Monday, 15 December 2014

Miri Yet Again

Seventeen days after getting a dawn bus for Rome in Locorotondo I finally arrived in Miri with Sue yesterday.

This morning I pulled on my running shoes and went for an exploratory jog around the strange peninsula where Sue's apartment is located.  You can see from the map that Miri has a river which snakes inland and creates a long tongue of land between the main city centre and the sea.  This tongue is home to a bizarre combination of smart apartment complexes, like Sues, a golf course, a fishing village, an idyllic but rubbish-strewn and sandfly infested beach and the moorings for literally hundreds of oil rig service and supply vessels, some the size of largish oil tankers.

I ran around the edge of the golf course to the tip of the tongue, where I spotted a couple of paunchy expats finishing a hole while a tanker the height of a four-story building slid slowly down the river behind them.  Then I turned around and ran back up the tongue before stopping to take this photo.  En route I ran a bit of the palm-fringed beach, until I remembered the risk of sandfly bites and returned briskly inland.

On my way back to the apartment I took this photo of the first of the five or six blocks of the complex where it is situated.  It's a gated and guarded compound for wealthy Malaysians and expats.  It's a far cry from the tiny little town of Saratok where Sue and I spent our first two years in Malaysia.

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