AngeLog

Kuching… again

I finally get it. Kuching is suddenly all making sense now that we have less than 24 hours left here. Maybe we just needed the contrast of roughing it in Bako national park, or the hilarious-ness of the Damai Beach and what it had to offer. More on those later because we’re just back from dinner with fellow lodge people (including an Aussie from Newtown who went to school with someone I work with), and now we’re going up to the roof top bar.

So why does Kuching now make sense? We found a supermarket. Asian supermarkets rock. We realised that eating at the authentic looking local places are not the way to go. We’re just back from a pretty good meal at a boring western looking place. Sure, we’d never heard of the cheap Australian wine we had with our Malaysian food, but the food was more interesting that most of the roadside stuff we’ve had so far.

Posts on Bako and Damai to come. Do tune in for both because they’re sure to be hilarious. Firstly because Bako was like being in the army (I imagine), and secondly because Damai and its “cultural village” involved audience participation. That always makes me cringe.

Oh and no, the Proboscis monkey hid from us this morning but tomorrow we shall definitely see Orang Utans.

Kuching

It’s strange being a tourist in a city when you’re not the type of tourist being catered for. It’s a funny mix of being a novelty to the locals one moment, and walking past a giant Hilton Hotel and then a KFC. Kuching seems to get lots of Asian tourists from Singapore, other parts of Malaysia and Korea too. There are no streets of internet cafes and signs for cheap international phone calls, nor are there any chilled-out bars by the river or night markets selling fisherman’s pants.

In one long day we feel we’ve covered the entire city but more on that later. For now Bako National Park calls. Tomorrow night we’ll be staying in a treehouse in Damai National Park.

Singapore

Words to describe Singapore: clean, efficient, clean, friendly, clean, well-planned and cleaner again.

It’s quite nice to be in a clean city, and it is a beautiful city where they disguise their flyover freeways with vines and lush tropical gardens. By the end of the day it was starting to get on our nerves and look like a socialist regime though. People would mop around our feet and enter bathrooms after us to clean up. Most disturbing were the educational signs explaining the importance of everything from washing and drying your hands rather than shaking them dry on the bathroom floor, to not throwing yourself onto the MRT tracks.

Singapore certainly isn’t a city that gets up early. We landed at 4am and were in the city by the waterfront at 7am. Walking the pristine and empty streets around City Hall admiring the obscure mix of architecture was appreciated later in the day when we went back there to find it bustling with people.

Holly and I certainly accomplished a lot in a short time. Little India in the morning, followed by Sim Lim Square, then onto Chinatown and finally a look through Raffles. Finding some markets not far from Sim Lim Square was just what we needed in the morning. I was able to tick two of my favourite things off my list – eating mangosteens and drinking strong coffee with lots of sweetened condensed milk. We ate and drank in a mall as we watched people rubbing a giant gold buddha in front of a shop. There were some beautiful temples in that area as well (photos to come).

Sim Lim Square was really cool. I love a good electronics store and this was eight floors of them at bargain prices. Interestingly enough I was strong and didn’t rush in to buy anything. I’ll save that for JB at the end of the trip.

Chinatown is where the monsoon season emerged for the day. We hid for cover in a hawker food centre and had a great lunch for a couple of dollars. Tough. We then found a very funky store selling all sorts of clothes and bags and homewares mostly from local designers. Of course I managed to find a little something to add to my extensive ‘things-bought-while-travelling’ wardrobe.

What is missing from this post is that at almost every destination we spoke to at least one person who realised we were tourists and wanted to help out in some way. It’s almost like they’re competing to be good citizens! No, it’s lovely to feel welcome and get some insider tips on what to do and where to go.

We ended our 12 hours in Singapore thinking that Singapore is the Asian city you go to when you don’t want to go to an Asian city. The culture and great food is there, but what’s missing is the crazy driving, the lack of organisation, and above all, leaving things to chance – that’s when the most interesting things happen.

Oh and lastly, the funniest thing was the washing sticks they hang out of their huge apartment blocks – kinda like a flagpole, but suspended diagonally out from the building looking very precarious. Photos of that will certainly be on the gallery soon!

Planes, trains and automobiles

Well, to be more precise, it has been 2 planes, 2 buses, 1 taxi, 1 Skytrain, countless MRT (subway) rides and many, many kilometres of walking.

As the researched showed, food on Gulf Air was excellent. It was a shame they insisted on feeding us three times during an 8 hour flight that was the equivalent of our Friday night’s sleep. We didn’t sleep very much.

Arriving at Singapore airport at 4am was a little bizarre – even the tourist information wasn’t open (and they’re open 20 hours a day!). It was probably this lack of sleep that led to a little miscalculation on how long it would take to go from Singapore to the airport to get our bags, then to the bus station for a bus to the border and then across the border to Sunai airport for our Air Asia flight.

Border immigration was pretty hilarious. We get off a bus on the Singapore side, race everyone up the stairs to get our passports stamped and then race down the stairs to find our bus… only our bus wasn’t there. We decide that we’re probably allowed to get on any bus for the 1km trip across the bridge to Malaysian Immigration but we shouldn’t have tried to get on a bus full of Malaysians destined for the express lane at the other end. Eventually we find our yellow bus and are packed in.

We find a crazy taxi driver at the other end who displays all sorts of interesting driving habits to get us to the airport on time. Air Asia is like Jetstar and demands you be there 45 minutes early. We ran into the departure hall and just made it on time. As we left the check-in desk we noticed that we ran straight past a bag x-ray security check but the guys working there just chuckled. What’s the point of a bag check if you let crazy people like us run past it?