Christmas in Sarawak

We decided to go away for a few days around Christmas and booked three nights in a smart hotel in Kuching, the regional capital and three nights at a small beach resort, Sematan, in the far west of Sarawak.

The Pullman in Kuching was much as one would expect.  Nice rooms, big bathrooms, big breakfast buffets and lots of affluent looking people traipsing up and down.  It was OK but not an experience either of us feel in a hurry to repeat.  I like smartish hotels but I don't feel so comfortable in them here, maybe because they make me feel more part of an affluent elite that I don't want to admit to belonging to.  If so, this is probably hypocrisy.

On 27 December we drove to the Sematan Beach resort, which was much more fun.  A collection of chalets on the edge of the South China sea facing a massive sandy beach where the tide goes out by about half a kilometre.  Our booking included a buffet breakfast and evening meal and the resort was packed with mainly Chinese holidaymakers.  We spent our time wandering the beach, exploring, reading and generally lazing around.  One afternoon we hired bicycles and got soaked to the skin, much to the amusement of the locals and the resort staff.  It's hard to overstate just how surprised most local people were to see us.  You don't see a white person in more then a decade, then all of sudden two old ones come along at once, soaking wet, riding bicycles and smiling and waving at you.  Very strange.

The weather was warm, as it always is and wet.  Well this is the monsoon season.  This means that much of the time we were hemmed in by great grey towering clouds, pregnant with water.  It rained several times a day and especially at night, sometimes for hours.  Impossibly heavy rain, like the intense rain in the middle of a heavy shower, but all the time.  It would keep me awake at night sometimes, hammering on the roof of our chalet as if sacks of nails were being continuously emptied onto it.

At the end of our stay we loaded our wet things into the back of the car and headed back to Saratok, happy to have been to Sematan and keen to return one day, preferably outside the monsoon season.

Kapit

Sue does not have to be back at work until early January and so we have a total of four or five weeks together to travel and allow me to acclimatise.  Last weekend we went to Sibu, the nearest large town, some two hours drive from Saratok.  Sibu lies on the Rejang river and from there we took a day trip on the river ferries to Kapit, a small town in the interior which can only be reached by river I believe.

The ferries travel at 20-30 knots and the journey to Kapit takes about two and a half hours.  We travelled "business class", which is one step down from "first class" and entitled us to air conditioning and a flickering film on DVD which could barely be heard above the roar of the engine.  During the trip a man wandered round with a large bin liner full of crisps and other packet snacks for sale.

As we hammered our way up river I scanned the shoreline for crocodiles and, out of the corner of my eye briefly glimpsed a large one basking on a log with its legs dangling over the sides.  I don't think Sue believed me.  The river is an artery into the interior of the island and we saw many big tugs towing barges full of logs,  (Borneo is said to be losing its rainforest at the rate of one percent a year).

Kapit itself was cooler than Sibu and noticeably less humid, perhaps because it is a couple of hundred metres higher.  We had a pleasant stroll around the little town and visited Fort Silvia built by one of the Brookes, "the White Rajahs of Sarawak" in the 1880s.  Inside is a dusty little museum where we signed the Visitor's Book before getting our boat back.

Kabong Wedding

We went last Sunday to a wedding in Kabong, the village and district in which Sue works.  It was about a thirty minute drive from Saratok and my first opportunity to get a feel for the area that Sue travels to most working days.

Stopping to ask directions some way from our destination it was clear that a large section of the local community already knew who we were and why we were there.  Central Kabong is a collection of houses on stilts over a salt marsh linked by a network of wooden walkways.

The wedding was for the brother of Nora one of the teachers of English with whom Sue works.  This was the second ceremony, the first having been held in the regional capital Kuching.

They are a large, sophisticated and well travelled family and as a result I felt both very welcome and remarkably at ease in a setting like nothing else I have ever experienced.  We joined in the ceremony, took photos, ate, danced and relaxed in a palpable atmosphere of hospitality and goodwill.  Like all good ceremonies it also went on for the perfect length with no sense of obligation to linger.  We headed back to Saratok after a couple hours, exhausted more than anything else by the sheer variety of images and sensations.

Hello Borneo!

I've been here twelve days I realised checking my diary.  What have I done?  Where has it gone?  I feel like I've been on one of those kids roundabouts which you suddenly step off and stagger drunkenly away from, slowly regaining your balance.

I shook hands with young Paolo at Bari Airport then stepped on an Alitalia flight to Rome.  At Rome I got a Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur.  It was half empty and I had a window seat right at the back.  The time drifted away eating airline curries and catching up on films I'd missed, "Rise of Planet of the Apes" and "the King's Speech".  Beneath me drifted Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India.  It got dark, then we dropped down towards KL over the Malacca Strait at dawn.  The light in KL was liquid gold, but my plane for Borneo it seemed left from a different airport.  Dazed I found my way to the bus station and was hurried onto a bus dragging my luggage behind me.

The bus tore round a ring road.  It was full of asian faces and suddenly I felt very big and pink and kind of floppy.  After twenty minutes we arrived at LCCT, which I realised with a smile stood for Low Cost Carrier Terminal.  It was satisfyingly like a bus station and my Air Asia plane to Sibu was the bus, it made Ryan Air look up-market, I was surprised not to see people strap hanging.  For two hours I dropped in and out of consciousness, then we dived into the cloud base and as the mist began to clear I could see palms and deep green fields and rivers like big brown snakes.  Sibu Airport was made of grey stained concrete with rusty bits of steel reinforcing poking out.  As we entered the Arrivals Hall we passed a pile of damp, crumpled red carpet smelling of mould and obviously there for minor VIPs.


In my second immigration queue of the day I suddenly glimpsed Sue in the terminal beyond, looking thin and tanned.

Welcome to Borneo!

Bye bye Puglia

I'm just waiting for Cosimo our wireless internet man to come and disconnect our service, so it seemed like a good moment to send a last message from Puglia, at least for now.

Everything is pretty much stowed away and my bags are packed.  It's a fantastic sunny day here as if to mock my leaving.  For most of the past ten days since I returned from the UK its been wet and horrible, making it difficult to do much outside.

Looking back over the past few months I've got a lot done, including late last week showing a prospective buyer over La Fulica and agreeing a deal, which I hope will be finalised before Christmas.

I leave tomorrow morning at 4.00am for Bari Airport, to where our neighbour Paolo is very kindly giving me a lift.  Erminia has been pretty good about all our comings and goings.  I've only had one "of course I'll probably be dead by the time you return" and even that was said with a twinkle in her eye.  But then southern Italians understand the business of migration, it's been an economic necessity here for centuries.  What she can never get her head round however is that we might actually want to this.

OK, Im signing off before Cosimo gets here and drags me from the keyboard.  "Bye, bye,Puglia, I will miss you and look forward to coming back after our adventure!"