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Singapore and Sarawak

Holidays again, what wonderful ways to spend time. I visited Singapore for the first time, spent a few days seeing the sites and taking in the city. The city/country/island is exciting - so many different cultures blended into one, which is obvious with the various ghettos such as Chinatown and Little India. The food matches - chinese, western, malay, indonesian, indian (and then a mixture of all of the above). The only draw back is the cost, Singpoare is an expensive city, and testing it all out costs money. An exciting adventure was going to the Night Safari, an evening tour of the Singapore Zoo’s nocturnal animals. I didn’t even recognise half the animals. Fishing wild cats, barking deer, tapirs and some more which I can’t spell or even pronounce were also on the list.

I got bored of Singapore’s over priced attractions and crossed the border in Malaysia a day early for my flight. I realised that the border town Johor Bahru was really quite boring and headed up the same day to Melaka, the city where Malay civilisation all started. The influence is grand, with Dutch, Portuguese, British, Chinese and of course Malay influences creating dramatically standout architecture of deep red churches and stadyhaus (town hall) buildings. The food was a bit poor, but I dealt with it. That evening myself and some other backpackers made some home cooked food for some reason, but it was a fun thing to try. I’ll be eating out from now on.

I returned to Johor Bahru for my flight to Borneo, killing time buying pirated dvds and ended up catching a bus to the airport which took over two hours - as opposed to the advertised 30 minutes. I still made my flight which was lucky.

I’m now in Kuching, Borneo - one of the mildest Asian cities I have visited. Not so busy, clean, hassle free and very relaxing. It has been very pleasant. Spent lots of time exploring the city’s museums, and spent two days at the remote Bako national park seeing wildlife. Bako is one of the few places in Borneo to see the proboscis monkeys, a native primate which has the strangest dangling appendage for a nose. It’s funny. We also saw bright green diamond headed vipers, a few birds and were followed by the mischievous macaque monkeys. Infact after lunch one afternoon we carelessly left a bag of rubbish on a seat, to find it snatched by a macaque. It called for backup and within moments we had nearly eleven scampering monkeys approaching us at all angles. One of them opened Kelly’s bag and pulled out the packet of pringles and opened it out of the wrong end with it’s teeth. We had time only to grab a few bags, and soon boots and shoes had been left at their mercy. Four of us, Kelly, Hannah, Donn and myself tried to scare them away with loud noises. Instead, the big head honcho monkey ran at us, saw-like sharp teeth exposed and hissing like a rabid animal - scaring us away. Eventually we used some branches to whack on the ground and scare them away. That was a fun adventure.

Back in Kuching we went to the Urang Utan rehabilitation centre, Semmenggoh. Being the exceptionally lucky people that we are, we saw about twelve animals - all of which are semi wild and go to the centre only for some food. We saw big males weighing in at over 100kg, aggressive females protective of their young and some other playful apes.

That’s all to report for now, plan for now is to travel deep into the jungle to visit the indigenous tribes of Borneo for a trip to the longhouses.