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.
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