Kuching: Cats, Kayaks, and Free Booze

My last stop on my magical mystery tour of Malaysia was the up and coming city of Kuching.  I'd heard really good things about it, with legendary food and a great mellow vibe.  Plus, scoring bonus points for a cat person like myself, Kuching is a city that has an unnatural fascination with guardian felines...

The chilled out vibe started as soon as I got my taxi into town.  The taxi driver was super relaxed, and to round things off, he followed the Malaysian custom of randomly punctuating his conversation with “la”.

“La” is kind of the Swiss Army knife for the Malaysian language – covering everything from agreement, DIS-agreement,  indecision, anger, happiness, and everything in between.  And, not to be confined to merely one language, the Malays often use it in English, giving a lilting, poetic feel to the conversation.

This really doesn't translate to writing, but this is a small sample:  “So, la, I moved from Kubu-la because, la, there were too many other drivers, la.”  I even gotten into the swing – nodding knowingly and saying (what else?)... “La.”

So, the trip was off to a good start.  I popped into the Bedz hostel, where the basic name belied the great value; for the princely sum of $15, I got another immaculate room with the blessing of uber-powerful AC.

The next day was more of a “getting to know the city” session – I started with Lonely Planet's walk through Chinatown and an early breakfast of the region's signature dish of kokok gee.  Tasty – with a bunch of noodles and seemingly the kitchen sink thrown in.

The rest of the day was pretty relaxed.  I just kept popping in and out of the city's many odd alleys and temples...

...walked along the renovated riverfront, and finally retreated from the heat by ducking into the Hilton.

I know, I know – not particularly culturally adventurous but what can I say?  I'm a sucker for good AC.

I redeemed myself with dinner though – walking up, up, and UP a bunch of stairs to the “Top Spot”, a collection of seafood stalls around a cheerful chaos of tables.  It was absolutely worth it, as I ended up with an entire black pepper crab to myself, combined with brilliantly sauteed local vegetables and a beer for about £6.  You have to love Asia.

The next day was fantastic as well, as I was able to squeeze in a bunch of fun stuff before I had to fly out to Singapore.

It started in the morning with freshly-made pork bao puns at the locals-only restaurant, and then I met up with our day tour group.

Now, normally, I'm generally a very independent traveller, and absolutely loathe the idea of blindly   a tour guide holding a guiding umbrella aloft from sight to sight.  But this tour was different – nice, mellow, and very laid back.

Our first stop was the legendary orangutan rehabilitation center... where they raise and release orangutans into the wild to rebuild the population.  The bonus for the tourist?  You get to see them up close and personal at feeding time – their human-like expressions are incredible, and they are often remarkably cheeky with each other.

I've also found a contender for the “Best Job in the Whole World”.  Ritchie is the dominant male at the center.  However, without predators, he just gets to hang out and impress the ladies..  Nice gig, huh?

We saw a half dozen other ones too – from a mom and her baby, to a male who just hung out about 15 feet away.  Who was studying whom?

And of course, the young ones stole the show – check this little guy out... I think every guy in the place was wincing the entire time he struck this pose:

Oh, and did I mention cheeky?  One young adult cottoned on to the fact that rather than forage, it was sooo much easier to just swipe the baby's food.  He even mastered the “who, me?” expression of injured innocence.

The rest of the day was spent kayaking down a mellow river.  No Class V rapids or anything, but as far as a great way to explore the countryside, this couldn't be beat.

We even got to check out a local village waiting for our guide, and I ended up taking some pics of the local schoolkids, who were born hams for the camera:

Once on the river, our first stop had us hanging out with some of the locals sampling everything from soursop fruit (delicious) to local pepper and a bunch of herbs, with some rice wine to top things off.

Throw in a beach lunch stop and some time for jumping off a log, and it was  a good day all around...

My last night in Kuching?  I admit it, I easily get caught in a rut – and headed back to the Top Spot.  With that much choice and a great view to boot, I couldn't resist.  In this case, it was corn/crab soup and sauteed cuttlefish in chili... mmm.

To close the loop of my time in Malaysia, I got to spend some time back where I started in Singapore.  This time around, I wasn't fired up to see anything in particular; I just wanted to explore a bit more of the city.

So, after dropping my bags off, I headed back downtown to go check out the rest of the Colonial district.  There were yet more massive malls (surprise, surprise), a ferris wheel (although London's is bigger [hee, hee], even an equally massive good luck fountain:

Once again, I left firmly convinced that the Singaporeans live to shop.  Period.  I'm not opposed to malls and such, but man, how much time can you spend just wandering around looking and buying stuff?

More interestingly, my next leg took me to (yes, overused word alert) MASSIVE new casino/living complex called the Marina Bay Sands.  Three towers supported a fully-fledge park on the top level, it's pretty stunning...

The hotel's not fully open yet, and as your shorts-wearing correspondent, I wasn't able to pop my head into the casino.  But with 550,000 visitors in the first three weeks, I'm willing to guess it's pretty posh.

Finally, I just headed back to Chinatown.  While I avoided shopping, I finally gave in and got a seriously short haircut... clippers only.  I guess my thinking was pretty basic... “must... get... rid... of as much heat as possible”.  With so much skin exposed on my noggin, I think I'm on the right path!

With most of my last day in Singapore to kill before my flight, I decided to head over to Changi Airport early and just relax.  It sounds weird to include relaxation and airport in the same sentence, but Changi does things absolutely right.

For anyone cursed with having to fly out of dull and dingy Heathrow or Gatwick, check out the amenities:

• free wifi
• free movies in a theater, 24 hours a day
• showers
• free butterfly garden
• tasty AND non-overpriced food

I had experienced all of this my first time through in 2009.  But Changi had one more secret that elevated it into a backpacker's paradise... I wandered into the duty-free liquor store, and saw they had a cabinet with some bottles of whisky, port, and brandy with little plastic cups.

No attendants, no ID checks or pressure to buy.  Nope, this was the rarest of all things... a SELF-SERVICE whisky bar.  Brilliant.

21 year Chivas, 18 year MacCallan, Johnny Walker Green Label... and so on.  I can't say I drank a lot, but it was an amazing way to sample some otherwise pricey booze.  Lovely way to end my first leg of my trip, and send me on my way to Hong Kong.

Oh, and to finish on a Malaysian note... la.

Mulu - Muddy and Magnificent

Who'd have thought? My liberal arts degree from four years at uni would be great preparation for a long, sweaty trek in the jungle? Now to be fair, being able to BS effectively about the weaknesses of the Soviet Union's political system vis a vis the lack of energizing their nation's supply of human capital (blah, blah, blah) wasn't useful at all.

However, when it came to cooking, I was definitely prepared. After all, I had four years of practice in preparing one of humanity's greatness inventions (after fire, and just beating out the wheel)... Top Ramen noodles.

Yup, instant noodles in all their variety would turn out to be a good friend of mine, as after chilling out in colonial Melaka, it was finally time to check out Malaysia's “other half”; leaving the peninsula for the jungle haunts of Borneo. With unspoilt jungle, oranguatans, and a bunch more besides, it was time to get my hiking boots good and dirty.

Coming from Kuala Lumpur, I had one night in Miri – a town built around supporting the workers on the offshore oil platforms. I was far from overwhelmed. Heck, I don't think I was even whelmed (sidenote: does anyone know if that's even a word?)... as that meant a large number of bars (hurrah!), but lots of dodgy lodgings and even dodgier brothels (no, no – no hurrahs there). Lonely Planet came through like a champ here though – directing me to Dillenia's, one of the nicest hostels I've stayed at, ever.

Not only was it so clean that you could probably stage an operation on its floors, but the kind owner, Ms. Lee, directed me to a fantastic seafood place. All Chinese, with no English menus everywhere, it was packed.  A patient waitress took me under her wing, walking me around to the various tanks of live fish, crabs, and who knows what else? Basically, I just picked, gestured a rough guestimation on size, and she used pidgin English to ask how I wanted it cooked.

Now, I tried to be good, asking for enough for only one person, but somehow that translated into a dozen mussels in lemongrass, a dozen tiny crabs in satay sauce, and a big fish grilled in garlic. Oh, and of course rice and a few beers. Lovely.

Waddling back to my hotel, I had the best of intentions of catching up on my blogging but my left eye raced my right in seeing who could shut the fastest. Zzz.

The next day was my first glimpse of Mulu National Park. Flying in on a little propeller-driven airliner, we passed over miles and miles of unbroken jungle. Our landing strip stuck out as an oasis of civilization, bracketed on both sides by limestone karsts that popped out of the foliage.

Stunning.

Well, stunning, but wicked hot too. I dropped my stuff in the dorm at camp HQ and headed out for a quick hike up a trail towards some of the legendary caves that Mulu is known for. About two miles, that translates into an hour each way, with plenty of time to get back for my organized caving trip.

Wrong. First, there was the heat... where you started dripping with sweat 20 yards (uh, or meters for you Brits) after leaving whatever cool place you could find. Second? Mulu is seriously distracting – sending dozens of the biggest butterflies fluttering around you whenever you walked.

Third? Well, I was a bit out of shape – and after gamely heading up three steep vertical staircases like this:

… I called it a day. An afternoon rather.

Mulu threw one more surprise as well. Probably politely figuring that I wasn't cool enough from all that sweat, it threw a truly massive monsoon-like downpour just as I was about 500 meters from the shelter of HQ. Lovely.

After a non-too-dignified sprint for cover, I met up with the guide for our caving trip, who told us that in the caves, we'd be able to get out of the rain a bit. Actually, caves are a bit of a misnomer – for a variety of technical reasons that I had no intention of remembering, Mulu's limestone is pretty much near-perfect for caves to develop. And caves? Actually, think “huge, gi-normous caverns”... populated with millions of bats to boot.

We ended up checking out two caves – the Wind Cave, which featured amazing stalagmites and -tites formed over millions of years like this:

… before heading to Deer Cave, one of the world's largest. It wasn't great for photos, but as an experience... wow. When you walked in, you were greeted by two things – the overwhelming smell of bat guano (fancy word for bat poop) as well as the near-constant chittering from all of the bats as they were getting ready to head out for the night's hunts.

We couldn't actually see them directly, but you could see large dark stains on the cave roof, hundreds of feet above. Each one made up a portion of the estimated 2-3 million bats that live in that cave alone. Unreal.

Among the bits of trivia I picked up... bats actually don't have to 'hold on' to the roof. Their ligaments have evolved such that they actually have to exert effort to let go – handy. I figure the IRS took their inspiration with my tax refunds from these guys...

Some beers and tasty nasi gorang (spicy meat, rice, flatbread) helped dull the noise from the Japanese tour group sharing our dorm room, so it was a relatively early night.

The next three days were the reason I came to Mulu. I joined a group heading out to the Pinnacles rock formation, at the summit of a mountain peak in the jungle. (Not my pic...)

With two Aussies and a Canadian, we checked out a few caves in the morning, got in a much-needed swim in the river, and then were dropped off at the trailhead further upstream.

A fun 9km hike upriver went well, with Mulu doing an exceptional job in minimizing impact of all the thousands of tourists. Wooden walkways, suspension bridges and more....

...it was a pretty easy hike in to our temporary home for the next few days – Camp 5.

Surprisingly good conditions – with electricity and showers, we were pretty impressed. No cold beers though, but what the hey, we were truly 'roughing it'... a quick afternoon swim, warm-ish beer (that utterly failed to get colder after I stuck in the river for a few hours), and some silly card games finished our first night.  Oh, and the first of our many ramen noodle meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner... but at least they got past the boring "chicken".  Malaysians do noodles right - including soy sauce and sesame oil packets, and heaps of funky flavor combinations.

Now, the plan was to head out at first light, and make the climb up in the morning. At 2.5 kilometers long, with 1.2 km altitude gain, that worked out to a near-constant 45 degree climb. Ouch.

The weather threw a wrench in the works here – as we got absolutely blasted by a HUGE monsoon all night.  And, coming on the tin roofs of the dorms, it was impressive indeed.

Optimistically, we still got up early as planned, only to be told that for safety reasons, no one could hike that day.

Crap.

We did salvage a bit of the day with a short hike into the jungle across the river:

… but basically, the 2nd day turned into lounging, reading, and playing yet more games (Celebrity, anyone?).  Not bad, but oh so disappointing after the build up and anticipation of Pinnacles.

And watching sunset, legs dangling over the bridge, was a nice consolation prize:

Oh well... the third day, it was back to the HQ. We were well motivated by thoughts of cold drinks and a hot shower, so ended at the trailhead in record time. Then, it was an even faster boat ride back downstream, boosted by the seriously swollen river.

10am at Camp HQ? What's it time for?

It's never too early. :)

We got in a bit of frisbee throwing on the grass, drawing some bemused looks from the staff and sometimes enthusiastic, if unskilled, participation. Then it was time for me to clean up, eat up, and finally meet up with my flight over to Kuching...