Tracy isn’t feeling well today; she has succumbed to a head cold. We went for a short stroll through Chinatown to find something for breakfast and a coffee.
We stopped in a food-market and ordered our drinks. Looking around for something to eat, we noticed a lady selling a pancake filled with “stuff” which looked ok, so we ordered one each. Sure enough it was a pancake, but the filling was mysterious; it definitely had crushed nuts, some sort of vegetable (sort of like rojak without being rojak), a hint of chilli and a few other spices and a lettuce leaf. Scott thought they were quite tasty (a taste acquired after a few mouthfuls) but Tracy wasn’t of the same opinion.
After brekky, we took a slow walk back through Chinatown, stopping to take a few photos and to poke our noses into the Chinese temples along the route back to the hotel.
We were welcomed in each temple and a lady in each pointed out a feature; in the first temple the lady pointed to some of the carvings in the ceiling and said, “Roof.” In the second temple a lady pointed into a bath-like fixture and said, “Tortoise,” and surely enough there were live tortoises in the bathtub (some sort of good-luck-charm cum wishing well?)
We stopped at a travel agent near the hotel and booked a boat to Sibu for tomorrow. With Tracy not being well, we decided that today will be a “no-day” and we shouldn’t spend another day here to make up for this one. This of course means that we will not get out to Bako National Park to see the probiscus monkeys (luckily we saw these at Labuk Bay earlier) but will also miss out on the mangroves. Cest la vie. If we ever came back to Kuching we would definitely stay for longer; two days for the city itself, two days for Bako and another day to get out to the Semenggoh orang-utan sanctuary , and maybe an extra day or two to do some of the cooking schools.
Tracy went back to bed, so Scott went on a longer walking tour around town. The waterfront was still quiet, leading him to the conclusion that Kuching might just be a quiet city. The river was occupied by a few boatmen operating as ferries across the river. Some of the boatmen have allowed their boats to be plastered in advertising, so seeing “University of Technology” emblazoned all over a simple wooden oar-driven boat is quite amusing.
Scott found more evidence that Kuching allegedly means “cat” in Bahasa, as he discovered more statues and carvings of felines along his way. At the far end of town there is allegedly a large roundabout with a massive statue of a cat, but Scott didn’t make it that far downtown this morning, so maybe some time later?
It was lunchtime, so Scott went back to the hotel room to get Tracy for lunch. She was feeling a little better, so we went to the little restaurant directly across the road from the hotel. Scott ordered kueh teow goreng (fried flat noodles) and Tracy roti canai (plain roti) and asked for an egg filling (roti telur was not listed on the menu) and was very surprised to receive a western-style fried egg sandwich! Maybe something got lost in translation? Lunch was washed down with ribena soda, which not surprisingly was Ribena and Sprite.
After lunch we had a short stroll around town to see if anything was happening. It wasn’t. It was also hotter than the morning, which is not doing Tracy any good so we went back to the hotel for an early siesta.
After siesta we wandered around the town which seems in total shutdown with very few things opened due to the long weekend and Iban new year festival. We had dinner down at the waterfront as it is actually nice and cool down there, thank god as I am sick of sweating to death every minute you are outside.
We had thought that Chinatown would be open and that some of the pagodas etc would be lit up, but we were wrong, so after a couple of hours we gave up and headed back to the hotel for our sweet and sour cake dessert and vegged out reading.
The cunning plan (for now):
We leave for Sibu tomorrow morning (4 ½ hours by boat), we’ll stay overnight there and then take another boat on Wednesday further upriver to Kapit (3 hours) for one night. If the water level is high enough, on Thursday we will take a boat further upriver again to Belaga (4 ½ hours); if the river is not high enough then we will travel overland to Bintulu on the coast, in any case we will end up there even if we visit Belaga first. Once back on the coast, we will travel north to Miri where we will spend a few days and hopefully will get the opportunity to check out the almost undiscovered scuba diving opportunities which are just starting to open up there. From Miri, it’s just “short” bus ride into Brunei where we’ll spend a couple of days, then take the ferry back into Malaysia, landing at Pulau Labuan to visit the Australian War Cemetery and museums before finally taking another ferry to KK in preparation for going home. The end of the trip is nigh. 🙁