Kuching

What a great city this turned out to be! Who knew?

Kuching is situated at the banks of the Sarawack River on the North-Western part of Borneo.

We arrived late & by mistake checked into a hotel next to the one that we were going to stay at.

However, it turned out to be better than our initial choice, & just hadn't had any reviews in the Lonely Planet yet, so it was comparatively unknown. We had a huge split level room with ultra powerful AC. I believe we were the only ones staying in the hotel & had lovely personal service from the staff.

Our hotel room in Kuching was vast & cold-just what we needed

We did our exploration of the city in a few of days. It was beautiful. A mix of old & new. The oldest street of Kuching is the Main Bazaar, a row of 19th century Chinese shop houses located along the Kuching Waterfront overlooking the Sarawak River.

As usual there was great cheap food here, & as usual we ate mainly in the Hawker stalls where you could get the best stuff for just a few Ringgits.

I haven't mentioned what language the Malays speak. It seems like a big mix, and sometimes it's hard to make a judgement as to what language they're speaking.

The main languages in Kuching (and other parts of Malaysia/ Sarawak) are Bahasa Melayu, (the official Malay language), Iban (which is close to BM, but not the same), Bidayuh (which has completely different languages for the different "Kampungs", villages), to Chinese (the most popular Chinese dialect in Kuching being Hokkien), to English. The Malaysian English is not just common British English, but a "refined" version.

So basically we were able to communicate in English the whole time we were here. It was amazing to find that most people, even the poorest & least educated had at least some English, even if they lived in remote villages & such. It felt embarrassing that we knew so little, if anything of their language.

Since we're always on th'hunt for vegetarian food, we invariably end up eating Indian. It's also a good relief from the piles of greasy noodles that get overwhelming after a while. 

This guy was making hundreds of tin containers by hand

Tin Shop

Malaysian Malls often host TV shows, dance competitions, beauty contests..a myriad of events.

From Kuching we planned a day to go to Bako National Park. We were thinking we might stay over, but were a bit jungled out so decided to do  day trip. We got an early local bus & then a boat to the park. Once we got to the HQ they told us that we'd only have time to do the shorter trek which we were a bit annoyed about but didn't want to be irresponsible tourists so took their advise.

We got to  experience a different kind of jungle to our previous adventures, & it wasn't so exciting. Basically we say a lot of fauna & a few proboscis monkeys very high in the trees swinging & jumping above us. 

It was a really hot trek (as usual) & though short we had to drink gallons of water to get back to feeling normal again. 

These were amazing. Dave identified them as Pitcher plants which are actually carnivorous!

This ant was the biggest ant I'd ever seen in my life!

Lovely, long, furry moss