July 2006 Kuching - Bako National Park & Rainforest World Music Festival

Photos on Flickr - Bako     Photos on Flickr - Music Festival
Kuching - Bako National Park

After the long house visit (Kuching - City & Longhouse Visit) we had a night back in Kuching before heading out for a three day stop in Bako National Park which is 45 minutes out of Kuching on a headland. After spending some much time in Thailand it is natural to compare the two countries - Malaysians drive at a much more relaxed pace and generally the 'oh my god we're gonna crash' event is much less common. We caught a mini bus as the deal was only slightly more than the bus and no wait for the next bus. Safely delivered to a jetty we hopped on a long-tail style boat but with a quiet outboard. Long-tails in Thailand are very unique and culturally significant, but so bloody noisy!  15 minutes later we are wheeling our suitcases, backpacks and plastic bags along the path looking for the parks office. Sounds like an ordeal - 200metres dragging bags in the sun is!  We booked a lodge which was sort of clean and sort of tidy and many of the lights worked - but nice to be in a detached house surrounded by forest with a nice view of Mt Santubong in the distance across the bay.

The national park is home to lots of animals and macaques are very common as are proboscis monkeys and some sort of wild pigs that are particularly ugly.



The main activity here is walking, then recovering from the walks.

First day we had a short walk of an hour and a half in the late afternoon to small beach and saw lots of proboscis monkeys and generally enjoyed the walk. Hot and sweaty at the end of course. Next day a much bigger walk, with a long climb at the start, a long walk to several lookouts and a long section of dry light forest, many unusual pitcher plants, then a seemingly never ending, climb down.  Absolutely buggered at the end! A really still day didn't help for tropical bushwalking.

     

After three enjoyable days at Bako we headed to Santibong for a taste of luxury as we stayed at the Holiday Inn - Damai Beach.  These photos are of the rooms on the headland. We stayed down at the beach level and we only 300metres walk from the Sarawak Cultural Village - venue for the Rainforest Word Music Festival.  We had been told by Michael, one of the teachers at the school, that he had gone last year and enjoyed it so much he was coming again.

After three wonderful days we wholeheartedly agree with Michael's comments. If circumstance allow, we'll be back again next year. The cultural village is set around a small lake and .has a several longhouses built to demonstrate the way the different local groups of Sarawak live. These longhouses became the venues for daytime workshops and a natural amphitheatre, with a high forest backdrop was the venue for the concerts each evening. The workshops were a mix of individual bands demonstrating their musical styles and groups together who explored a certain aspect of the commonality of their music. For example, in one workshop a  musician from Madagascar demonstrated how the local instrument from his country has its roots in a musical instrument from Sarawak. Trading across the Indian Ocean must have taken the instrument to Madagascar centuries ago. Another was a "Bollywood" style dance lesson with an Indian-Malaysian drum band.  This was great fun. We all enjoyed the three days and found we went our separate ways to attend different workshops that interested them.

   

So for three days we stayed in the luxury of a five star detached villa, ate excellent buffets each morning & evening, and spent our days at a truly memorable world music festival. good stuff!

 

After the festival we spent a few more days exploring Kuching, and discovered the old town much more, especially the Chinatown streets that are closed to cars for most of the day. Gil flew home on the last day of the festival and we feel sure he enjoyed the whole thing as much as we did.

   

We stayed at an expensive hotel for a few days, due to a earlier panic session over accommodation, but then moved to lovely cheaper guesthouse call Singgahsana which was much more our style. We left Kuching feeling very pleased with our discovery of this excellent city to visit.

Next we flew to Miri to rejoin Reflections. Miri, Brunei, Labuan& Kota Kinabulu or Home

2006 July - Kuching - City and Longhouse Visit.

Kuching City photos on Flickr
Kuching - City and Longhouse Visit.
So here we are in Kuching in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, on the end of school year holiday break. We have Liz's father Gil with us and the plan is to stay here in Kuching for 11 or so days and then head to Miri at the other of Sarawak to hop onto Reflections which is sitting in a marina there waiting for us.

Kuching is quite an interesting little city set on a river just a little inland. The history is based around an Englishman Charles Brooke who came and, with the help of a gunship, established himself as the 'white rajah' and had control of the area until it was ceded to the British and then became part of Malaysia. It's a small enough town to walk around and take in the sights, mainly an excellent cultural museum, and arrange plans for the rest of the time here.

Heres a bunch of photos of around Kuching. Kuching means 'cat' in Malaysian hence the multitude of cat statues around the town. Click on the photo for a larger copy - press back on your browser to return.

Dancers on a river cruise...

After two days we had found our bearings, planned out our stay and took off on the first leg.  This was a trip to a longhouse. On our way we stopped at Orangutan sanctuary. Only 20 minutes from Kuching it was very impressive to think that such animals were able to live in the wild so close to humans. A large reserve area houses them where they are free to go as they please. Each day food is laid out for them as a supplement. Even though there were many people there it was an excellent viewing set-up and worth going to.  Memories of our river trip in Kalimantan to the national park to see these and many other animals came flooding back.

The large photo on the end links to a QuickTime movie - it will take a long while to load and only suitable for 'broadband connected types'. (7Mb)

Further along the way to the longhouse we stopped at a market for a rest/drink and a look around. Having been to many markets in SE Asia, this one stood out as particularly clean with a tiled floor and decent roof and ventilation.

Next stop on the tour a pepper farm where we learnt a bit about how pepper grows - on a vine around a pole standing on a dry sloping hill. The spiral mill was neat how it separated the good from the bad peppercorns by centrifugal force. Apparently the only difference between white and black pepper is the husk is removed from the peppercorns to make white pepper. You learn something new every day.

So after four hours we reached the end of the road and a short walk led us to the longhouse.  The traditional lifestyle across the region is to live in a longhouse. These are often over a hundred metres long and many families share the house, each with their own living space behind a door which opens on to huge long common area. The one we visited held 28 families. The one we visited was traditionally built timber structure which are steadily being replaced with concrete ones. Interesting that as they 'modernise' they still follow the same housing practices.

The longhouse we visited was an Iban village with sea faring and hunting practices traditionally followed.

Generally people eat separately and look after there own section of the house, getting together for special functions.  Our accommodation was a longhouse of a kind with cubicles with beds and a verandah to eat on.  In more remote areas, visitors are always welcomed and housed in the communal longhouse, but this is a fair enough compromise with a constant flow of tourist traffic. In the evening there was a short traditional dance, a traditional 'get the tourist to join in and feel stupid' session, and then we sat down and drank some locally brewed rice wine and rice whiskey. The wine was OK but the whiskey was true firewater.






Next and final day of our 'well orchestrated but enjoyable all the same' tour, saw a demonstration of cock fighting (no knives attached and care to ensure the cocks didn't get too agro on each other) and a demonstration and a turn at using a blowpipe. We all managed to shoot a dart into the tree and some even hit the target.  The trip back started with a boat ride down the river in the long slender canoes which shot along in the shallow water with the aid of an outboard that the driver lifted up constantly to skim over the shoals.

Quite a lot packed into a two-day trip. Not something we've done a lot of before (package trips) but all in all it was worth it. After a night back in Kuching we went out to Bako National Park for three days.

Time for a new page Kuching - Bako National Park. or Home