Malaysian Borneo - Sarawak - The Long Hot Road from Miri to Kuching

Our bus out of BSB landed us promptly in the city of Miri in Sarawak, a semi-autonomous province of Malaysia's part of Borneo. Miri is the access point for three major fabulous national parks, Limbir Hills, Niah Caves and Mulu. We had been hoping to squeeze in a half day checking out Niah's famous caves, which are supposed to be amazing. No such luck - the buses and timing were totally against us. Our Brunei bus actually dropped us off in the middle of nowhere - the new long distance bus terminal was completely deserted. No ticket counters, no touts, no taxis, nada. We did eventually grab a desolate city bus and an hour later found ourselves in the city center.

Now, as previously mentioned, I haven't disliked many places on this trip (Auckland grrr). I did not like Miri. First instinct reaction was to look for buses out of there. I don't know why. Mehr was also melting - it was very hot. So she was up for fleeing the city as well. We were directed to a third bus terminal for a 4:30pm overnight 14 hour bus ride to Kuching, the provincial capital of Sarawak, where our flight would be leaving from in two days time. We signed on with no hesitation. And the bus wasn't bad, but the passing of time was pretty slow.



We read aloud to each other about etiquette pointers for Renaissance gentlemen and ancient Celtic myths about boy-wonders (English title selection was limited in Brunei). To drown out the awful video games seated behind us, I burned through two sets of AA batteries in my Discman. And when we finally arrived all bedraggled in Kuching at 6am, I felt like I'd been kicked in the neck.



Kuching is totally charming though and the food is heavenly. We tried pansoh manok (chicken chilli cooked in bamboo) and it just melted in your mouth. We also finally had some laksa soup, which tastes a bit like Singapore noodles in soup form. Very tasty. I'm also a big fan of honey popcorn... perfect bus snack food. Also, Kuching means 'cat' in Malay and they are obsessed. We have no idea why and sadly don't have time to trek out to the Cat Museum to find out. There are cat monuments all over town too.



The one other thing that has stood out for us on Borneo as a whole is how much attention we draw. Not bad attention, just lots of it. We can't quite decide what's the cause. In Brunei, there were few foreigners, so that was a given. They kept asking us what race we were, which we found to be a very confusing question. It was even on the immigration cards, which we left blank. They were confused that we don't racially identify in Canada. They also were confused that we're both from Canada. They inevitably ask where the other person is from assuming it's a different place than whoever answered first.

We figure it is one of the following:

1) We don't match. I am very tall and very white. Mehr is very less tall and darker. We've noticed that white people tend to travel in herds here, so me being a loner might be a factor.
2) We laugh a lot, which makes us noisy.
3) We wear appropriate clothing and eat in local restaurants, unlike a lot of the other short-sporting tourists frequenting McDonald's and KFC. Hello, Muslim country... put some clothes on kiddo.