The Pictureteller | Southeast Asia 2014/2015

With the starting point in Thailand, after the collapse of an investment bubble, the 1997 asian financial crisis swept through most parts of Southeast Asia, not leaving Malaysia uneffected, altough not as bad as Thailand, Indonesia or South Korea. Still it was bad enough to wipe out a couple of construction firms, and scrap a couple of ongoing highrise projects and residential projects, leaving them unfinished. Yes, that’s right, they took their tools, machines and just left the constructionsites, leaving them either totally unfinished, or when dealing with projects of larger residential areas, leaving patches of unfinished areas.

Taman Sri Lambak, or Bandar T6 as the locals call it, is a residential area that was built from scratch and was completed in 1997, or more precisley the work was halted in 1997, to never be resumed again, due to the crisis mentioned above. Luckily Bandar T6 was almost completed and only a few areas in the outskirts were left uncompleted.

While living in Taman Sri Lambak I thought that it could be a fun little project to document some of these areas, so I headed out for a photo hunt in Taman Sri Lambak’s own ghost town. The rampant growth of weeds and bushes in the neglected areas made me thread carefully, since I was wearing regular shoes and not the kind of boots that plantation workers wear, to protect them from snake bites. I actually remember wishing I had a pair, especially thinking about the encounter I had in Langkawi, with a monocled cobra, which was one of the most awesome wildlife encounters I had in Malaysia. You can read more about it here. At the end of this ghost town excursion the only wildlife encounter I had was finding thousands of rodent bones and skulls in one of the houses. Most likely a barn owl, which I had spotted around our area, was residing in this house.