In and Around Kuching

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June 6th 2011

Published: June 6th 2011

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Native Long-House

This was the most stunning long-house at the Sarawak Cultural Village

Kuching is a city in Sarawak, a state in Malaysia that is on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. The geography is a bit confusing. Borneo is a huge island divided among Indonesia (the state of Kalimantan), Malaysia (two states), and the small country of Brunei. Kuching is the capital of one of the two Malaysian states, Sarawak.

Kuching. Kuching is a great city. Malaysian Borneo seems very wealthy, maybe more so than the rest of Malaysia (which is quite wealthy in general). Kuching is a city of around 600,000. It's clean, green, calm, quiet, wealthy, orderly, uncrowded, and great for strolling. Pretty much the opposite of my experiences in India.

Even the weather here seems noticeably different from South India. Yes, it's tropical rainforest weather here. But 95 with 100%!h(MISSING)umidity feels downright temperate after India. There's a big difference between 95 (Borneo) and 105+ (South India). It's quite comfortable here compared to India, even though it's like the heat of summer at home.

Kuching has a superb waterfront boardwalk. It's really, really nice, as nice a boardwalk as I've ever seen. It runs along the tropical river that goes through Kuching, and everyone comes

Mom and Baby, Closeup

Semenggoh National Park

out and strolls along the waterfront as the sun sets. The sunsets over the river are incredible. Every night is a perfect summer evening. It's a fine place to be.

Kuching seems to be more of a Chinese city than many cities in Malaysia. The downtown center is really one big Chinatown, and Chinese seem to outnumber both Malays and indigenous Borneo peoples. There aren’t many Indians here at all, unlike cities like Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown. In some ways, Kuching seems less diverse than most other Malaysian cities, at least the larger cities on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia. It has a mostly Chinese feel.

Kuching and Sarawak have an unusual history. They were a territory of the Sultan of Brunei, but he granted Kuching (and eventually all of Sarawak) to an Englishman named James Brooke after Brooke helped him quell uprisings in the area. James Brooke and his family ruled Sarawak as “White Rajahs” from 1842 until the Japanese took Sarawak in 1942. After World War II, the Brooke family gave Sarawak to the English; it became part of Malaysia when it became independent of England in 1963.

So basically Sarawak was built, developed,

River Taxi and Mountains

The mountains in the background of this picture are where Kubah National Park is.

and modernized over a hundred years by three generations of this one English family, the Brookes – and by the Chinese folks that the Brooke family brought in. The descendants of these Chinese settlers make up much of Kuching today. What an odd history.

Visiting the orangutans. Kuching is a delightful city, but the main reason I came is that it has several interesting, easily-accessible daytrips around it. These daytrips were excellent.

My favorite daytrip was to a place called Semenggoh National Park, where they have an organgutan rehabilitation center. The orangutans there are half-wild. They live in the forest, but they're not scared of people. They do feedings twice a day for tourists (mostly Malaysian tourists, but plenty of white tourists too).

I pictured this place being way out in the deep forest, but it’s not. You drive past a never-ending strip of car lots, schools, restaurants, housing developments, malls, and supermarkets. Then you turn off onto a little road, and after a mile and half there is the national park.

At the park, the orangutans come crashing through the rainforest, swinging from tree to tree to get to the feeding platform. It's a unique

Rainforest Tangles

This photo gives a sense of how in the rainforest, plants and vines just sort of grow, everywhere, all on top of each other. Kubah National Park.

experience. It's very touristy, but the orangutans are definitely not zoo animals.

And there are a ton of them; I probably saw 20 orangutans. Two pairs of moms with babies strolled right down the middle of the lawn of the national park headquarters, just walking through all the tourists, five feet from me.

It was all pretty fascinating. I liked it a lot. I looked at it as a tourist experience rather than a wilderness experience, more like a zoo than really seeing orangutans in the wild. But it’s an excellent, fun, enthralling tourist experience. It’s a hoot. I went there twice, I liked it so much.

Visiting the rainforest. I also took two daytrips to rainforest national parks, Kubah National Park and Bako National Park. I liked them both a lot.

Kubah National Park was my favorite of the rainforest parks. It was classic “jungle” rainforest, as you can see from the photos. Borneo’s rainforests are the most biologically diverse places in the world.

I took a four-hour hike through the forest, and I didn’t really see anybody else the whole time. There were Malaysians cooling off and relaxing at a waterfall, but mostly

On the Waterfront

This captures well how pleasant and lovely Kuching's waterfront boardwalk is.

I was alone with the sights and sounds of the forest.

Even though I was out there by myself, I felt totally safe. The trails in Malaysia are clearly marked, and I had checked in with a park ranger before going out. It’s an easy, accessible way to experience the rainforest.

I really enjoy hiking in the rainforest. It’s so deeply green, and the growth is so rampant. Plants grow on top of plants, which are growing on top of other plants. Green growth is everywhere, even covering all of the rocks. And the sounds are fascinating – the constant twitter of cricket-sounding insects, and intermittent bird calls, and rustling through the greenery as squirrels or monkeys move from tree to tree.

Hiking through the forest is hard, though. I hiked for four hours, and it poured – buckets – for the last two hours of the hike. I was soaked to the bone, and chilled despite the tropical heat. It got dark in the forest, and the trail got slippery, and I had to be careful even though I was trying to move quickly to get back. The next day I was stiff and sore. I

Astana at sunset

This was a colonial building across the river, now used as state government offices. And a really pretty sky, again, from the waterfront in Kuching.

think maybe I’m getting too old for rainforest adventuring.

I also visited Bako National Park. It was good too. The trail at Bako wasn’t as rainforest-y as Kubah National Park, but it ended up on a cliff overlooking a gorgeous beach. I hiked with two other folks from the US, and we spent a few hours on the beach, which was as tropical-postcard-pretty as any I’ve ever seen.

A walking, talking history lesson. Actually, my fellow hikers at Bako National Park were more interesting than the hike. One of them was a young Vietnamese-American woman from San Diego, now teaching in an international school in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), in Vietnam. She was on a week vacation from her school, using Air Asia’s flights (the same ultra-affordable airline that I’ve been using) to take a short break.

When she was three months old, her family left Vietnam, just after the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). Her father was a pilot in the South Vietnamese army, and he had been put in a “re-education” camp after the war, and they were afraid he was going to be persecuted further by

Pretty Old Shophouse

This store is very typical of the Chinese shophouses in Kuching. People have their shop downstairs, and live upstairs.

the Vietnamese government. So they left.

It’s a bit of a long story, but they ended up on a boat without a working motor, drifting about for ten days in the middle of the South China Sea. They ran out of food and water. Her mother had no breast-milk to feed her. She was listless, limp, not moving. They were hundreds of miles from land. They were sure they were going to die.

They were rescued by a boat owned by a nonprofit called World Vision. Legally, World Vision was supposed to give them food, water, and medicine, but not take them aboard or tow them to shore. World Vision realized that if they left them at sea, they would all surely die. They took them to Singapore, and confronted the US embassy there, and the US agreed to take them in as refugees.

She recently saw an old World Vision video of herself coming off the boat when she was three months old. She said she could tell it was her, because she saw a special hat that her grandmother had knit her. It gave me chills, listening to her talk about it.

She said

River Taxi at Dusk

From Kuching's waterfront boardwalk

that 500,000 Vietnamese died on boats in the South China Sea, trying to escape Vietnam after the war. She and her family were obviously lucky.

When I first started talking with her, she seemed like a typical smart, interesting, lively, engaging young Asian-American woman. But then she told me her story. It was riveting. She really made history come alive for me. Getting to know her made me feel, deep in my bones, a part of US history that is definitely worth remembering.

Anyway, I enjoyed her company. She also said that teaching elementary school in Vietnam was excellent. She really sold me on how good a setup teaching in Asia can be. Hmmm….

Visiting the headhunters. Well, I didn’t actually visit the headhunters. There used to be headhunters in Borneo, among many of the native groups, but James Brooke made head-hunting illegal in the mid-1800s when he became White Rajah.

I did visit a place called Sarawak Cultural Village, outside of Kuching. Sarawak Cultural Village is a beautifully-manicured tropical garden where they have built, using traditional methods and native expertise, seven different long-houses representing the major native ethnic groups in Borneo. It’s a “living museum,”

On the Cliff

Above the beach, Bako National Park

sort of like Williamsburg, but for native Borneo peoples. It was slightly cheesy, but it was also fairly authentic-feeling and interesting.

The long-houses were beautiful, and they were set up like the “real” long-houses deep in the rainforest. Members of the various tribes were in each long-house, and they would explain how things worked, how people lived. They were often demonstrating some skill (using a blow-pipe) or cooking something. There were old heads in one of the long-houses. The guy there explained the role that head-hunting used to play in that tribe’s culture.

It was totally set up for tourists, but it was well-done and felt respectful. It wasn’t spectacular, but I’m definitely glad I went. I learned a good bit about long-house life, and I didn’t really have any interest in visiting an actual long-house, so I wouldn’t have learned about this part of Borneo without visiting here.

Kuching’s waterfront. The best thing about Kuching is its waterfront. I’ve mentioned this above. The photos give a sense of it, but it’s much nicer than I could capture in a photo. It’s a long stretch of attractive cobblestones, maybe an hour’s stroll right along the river. It’s

Kolo Mee

This is a dish specific to Kuching. I eat it every day. The tea is great too - honey teh bunga, iced green tea with honey.

all shaded by beautiful tropical trees, with flowers and carefully-manicured lawns all along. The river too is gorgeous, a lazy-feeling tropical river with deep green jungly banks and little river taxis puttering back and forth across it.

Sunsets over the river are stunning. Evenings on the waterfront, as the sun goes down, are fabulous. Everyone is out strolling and chatting, and there are snacks all along the waterfront, and the sun goes down slowly and just takes your breath away. It’s a bit cooler in the dusk, and there’s a breeze off the river. Every night is perfect. Truly.

Kuching’s food. Malaysian food is my favorite. There’s a huge variety of delicious things to eat, and it’s all so tasty, so affordable, and so everywhere. One day I ate three lunches, because I kept coming across places selling food I’d never eaten, and they were all full of obviously happy eaters. I couldn’t pass them up.

There are dishes here that I haven’t seen in other parts of Malaysia. Kolo Mee is my favorite Kuching dish. Mostly it’s fresh Chinese egg noodles, but they’re so good – sort of like the difference between fresh pasta and dried

Rainforest Hiking Trail

Kubah National Park

pasta. On top of the noodles are various bits of meat, and you pour over it a sort of sweet-sour brown sauce that is laden with chilies. So it’s ultra-fresh, delectable, too-good, just-cooked noodles, with a variety of tasty meat bits, a wonderfully tangy-sweet yum sauce, and a little chunk of red-hot chili in each bite. It’s so good. I eat it every day.

Strolling Kuching. I also spent a good bit of time strolling through the streets of Kuching. It’s an extremely walkable and pleasant city. It’s big enough to be interesting, but small enough to be calm and quiet and peaceful.

Much of central Kuching is made up of two “Chinatowns,” two streets that were the center of Chinese life in Kuching since the mid-1800s. Kuching was largely settled by Chinese from various areas in Southern China, folks that James Brooke invited in to provide labor for his growing city.

Kuching was not destroyed during World War II, so it has preserved much of its heritage. Its Chinese shophouses and colonial British buildings look much like they did in the late 1800s through 1930s. I saw many photos of “old Kuching,” and it hasn’t changed

Mom and Baby

This photo gives a sense of how graceful and attractive they are, even on the ground.

a whole lot. Much of the town has an historic turn-of-the-century Chinese flavor, a flavor that you can’t really experience anymore in China.

Kuching has an unusual number of museums for a smallish city. I went to a Sarawak Museum, which provided an overview of Borneo’s traditional cultures and animal life. There was also an art museum, a textiles museum, a natural history museum, an Islamic museum, and a Chinese culture and history museum.

The strangest museum was Kuching’s Cat Museum. Kuching means “cat” in Malay. It’s not clear whether that’s where Kuching got its name, but they’ve adopted the cat theme in an all-out way. The Cat Museum was a trip: rooms and rooms full of endless variations on cutesy, kitschy porcelain cat statues and cutie-pie cat posters. I’m not quite sure it was worth the effort of getting there – it was pretty far out – but it certainly was a memorable, if odd, museum.

I’m getting too old for this. All in all, Kuching is superb. I’ve spent seven full days here, and each day has been packed. Either I’ve walked around Kuching, literally all day and all evening, or I’ve been out hiking

Entry Gate into Chinatown

Many Chinatowns in Southeast Asia have these entry gates going into them.

through the rainforest or hanging with orangutans. I’m exhausted. I’m whupped. My body is sore, and crampedy, and achy, and stiff. I’m starting to think that traveling is a young person’s sport.

It was all worth it, though. It’s a great place. I had a great time.

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