many things, but it was perhaps fitting for it to end in the Spice Islands, destination for traders, explorers and colonizers for over two millennia.
Comments - Bye, Besse - by Spencer Wells
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Bye, Besse
In my last post I mentioned that I intended to take the jeep on a car ferry to the ‘Spice Islands’ of North Maluku after exploring northern Sulawesi. The latter part of that is still true — I’ve just landed in Ternate, a small volcanic island that was once home to one of the most powerful sultanates in eastern Indonesia — but Besse the jeep has already begun her long sea journey back to Lombok. I made this slight tweak to the plan for a couple of reasons.
Comments - Manaaahhhdo... - by Spencer Wells
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Manaaahhhdo...
On Saturday, September 16, nearly six weeks after leaving the southern city of Makassar, my wife Holly and I drove into the city of Manado in Sulawesi’s opposite, northeastern-most corner. The long drive across Sulawesi, which began with a ferry from Labuan Bajo to Bira on the south coast in late May, was complete. A milestone, to be sure — even though the expedition is still ongoing. Let me explain. The notion of driving across Sulawesi took hazy shape during the early months of the pandemic.
Comments - Jeep update - by Spencer Wells
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Jeep update
Shit happens, as they say. And sometimes, a lot of it happens in the same place. This has certainly been the case with the FJ40 since the start of the expedition. It overheated on the first day, and after a valve adjustment we were able to make it to Labuan Bajo in Flores, onto the ferry to Sulawesi, and ultimately into Makassar at the end of May.
The mystery of Snake Island
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The mystery of Snake Island
During my current expedition through Wallacea I’ll be spending a lot of time on Sulawesi. I’ve already seen Bira, on the southern coast, as well as the Maros region. I’ve also spent a lot of time in Makassar, the capital and largest city in eastern Indonesia — a bit too much, to be honest, but the jeep is a fickle beast (more on this in an upcoming post). I’ll be spending the rest of August and most of September on the island, exploring the many wonders in Central and North Sulawesi.
Sulawesi's extraordinary karst galleries
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Sulawesi's extraordinary karst galleries
Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Makassar in early September 1856, staying until he set sail for the remote Aru Islands in December of that year to see (and collect) their Australasian fauna. It was on his second visit, in July-November 1857, that he ventured inland beyond the immediate environs of Makassar and its outlying Dutch plantations, into the Maros region.
Lords of the seas
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Lords of the seas
In my previous post I was off on the ferry from Labuan Bajo, on the island of Flores, to Bira in South Sulawesi. The crossing took around 26 hours, not counting a two-hour delay in leaving, and included a 3am stop to unload cargo at the island of Jampea in the Selayar Islands in the middle of the Flores Sea.
Blowing up in Sumbawa
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Blowing up in Sumbawa
Holly and I pulled out of our driveway in Sengigi full of confidence after making it over the hurdle of packing up the FJ40. A torrential downpour the night before had flooded villages and homes on the western side of Lombok, but thankfully it left us relatively unscathed apart from an inconvenient loss of electricity — though this did mean packing while sweating profusely in the steamy final gasp of Indonesia’s rainy season.
Comments - We're off! - by Spencer Wells
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We're off!
After much preparation, and delays due to Covid and a lingering La Niña weather pattern, Holly and I are finally off on our expedition to Wallacea. We’ll be driving overland and taking ferries between islands — heading east from Lombok, located on the southwestern edge of the region, through Sumbawa to Flores, where we’ll take the ferry from Labuan Bajo to Bira on the southern coast of Sulawesi.
Dingoes, singing dogs, and ancient sailors
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Dingoes, singing dogs, and ancient sailors
The dingo is probably as iconic a symbol of Australia as the kangaroo and koala. These wild dogs excel at living in a wide variety of environments throughout the country, and it’s hard to imagine the Australian landscape without them.
The Lombok Diaries
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Wallacea
You can’t travel very far in Indonesia without encountering Alfred Russel Wallace. His presence is felt nearly everywhere, from the pre-trip reading you’ve likely done before arriving here to the displays in the National Museum in Jakarta to the view looking eastward from Bali across the Lombok Strait.
HUNTER BOOTS x ROWING BLAZERS - ‘A playful new perspective on British and American heritage’ with a road trip campaign by Spencer WELLS c/o ALYSSA PIZER MGMT
![endif]--> ALYSSA PIZER MANAGEMENT • NEWS (81) • ARTISTS (17) • BLOGS (3) • Contact HUNTER BOOTS x ROWING BLAZERS - ‘A playful new perspective on British and American heritage’ with a road trip campaign by Spencer WELLS c/o ALYSSA PIZER MGMT CREDITS / DETAILS / VIDEO EMBED LINK Copy the following code to embed this video on your site (use ctrl+c / cmd+c): HUNTER BOOTS x ROWING BLAZERS is a limited-edition collaboration with Rowing Blazers, the iconic NYC label, loved by celebrities such as...
Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 3)
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Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 3)
My career as a scientist has been marked by two significant paradigm shifts in the study of human origins. I started my PhD in 1989, two years after Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson published their groundbreaking paper on mitochondrial DNA showing that all humans around the world share a recent common female ancestor around 200,000 years ago (200kya) in Africa.
Cabinets of curiosity
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Cabinets of curiosity
In February-March this year I traveled to Singapore, Sarawak and Jakarta - the first because Holly and I love visiting the Lion City (luckily it’s one of the two international destinations we can fly to directly from Lombok), and then onward to Sarawak to scout for an upcoming trip. This was followed a couple of weeks later by a quick overnight to Jakarta to run an errand. I’m a serious museum junkie, and with three of my favorites in these locations I was in heaven.
Comments - 2008 Redux - by Spencer Wells
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2008 Redux
I stepped off the plane at Ashgabat airport and entered the passport control queue, uncertain about whether my e-visa would be valid. It was just before midnight on September 15, 2008, and I had made the short hop across the Caspian Sea from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. It was a flight I hadn’t intended to take, and had been hastily arranged based on bad weather and good advice. Let’s step back for a bit of context.
Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 2)
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Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the geographical context for humanity’s long-term presence in Southeast Asia. One surprising aspect for many is the existence of vast tracts of savanna nestled in between the present islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo during much of the Pleistocene, from ~2.5 million to ~12,000 years ago. There is a wealth of evidence for this, dating back to the first settlement of the region by Homo erectus at sites such as Mojokerto.
Eating astride two oceans
On our recent trip to Singapore, Holly and I had the opportunity to indulge ourselves with a rare culinary splurge. While we are pretty serious cooks at home, as anyone who follows me on Twitter or Instagram has probably gathered from our many dinner posts, we don’t get a chance to eat at world-renowned dining establishments that often here on Lombok.
Land of the White Rajahs
On the 15th of August 1838, a ship under the command of James Brooke sailed into the harbor of the trading port on Borneo’s Sarawak River (present-day Kuching). Brooke was 35 at the time, a former British army officer who had been seriously injured in India and given a military pension in his 20s. The scion of a wealthy family, his inheritance in 1835 had paid for his ship, the Royalist, as part of a plan to pursue a swashbuckling lifestyle in the Far East.
The Lion City beyond Raffles
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The Lion City beyond Raffles
“If you do not know history, you think short term. If you know history, you think medium and long term.” ― Lee Kuan Yew This week Holly and I are in Singapore, stopping off for a few days en route to another destination to enjoy one of our favorite cities in the world. One of the things we love about living on Lombok is that we have inexpensive direct flights to two of Southeast Asia’s most vibrant cities, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. This was by design.
Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 1)
Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 1) lombokdiaries.substack.com
Southeast Asia: 1.8 million years of human prehistory (Part 1)
Let me start by saying that the task in the title is obviously impossible in a single blog post - or even a few - and it would even be difficult to do it justice in a single book. My goal here is simply to outline the key events in the human settlement of the region, ignite some curiosity about the unanswered questions, and lay the foundation for future posts that will touch on various aspects of Southeast Asian prehistory.
The Journey of Man at 20
20 years ago, on January 21st 2003, The Journey of Man premiered on PBS in the United States. It was a chilly midwinter night in much of the US, but I was in Dubai for an event celebrating the launch of 24-hour Arabic programming on National Geographic Channel Asia, where the show had already aired a month before. Although I was far away from the television audience that night, it rapidly became clear that a lot would change after the broadcast. Many years of work had led up to that night.
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