Borneo - Sarawak

We arrived in Kuching, Sarawak on 8th October, got a cab into town and had a look for some accommodation. After a wander around, turning our noses up at the place we had tentatively booked (due to mattresses hanging out of the window - a sure sign of bedbugs!) we found a decent family run hotel. Most of the family seemed quite pleased to see us - it was just the two toddlers who glared at us evilly every time we walked in! A walk around town and along the river followed, and the town all seemed quite nice - including a rather cool looking government building - not what we’d imagined seeing in Borneo.

After grabbing some dinner, we headed back to our place to try and get a good night sleep. Our plans were scuppered, however, as it was the local temple’s birthday - meaning a huge very noisy procession going on for about an hour right outside our window!

We got up early the next morning and got a bus to the Semengogh Orang-utan rehabilitation sanctuary. We’d not anticipated seeing too much, but almost as soon as we walked through the gate, we spotted the beasts swinging through the trees!

It turned out that they were in quite a sociable mood, and we managed to get quite close to them - an amazing experience to see them in the semi-wild! Certainly something that neither of us will forget.

After spending a couple of hours watching the Orang-utans, we got a bus back into town, and got a boat (above) across the river to see Fort Margarita, which was built in 1879 to guard the approach to Kuching against pirates. It was semi-impressive and offered great views of the town.

Our main plan for Borneo was to try and get a little bit fit for our November trip to Nepal, so the next day, we headed to Bako National Park for some serious walking! After a bus and a boat ride, we arrived and were relieved to hear that this National Park was home to no leeches whatsoever, but it was how to some very strange looking one-clawed blue crabs (not sure of their real names)!

We had booked for a couple of days, and got underway with a pretty hilly five mile hike. The scenery was fantastic, and we even managed to catch a glimpse of the elusive proboscis monkey. The walk took about three hours, and immediately upon our return, we headed straight for the canteen for a fuel up. No sooner had we put our plates down on the table than a pretty aggressive monkey appeared out of nowhere and nicked most of Lauren’s food - not funny at all! Following that fiasco, we headed off for another hike - this time slightly shorter, but much steeper and harder. It looked like the path hadn’t been trodden for months - it was brutal! We felt like we’d achieved something when we finally reached the end - we then did it all again in reverse to get back to camp.

The camp itself was quite ‘rustic’- the bed was reasonably comfortable, but the shared facilities were pretty rough, and seemed to mainly be used by the burgeoning local mosquito population. Mosquitoes weren’t the only wildlife we had to contend within the immediate vicinity of our room.

Bearded hogs and long-tail macaques threatened us by day, and various frogs, snakes and other nasties by night, as we discovered on a two-hour night trek…

The next day, we were up early to do what turned out to be a pretty hard final trek. It was worth it though - after a very, very tough three hours via a very disappointing waterfall, we emerged at a beautiful deserted beach - deserted aside from a very strange looking but friendly fish and a huge dead jellyfish.

After repeating the trek in reverse to get back again, we then checked out of the national park and headed back to Kuching for the night before starting our trip further into the interior of the country.

The next part of the journey was a four and a half hour speedboat from Kuching to Sibu, shortly followed by another three hour boat journey to Kapit, the main inland town in Sarawak, where the locals use petrol stations as badminton courts after hours!

Our main reason for going to Kapit was to visit an Iban longhouse - a traditional form of dwelling in Borneo, whereby one long roof covers tens of apartments, which all share a communal veranda at the front. We managed to find a chap through our hotel who knew of a longhouse who were willing to have us to stay for a night, so we snapped up the chance. The next morning, we set off, and arrived at the longhouse shortly before lunch.

The place itself was pretty cool, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to be an easy ride for us!

We were dropped off at an old Iban man’s place in the longhouse, and would be picked up the same time the next day. It soon transpired that the chap we were staying with spoke about as much English as we speak Bahasa! After a quick bite to eat, we set off by ourselves to look around. Rather ominously, there were a number of human skulls hanging around the communal veranda, and the our reception was very mixed - quite a few people totally blanked us when we said hello to them, whilst others smiled and seemed genuinely pleased to see us.

The old man’s grandson was delighted to see us when he got back from school in the afternoon, though his only words in English were ‘what is your name?’ and ‘swim’. This led to a rather limiting afternoon both in conversation and activity. After a swim in the river, we headed back for supper - more chicken and rice, which was actually rather nice aside from the chicken’s feet which I was unsure how to tackle. Every time the chap looked away, Lauren was feverishly swapping my empty bowl of chicken for her full one!

After supper, the old chap took us to his chum’s place a bit further down the longhouse where we helped sort some fruit - it finally seemed as if the locals were warming to us!

We managed to get a reasonably good night’s sleep in the longhouse and were up early the next morning, though not at five thirty like our host. After some bread and coconut jam for breakfast, we spent the rest of the morning looking around the place further, before being picked up and taken back to Kapit. It was certainly a very strange experience, but fun nonetheless and certainly another part of the trip which we’ll never forget - not least because of the state of his bog, into which house rules forced us to walk bare-foot - well rank!

Next on the list of places to go was an ‘oil rich boom town’ called Miri. We caught a bus from Sibu and finally arrived in Miri about eight hours later. We checked into a backpacker’s hostel with perhaps the fiercest manger we’ve ever met! I tried a quick bit of haggling for the room, but she was having absolutely none of it! In the end, she turned out to be quite friendly to us, not only because we befriended her very fat cat, but also because a new nemesis had arrived in the meantime - Rolf, from Switzerland, who’d rather unwisely woken her up at three in the morning coming back pissed on his first night, having found himself locked out! She refused to speak to him for the rest of his stay!

Whilst in Miri, we visited the Niah Caves, about an hour away from the town. After about an hour’s walk through the jungle from the entrance to the park, encountering some pretty beastly centipedes, we reached the caves.

They were incredible - absolutely vast caves linked by very dark tunnels - luckily we had taken our torches. There were three caves to visit - the biggest was imaginatively named Great Cave; the one which used to be used for harvesting birds nests was called Traders Cave, and the one with 40,000 year old rock art was called Painted Cave.

They were all very impressive indeed, but trying to make out the old paintings on the walls of the caves was quite impossible! On the way back to town, the driver made a quick stop at a longhouse en-route to get some grog - the locals here were a far friendlier bunch!

Our final day in Miri was spent wandering around the town visiting the local markets and eating a lot. Rolf and I went to the bar below the guesthouse for a few beers, and were both beaten at pool by the local prodigy - a ten year old kid who was very good! The manager of the guesthouse, it later became apparent, had seen me and Rolf in the bar, meaning she now despised me again for fraternising with the enemy!

After a ten or so great days in Sarawak, the next morning we were at Miri airport to catch the half an hour flight to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, the northern part of Malaysian Borneo, from where we will pick up our adventures next time, so stay tuned…