Sometime in September last year I went to Sydney for an assignment and had the chance to chat with several immigrants who had obtained Australian citizenship.

One of them, a taxi driver from Peru, told me Australia was a strange country. “It’s a big country but most of it are deserts,” he said.

On my flight back to Malaysia, his words came to my mind as I looked down from the plane’s window and saw hundreds of miles upon hundreds of miles of deserts. It took the Boeing 747 nearly three hours to fly across the desert.

A strange country, indeed. And strange leaf, this one.

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This is a continuation of my previous entry, 100-Year-Old Grave Exhumed posted on February 22, 2008, which has attracted considerable attention around the social media.

The grave exhumation was an eye-opener for me, for I had never seen how a grave looked like after it was exhumed. But I was not there from the beginning. When I arrived at the graveyard, the two grave diggers had been digging for about a half-an-hour, and they already reached the coffin, or the remains of it, six feet down.

But there was nothing much to be pictured really; it was all earth, all the way down. In this picture below, the grave diggers had just removed the section of the earth where the coffin had once lain. They are now standing on the base of the grave.

This man is not me, but I had squatted like him besides the pit, curious to see what could have been my resting place had I been born a hundred years ago.

The picture below shows the remains of the wooden coffin after 100 years. Nothing much was left, except for a couple of decaying planks. I had hoped for the coffin to be intact so that the grave diggers could pry it open to find a considerably preserved body inside.

But that was not to be the case. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, remember?

Here are some of the very few bones recovered in the process. Come to think of it, if it were us buried in that wooden coffin, a hundred years down the road, the once great Us, who walked the earth with pride, would have been reduced to just this.

The close encounter with the grave had affected me in a powerful way, in more ways than one, that I had no words to describe how I felt. I guess you would, too, if you had been in my place, sitting there besides that old grave.

I could say I was apprehensive, though. About life, about what life should have been for those who have gone, and for those who will be gone. About everything life-and-death.

And about my own life, and the inevitable shortening of the journey to the grave as the days pass by.

Note: Pictures are taken at the old graveyard site at Jalan Kubor, off Victoria Street in Singapore sometime in 2006.

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I carry a camera almost everywhere I go. Even while driving, I will have it strapped on my neck and whenever I see things that excite my eyes, you can be sure they will excite my lens.

The photo below is taken along Jalan Duta in Kuala Lumpur while I was driving for work. The road was particularly clogged that day that I had plenty of time snapping away pictures from my car window.

As I was taking this picture of flowers planted on the road divider, a car on the other side of the road passed by. And look at the paint on the car body — it matches the colour of the flowers quite nicely.

It was a photographic coincidence that I was there at the right place, and at the right moment to frame this shot.

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[UPDATED: This entry has attracted a considerable interest among Macro Photography Blog readers. I've posted several more pictures on the exhumation work].

Original posting: This is a close-up picture of a six-feet-deep grave, an old one, after exhumation. It’s a 100-year-old-grave of a warrior whom the family member wanted to rebury in his homeland. I was there to witness and document the whole process.

To respect the family of the dead, however, I won’t be able to show the whole process without showing the faces of those involved. Even this one, I’ve had to crop it to make sure that none of the faces are shown.

Still, six feet is not that far down, isn’t it?

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