Advertisement
Published: July 29th 2009
Edit Blog Post
cat statue in Kuching
Kuching actually means cat, its the Cat City, and there are cat statues everywhere! But curiously not many real cats that I've seen. When I travel I prefer not to book accommodation and things ahead of time, largely because that would mean I'd have no flexibility in my plans which especially in a long trip is very important. It usually works out all right except for the minor hiccup here and there, but sometimes not so much. Well I flew into Kuching in Borneo, and fell flat on my face with my plans. I am coming into the peak of the tourist season, which I knew, but August is also the month Malaysia celebrates its independance as a nation, which I did know but hadn't really considered as a problem. Hence I have discovered that it is very difficult getting into the accommodation of the national parks of Sarawak and probably also Sabah. My first stop was going to be Bako National Park to see proboscis monkeys, but its booked almost solid. I managed to get the last bed for the 1st, the last bed for the 2nd and one of the last for the 3rd. In the meantime I will be going to Kubah National Park for a few days (it being not nearly so popular for some reason). While I was trying
to organise these, there was a constant stream of tourists coming through the office in Kuching wanting to go to stay at Bako and being told they couldn't. I really had no idea it would be that busy. So I'm still getting to Bako, albeit later than anticipated, but Mulu National Park which was going to be one of the major spots in Sarawak for me is completely out of the question. All the accommodation at the Park HQ (including the 21 bed hostel) is booked wall-to-wall for at least the entire month of August, and there's also no room at the Royal Mulu Lodge (not that I could afford that anyway at a starting rate of about NZ$140 per night!). Potentially after I've been through Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah, I could retrace my steps and visit Mulu if there's room available then, it being after August by that stage.
So my first day in Kuching was spent trying to arrange and rearrange my schedule. Today is the third day and I'm going to Kubah. My second day I did the usual tourist thing and went to Semenggoh, which is an orangutan sanctuary where formerly pet orangs are rehabilitated
to a life in the wild. The same as at the more famous Sepilok in Sabah but, I would have thought, less crowded -- nope. Watching tame orangs come to a platform to be fed bananas isn't really my idea of how I want to see them, but I figured this would be my cheat back-up in case I didn't get to see them in the real wild. When I got there I kind of changed my mind about that. I had expected that, as a centre for introducing orangs back into the wild, it would be somewhere in the middle of a forest out of the way of the local populace, but no. Its about 30km from the centre of Kuching and all the way from there to the entrance is lined with buildings and houses. From the entrance its only a couple of minutes drive up a road then a couple of minutes walk to where the feeding station is. Not exactly ideal if you're trying to return human-oriented orangs to the forest I'd have thought! There were perhaps a hundred tourists there to see the show. As far as I could tell that's all there really is
to Semenggoh as much as the visitors get: a short paved road to the start of the unpaved track which leads to the feeding platform 300 metres into the forest, and that's it. As it happened the orangs didn't even come to the platform, they came to see the humans at the gathering point instead. There was a young male and an adult female with a five month old baby. They swung on some ropes, ate some sweet potatoes and bananas, posed for photos for the ooh-ing and aah-ing public, then left. It was kind of disturbing to me that everybody there was gushing about how this was a fantastic encounter with a "truly wild" animal when it was nothing of the sort. In a way I suppose its no different to, and just as legitimate an experience as, watching birds coming to a feeding table but it really was pretty underwhelming. "Bornean orangutan" has gone on my list as a wild animal seen (largely, I decided, because the baby was obviously born in the wild), but I'm not completely happy with it.
Semenggoh is only open for two short periods during the day, for the feedings, so after
we returned to Kuching in the late morning I went to the Museum. There's a whole cluster of free museums in a park in the centre of the city. The Natural History Museum is currently closed for renovations, but the "Old Wing" (the Ethnological Museum) has a quite large natural history section devoted to displays of native Sarawak wildlife. They all have a very very Victorian air to them, with big ornately designed cases filled with dozens of birds in contrived positions and little scorpions and snakes and butterflies hidden amongst the branches the birds are perched on. The mammal section had a sign saying that the specimens were all prepared in London in 1900 and shipped along with their cases to Sarawak in 1911 when the museum opened. They were certainly showing both their age and the attitudes of the time. It was a bit odd seeing a glass case for a family of badly-prepared orangutans just hours after seeing live ones walking around. Unfortunately for the regular tourists none of the species were labelled beyond general signs on the cases ("wild cats", "leaf monkeys", etc), not even the bay cat. There was an Australian couple standing in front
...and gathering at the orangutan!
what a wonderful wildlife experience of one display and the husband was helpfully identifying all the animals for his wife: porcupines as echidnas, colugo as flying squirrel, and pangolin as armadillo.
Next to the museums is a small aquarium. It was nicer than I had thought it would be. I had only found out a minimal amount about it beforehand from the internet and it didn't sound particularly worthwhile, but its nice. There are mainly just standard aquarium fish there, and a couple of crocodiles, but its free and you can't really complain about that.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.05s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0279s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb