Southeast Asia: Transition among the Nagas - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 388

140 ° 120 °

SOUTHEAST ASIA POPULATION
DISTRIBUTION: 2010
One dot represents 50,000 persons
1200 Kilometers 0 600

0 300 600 Miles

T ropic of Cancer

20 °

Equator

0 °

100 ° Longitude East of Greenwich 120 °

140 °

Figure 14-4
Notice how the population lives along waterways and coasts. Why is this the case?
From H. J. deBlij and P . O. Muller, Geography: Realms, Regions and Concepts , 14th edition, 2010,
p. 535. Originally rendered in color. © H. J. de Blij, P . O. Muller. Reprinted with permission of
John Wiley & Sons.

primarily along rivers. Most of the Sunda Shelf, which
could have offered livable land, is overlain by the sea. Ex-
tensive coastal areas are mangrove swamps. The most
densely populated areas in the island realm are Java in
Indonesia and Luzon in the Philippines, both of which
possess fertile volcanic soils (Figure 14-4).
Even within this tropical realm, straddling the equa-
tor, there are considerable temperature variations.
Pinang, Malaysia, at 5

Precipitation varies both in amount received and its
seasonality (Figure 14-5). Sixty inches (152 cm) will
support tropical rain forests or monsoon forests. Areas
with less than this amount are moisture deficient. Most
moisture-deficient areas are on the mainland and on the
islands east of Java. Distinct wet and dry seasons increase
as one moves away from the equator. In equatorial
regions, the wet and dry monsoons are affected by con-
vectional rainfall. Even so, topographic barriers exhibit
seasonally humid and dry sides, depending on the mon-
soon and other wind patterns.
Length of dry season varies as well, lengthening both
north and south of the equator. Also, some “dry seasons”
are merely less wet ones. For instance, there is no real dry
season in Borneo, and in peninsular Malaysia it lasts only
a month. But on the mainland the dry season lasts four to
five months. Most of the rainfall is in the summer months.

21' N averages 80 F (27 C) for

12 months, Hanoi, Vietnam, at 21 04' N might drop to

60 C) in December or January . Altitude also

plays a role. With temperatures falling 3 degrees per
1,000 feet, Southeast Asia had its hill stations compara-
ble to those of the Raj. Java' s Bandung and the Malay
Peninsula' s Cameron Highlands are examples of places
where temperatures might be 10 to 20 degrees cooler
than in the sweltering lands below .

F (16