Kuching Skies

Sue and I went to Kuching last week for a final visit to Sarawak's capital before we head back to Europe in a few weeks.  For me it was a frustrating time as a couple of days after my 58th birthday I woke up with intense pain in my left knee and was unable to bend it.  It was no better one week later when we set off for the city with me struggling to fit in the passenger seat with a leg which wouldn't bend.  It felt uncomfortably like shifting Dad in and out of cars in recent years and left me with a nagging feeling that I was doing penance for not having been more patient with him.

We stayed at the Pullman, one of the posher hotels, where I spent a lot of the week lying on the bed, reading and watching TV.  When the boredom got too much I took photos out of our bedroom window.  When you look straight down at it, Kuching is much like any other city anywhere.  But look up or zoom in on the middle and far distance and a different picture emerges.  When the sky is not filled with dense, billowing, rain sodden clouds the intensity of the sunlight creates fantastic colourful and sculptural cloudscapes reaching far up into the atmosphere and at dusk these fade with amazing speed into twilight and darkness like God is turning down a dimmer switch.  I will miss these blue, yellow and copper skies when we return to Europe, especially monochrome England.

With the zoom one can reach out beyond the edge of Kuching to the jungle, paddies and rivers that
encircle it.  At the fringes of the city are the Malay kampungs (villages), from this distance they look like the hovels that surrounded the walls of a medieval castle.  The simile is appropriate, for the city is a concentration of wealth and privilege and the lives of many inside its walls are very different to those on the outside.  We come here to get a dose of modern life and to remind ourselves of the "civilisation" we come from.  When we are outside the cocoon of our hotel room we are on the streets and in the malls, buying stuff like there is no tomorrow with little rectangles of plastic that would be useless in our local market in Saratok, where even if they accepted credit cards, nothing costs enough to make it worth the bother.