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Published: September 26th 2006
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Spoilsports !
What, no durians ? How will we surive...a sign on Singapore's super-dooper MRT underground system. Some have dubbed Singapore "fine city"... Hopping back to the city of Miri from Gunung Mulu National Park, we have another free day before we are due to continue our journey towards Indonesia via Singapore. We decided to venture out to the Niah Caves National Park, a couple of hours west of Miri on the Sarawakian coast. This park contains (yet another !) cave, this one decorated in part with numerous examples of prehistoric art - sounded like a very worthwhile day out.
Getting to Niah without your own car, even from as near as Miri, is not a piece of cake. Everything in Borneo runs to
jam kerat or "rubber time", a beautifully accurate expression of how the concept of punctuality is handled in Malay-speaking countries (with the obvious exception of Singapore I suppose). We headed out extra-early to the bus station, a ten-minute walk away from our hotel. We had been on a reconnaissance trip (they are necessary here if you wish to get anywhere near where you want to go anytime near when you want to) there the day before, enquiring if buses stopping near Niah left from here.
Yes, yes, leave here. Well it turns out this was the
local bus station
Indeed it is...
Truer than they think. A café's sign in Melaka. and what we needed was the
long-distance bus station, miles out of time. Start as you mean to go on...We manage to find a taxi (rare at 6am in this rather odd logging-city) and get to the station just in time to hop on a bus bound for Kuching, the southernmost city in Sarawak near the border with Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan. This bus will stop on the motorway at the turn-off for Niah. We get there in reasonable time, only to find out there is no form of public transport to the National Park, so we are forced to hitch an (expensive) lift with a local woman to the entrance of the park. There we meet a single other visitor, a German medical student about our age - we decide to head off to the main cave together. After a kilometer an a half, the boardwalk disappears into five feet or so of murky floodwater. Unless you have a thing for leeches, you ain't gonna get across without a boat. No other route across.
We turn back and repeat the whole rigmarole in reverse to get back to Miri.
That's that for the Niah Caves National Park.
Smash, anyone ?
A mashed-potato dispensing machine in a 7-Eleven in Kuala Lumpur. AND you can have it with gravy ! Amazingly, we managed to resist the temptation. We are sorely missing green vegetables in Malaysia. Oh well. Instead of some wonderful artistic photos of 50,000-year-old cave art, I'll attach some pictures of some of the more amusing sights of Malaysia.
The following day we embark on the next leg of our trip - Indonesia. The only way of getting to Bali, our starting point for our time in the archipelago is via Singapore. Thus we catch an Air Asia flight (yes, another one, we're on about seven now in the space of three weeks) from Miri to Johor Bahru, a large Malaysian city just miles away from Singapore across the Straits of Johor. From the airport a bus takes us across the concrete causeway crossing the straits, and we are ushered through to Singapore with but a flourish or two of the rubber stamp. The change is immediate and obvious. The border post on the Malaysian side of the causeway is old, dirty and scruffy. The Singaporean post, on the other hand, is all gleaming stainless steel, efficient service and impeccable organisation.
The crossing is, true enough, a good indication of what the visitor can expect of Singapore. The city-state has been much derided for its strict, overbearing government and endless rules and
Qué ?
Hokey-pokey ? Did you know that's what they call honeycomb here ? Who cares, they have Cadbury's here ! We'd prefer Green and Blacks, natch, but beggars can't be choosers... regulations, but after the relative anarchy of South East Asia I am very happy not to jaywalk under the threat of a five-hundred dollar fine, thank you very much.
We have but twenty-one short hours in Singapore. Flights to Bali from here are not daily and we had no choice. Our plans for Indonesia, however, will bring us back here in a couple of weeks. We stayed on the first floor of a pub, the Prince of Wales, in Singapore's Little India district - the pub has a dorm and a few rooms, all decorated in bright, bold colours. A lively change from the often drab and dreary decors of Malaysian rooms ! Best of all, the pub has
Hoegaarden wheat beer on tap - Hurrah ! Worst of all, it's at Singaporean prices...sigh. After the long journey from Miri we allow ourselves a treat, though.
Singapore is gone in a blur of superefficient public transport, escalators (a novelty), and excellent food. We are only just adjusting to the miraculous change when we are drawn once more by the gravitational pull of the runway.
Adieu, kerosene,
au revoir Singapore.
A short flight, for the most part
The caves of Niah
Or not...the plank walk under feet of grubby water. Down the squat-toilet go our plans for the day ! parallel to the island of Java, with its volcanic spine poking above the clouds, lands us in Denpasar airport in Bali.
This could be nowhere but Indonesia - it is my fourth visit to this country and, barely off the plane, that familiar smell hits my nostrils.
Kreteks. The famous clove-laced cigarettes that Indonesian men chain-smoke all day and all night, for Indonesians never seem to sleep. The vast majority of the archipelago's considerable clove production goes into making these cigarettes, which Indonesians then smoke at the jaw-dropping rate of 100,000,000
per day. And many have the cough to prove it, too.
A taxi ride takes us to our hotel, which, given our short stay here and the late hour of our arrival, is in Kuta. This isn't normally a place we would choose to stay in, even less so since the devastating bombs that exploded here in 2002 and 2005, a few months after we returned from honeymoon here last year. Spending time here makes us both feel a little antsy, so much of our time in Bali on this visit is spent carefully planning the next seven weeks, which we hope will take us to some
Sunset over Java
On our flight from Singapore to Denpasar. pretty out of the way places.
Still, there is time to bask in the delight that is Bali. Bali, an island where surfers carry their boards past shrines with thatched roofs, where the clogged traffic stops to let a sacred procession cross the street, where life, incongruously, revolves around the twin stars of tourism and Hinduism. Indeed, one of the delights of even the briefest visits to Bali is observing the Balinese people's extraordinary devotion to their gods. The Balinese spend significant proportions of their days placing beautiful creations of banana leaves, rice and garlands of fragrant flowers as offering to the gods and spirits. They do so
everywhere. Bang in the middle of busy roads, in front of their shops and restaurants, on car bonnets and dashboards. These extraordinary creations are manufactured with care in their thousands every single day, carried out in the morning on huge trays and placed all over the island with tiny sticks of smouldering incense. The smell of that incense, mixed with that of the frangipani and jasmine flowers placed on the banana-leaf offerings, is to me one of the most powerful. Not in pungency, but in its ability to immediately trigger a
Island of Fire
Volcanoes, the one in the background puffing away, pop through the clouds over Java. Merapi ? Bromo ? Java brims with active peaks. flood of memories, images. It is the smell of Bali and it is beautiful.
Bali is quiet. Much as the hotel manager tries to convince us it is "getting very busy", there are very few people here. It would seem that Western governments' warnings following the spate of bombings here has had its effect. Restaurants are empty, hotels quiet. Keen as we were to stay away from Kuta, we find ourselves sympathetically drawn towards it. Kuta has long been held up as an example of the destructive power of tourism - traffic, rubbish, overdevelopment. After a few days here, I see things altogether differently. Brash and loud it may be, but Kuta is an extraordinary example how rampant tourism can fit in so effortlessly with the local culture and religion. Sure, Kuta is full of Aussie surfer dudes and honking mopeds, but in spite of this the peaceful Balinese culture shines through even more brightly and you just know that however many tourists invade this place, nothing will ever come between the Balinese and their sweet-scented offerings. Visitors here are welcomes perhaps more warmly than anywhere else in the world, but are always aware that the Balinese people's priorities
What a show...
Sunset over Kuta Beach. Not the quietest beach in the world, but it has some sunsets... in life lie elsewhere. As we walk past the memorial in Kuta to the hundreds of people killed by the bombs that have repeatedly exploded here, we can't help share the Balinese dismay that this peaceful little piece of heaven should have been so cruelly scarred.
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