I awoke to the
soothing tones of Kate's alarm at 4.40am, the unmistakable stabbing
pain of a nasty cold settling in in the posterior regions of my nasal
passages. We quickly got up and out and down and onto the street for
the short walk to the bus stop, where a slightly disreputable-looking
group of men sat around a table listening to the radio and making
desultory conversation, while something smouldered nearby to keep the
mosquitoes at bay. The bus ride to the airport was considerably
smoother than the journey had been going the other, and we were there
before 6am. We had some trouble figuring out where to check in for
our flight, but when we got to the counters, the queues were short
and soon enough our bags were on their way to the plane and we were
on our way through security.
The flight to
Kuching in Sarawak, the more southern end of Malaysian Borneo, only
took about two hours, but oddly, despite the fact that it was a
domestic flight, we still had to go through immigration when we
arrived, fingerprinting and all. It all went nice and smoothly,
however, and we grabbed our bags from the carousel and grabbed a
voucher for a taxi and then settled back for the ride into Kuching
itself. The taxi dropped us at the Nova Hotel, where we checked in,
but then struggled with the newfangled electronic door key, which
stubbornly refused us ingress to our room. Once we got inside,
however, we were impressed with the size of said room and spent a few
moments regaining our composure before heading out again to see if we
could find the national parks office so we could book our
accommodation for the rest of our stay in Borneo.
The walk took us
alongside the Sarawak River, which runs through the city, and before
long we had found the office and started making enquiries about
staying in Bako, Kubah and Guning Gading national parks. We were
aided in our efforts by a wonderfully patient and helpful gentleman,
who, unfortunately had clearly been lumbered with an incredibly
antiquated and laborious digital booking system. To make matters
worse, we were trying to juggle about ten nights of accommodation
spread over three national parks, two of which we could travel
between but one of which would require us to stay a night in Kuching
either before or after. Each potential combination of nights required
multiple key-strokes and switching between screens and I'm sure it
must have taken us at least an hour to come up with a viable
itinerary (an hour that ate significantly into the poor man's lunch
hour), but eventually we reached a satisfactory conclusion, paid all
of the required fees, and left the office clutching our booking
confirmations.
It was time for us
to have our lunch by now, so we headed up the road to a large
shopping mall to see what we could find. The guy at the office had
suggested we try the mall's food court, but it looked pretty grim, so
the girls got their wish as once again, we ate at the McDonald's
downstairs. On the way to lunch, we had passed the Textile Museum, at
which point Zoe had announced suddenly and uncharacteristically that
she 'loved museums', so after we had eaten, we returned there and
then made our way to the Natural History Museum (which was mostly
closed for renovation) and the Sarawak Museum (where most of the
rather moth-eaten natural history exhibits had been moved).
On the way home, we
walked through the Chinatown area. We noticed that there were
numerous rather trendy bars along the road we were taking and as we
were a bit hot and tired, we thought we would stop for a beer –
until we looked at the prices! A half pint of draught lager was about
12 ringgit, or US$3, which seemed just a little extortionate, so we
kept trudging back towards the hotel. By the time we got there, we
were unacceptably parched, so we tried another, less trendy looking
bar across the road. Unfortunately, the beer there was just as
expensive, but we bit the bullet and Kate and I shared a pint. We
then visited a supermarket to stock up on a few essentials ahead of
our national park stays before going back to the hotel room to relax
for a few hours.
In the evening we
went in search of somewhere nice for dinner, but all of the
restaurants we looked at looked less than appealing. In our
meandering, we stumbled across a covered passageway between two
buildings where tables and chairs had been set up. The area was
really buzzing, with almost all of the tables filled with groups of
diners, many with large buckets full of ice and beer. On one side of
the passageway was a sort of café, serving drinks and Chinese food
from a buffet, and on the other side was a collection of carts manned
by individual vendors specialising in particular types of food. This
looked perfect, so we sat down, ordered some remarkably cheap beers
(we later learned that they were actually cheaper than if you bought
them from the supermarket) and ordered a variety of very tasty noodle
dishes from a few of the carts.
No comments:
Post a Comment