Send to email
It sounded soothing - harmless, even - but the licks of fire that The Sunday Times photojournalist Mark Cheong and I saw in Indonesia's Riau province in April this year belied the vastness of the problem.
We were walking through what were once plantations of acacia trees, grown for the production of pulp and paper.
But hectares of trees had been reduced to scorched earth, laid waste by the ravages of fire.
The licks of flame we saw were vestiges of the fire possibly still raging under the dried-out, flammable peatlands we stood on.