The first night I was in Kuching city, I ventured out, rather tentatively, to pinpoint why it had this strange effect on me. In a day and a half, I would leave to longhouses and rainforests, and I wanted to know something about this city — the heart now of such an aggressive tourist circuit. Walking by night in Kuching is lonely at first, and a little strange, lit as its part colonial, part harshly modern architecture is by neon yellow, green, red lights. As I walked closer to the waterfront, and reached the Clock Tower, it was like falling through a trapdoor into a different place, a place with people, lightly scented with beer, and with this Portuguese band whose music had Kuching dancing. This was my first, and lasting, impression of the lovely Kuching waterfront. I left this glow of music and festivity to walk along the water, where couples sat close and planned their lives, or the next day’s sightseeing. A million lights played on the shiny black water, and on the paved walkway, lit the red and black Iban designs which I could instantly picture as a stunning dress.
You can see most of Kuching in a day, and feel like you know it. Start early, do the Sarawak Museum — which gives you a huge canvas that you can zoom into as you walk around the city later, and make your onward travel plans. I was on Guide No. 2 by this time, who had an uncanny ability to tumble into the natural or cultural history of whatever stuffed animal or wooden carving my gaze happened upon — without really looking at me at all. It was a good game, and gave me a rigorous grounding on the various ethnic communities of Sarawak — the Iban (the largest group), Orang Ulu, Bidayu, Melanau (and from there onto orangutans and many endangered birds) considerably detailing my sketch of the state and leaving my skin crinkling in anticipation of the days ahead.
After the museum, Kuching city seems like a kaleidoscopic mosaic you see differently every few hours. There’s a rather empty, colonial-meets-commercial and modern feel to large pockets of the city; views of Kuching from atop towers that will show you flawless planning, tennis courts, strangely-shaped legislative buildings, and abundant greenery, and leave you wondering where the half-a-million people live — normal working-class colonies seem absent from this perfectly planned city. (I saw a few on the outskirts of the city later that evening.) Of course, there are parts of Old Kuching, the markets along the waterfront — Carpenter Street, Gambier Street, India Street and so on — buzzing with the multi-ethnic crowds you’re told constantly about. You can spend hours not doing anything at all in China Town — with its variety of shops, and bizarrely painted façades, buildings that display, provocatively, their colonial heritage. And there is a sense of people placidly going about life in a city transformed by so many hands over the last 150 years, which renders Sarawak’s vivid, ‘romantic’ history into a muted watercolour of sorts.
Sarawak, ‘a slab of northern Borneo about the size of England’ was ruled by Brunei till 1842, when a rather fortunate Englishman called James Brooke sailed down the Sarawak river. He named Kuching city after the ‘mata kuching’ or cat’s eye trees growing along the banks (a reason for the rather spooky cat statues dotted around the city, and a Cat Museum across the river). He arrived just in time to quell a local rebellion, and was gifted Sarawak in return. So began a 100-year reign of the ‘white Rajahs’, splintered only with the Japanese invasion in 1942. After their defeat in World War II, Sarawak eventually became a British colony, until it joined the Malaysian Federation in 1963. Both buildings and local lore bear marks of a colonial legacy — sometimes as romantic story (told both by story spinners here and far away: Maugham used Sarawak as a setting for many of his), other times as more gritty, bloody retellings of history, of local alliances and guerrilla battles deep in the forest, of heads won after hard-fought skirmishes and slung on the beams of longhouses.
This history intertwines with others, of Indonesian invasions, and Chinese trader settlements, and the arrival of Indian migrant labour, adding and proliferating the multiplicity of ethnic communities in Sarawak and simultaneously absorbing and rejecting — for other, more modern presents — many layers of colonial rule. Driving out of Kuching city, towards the rainforests, these histories swirled around in my mind, and slowly settled down as sediment. The drive to the Lemanak river, along which was an Iban longhouse I was going to spend a night at, was four hours long, enough to shake the preoccupation with political history and delve into a startlingly different present. A forest produce market in Serian, an hour from Kuching, filled my mind with snake and dragon fruit, pink and green confectionery, and deep-fried everything-that-moves. Small scarlet chillies and sacks of anchovies infused my senses, and set an entirely contrasting tone for the rest of my Sarawak travellings.
Food became a focal point of my experience. Any vegetarian nightmares of being forced to eat fried creatures of the forest were dispelled at Lee Chong Café in Lachau, only an hour or so from our river safari. Each variety of local spinach and fern tasted distinct and tantalisingly fresh. Later at night, at the longhouse, my veggie dishes were, again, numerous and incredibly coloured and flavoured, and left me warmly grateful of being able to take away a memory of tasty vegetables in a land where even the alcohol tastes fishy.
I was told to hold tight to the sides of my three-foot-wide kayak and not lean either way (by a muscular oarsman whose ‘SHE ITCH TO GO OUT AND EXPLORE’ T-shirt I became fascinated with) as we set off on the Lemanak towards the Saruba Longhouse, 45 minutes away. The river was a milky kopi brown because of the unexpected rains, which thwarted my desire to swim, but not completely. Something about the milky ripples and eddies, and the perfect temperature of the water, and the branches hanging low — makes you temporarily forgetful of the deathly river crocs (Guide No. 3 had told me about a certain Happy Bachelor who’d ‘walloped some of the unfortunate soul’ and had been walloped himself in 1985). Something about the depth and quiet of the forest makes you silent and expectant — though the most startling wildlife I saw was a parasitic fig tree, strangulating its poor host.
The longhouse stay — a savvy deal between the Malaysian tourism department and the Iban tribes who live in these traditional communal dwellings along the river, bringing together the concept of the homestay and an adventure holiday — is something of a mixed experience: I felt like a girl with a funny-tourist mask on. A day and night at the Saruba longhouse gave me a shot of tribal life (heavily laced with rice whisky and wine) that was new and exciting, but left me a little queasy. The Iban were traditionally headhunters (a practice ‘officially’ banned in 1844), who now grow rubber and pepper, and weave mats, hats and some pretty souvenirs for visitors’ shopping needs. I prowled through their common living area, peeked obediently into open doors, and watched them smoking their early evening cigarettes, and slowly swaying as the rice whisky bottles emptied, all before a hypnotising pink and black sunset. By the time we sat down to the ‘cultural programme’ after dinner — rice wine and dancing — the Iban who most wanted to dance were being politely asked to sit down and behave, some of the performers themselves looked a little sad, and I felt a little strange. I’d had a structured dose of tribal culture, and a fantastic forest walk, exposing me to an incredible number of wild ferns and spooky plant life. But more than that, the longhouse visit was an insightful freeze-frame of a community — one that sharply captured its ability to use culture as a means of livelihood, but was also blurry at the edges, where the communities’ or an individual performer’s happiness or future was concerned.
The next night, back in Kuching, I visited one of a string of karaoke bars on Jalan Bukit Mata Kuching. It was late, and the bar was appropriately blue and red. There was, disappointingly, no karaoke (something about Miami Bistro had made me determined to shed my inhibited self and don a new one, ready to sing Tina Turner) but a fantastic band, the likes of whom I hadn’t seen since I was 11, and MTV first came to my parents’ TV set. They sang Tina Turner and Wild Cherry, and people in short skirts and leggings danced, while I played the worst half-hour of pool possible. And something about my night out settled the swirl of unease around Sarawak’s histories, and made me understand how ‘exotic’ holiday destinations manipulate their pasts, to negotiate a present that can be showcased to the outside world. Even package tours have holes, and if you peer long enough, you see something real, which draws you to this colourful state, and its incredibly diverse people, with their stories spiced with shrimp paste and ‘profucious’ humour
The information
Getting there
Sarawak is the largest state in the Malaysian federation, and occupies a substantial part of Malaysian Borneo. Fly into Kuala Lumpur, and from there take one of many flights to Kuching city, the capital of Sarawak. Malaysia Airlines flies Delhi-Kuala Lumpur return for Rs 25,950 and Kuala Lumpur-Kuching for Rs 14,696. Air Asia is the cheap option between KL and Kuching (return fares as low as RM 238 or Rs 3,128). Please note that, from August 1, Malaysia is no longer offering visa on arrival to Indian travellers. So get your visa before leaving.
Where to stay
At the top-end are the Crowne Plaza (from RM 192; +60-82-247777, www.ichotelsgroup.com), Holiday Inn (from RM 154; 423111, www.ichotelsgroup.com) and Hilton (from RM 239; 248200, www.hilton.com); the latter also boasts the Hilton Batang Ai Longhouse Resort (from RM 229), modelled on traditional Iban dwellings and set at the edge of a rainforest. I stayed at the Merdeka Palace Hotel & Suites (from RM 340; 258000, www.merdekapalace.com), which looks over the Padang Merdeka, an expanse of green with the most stunning trees on which the Independence parade takes place. The hotel is a very comfortable five-star, very centrally located — a short walk down from the waterfront, with the court house on one side and the Post Office on the other, and Sarawak Museum just behind. Other factors to make up your mind are a pool on the eighth floor, and a breakfast buffet that fully immerses you in Malaysian cuisine from 7am.
The old parts of Kuching, along the waterfront and the bazaars parallel to it, are good places to hunt for cheaper accommodation. There are some lovely small hotels that look like restored colonial buildings, sandwiched between souvenir shops as you walk down the waterfront. The Waterfront Lodge, located at Main Bazaar, is sweet (from RM 110; 231111, www.kuchingwaterfrontlodge.com). The Pinnacles Lodge enjoys an excellent location in the heart of town atop a hill with lovely views of the town from all rooms (from RM 80; 419100, www.pinnacleskuching.com).
Getting around
Kuching is definitely a walking city — get hold of a map, and circle the places you want to see, grab an umbrella and go. Cabs and buses are also available, and you can hire a car from numerous tour operators, or from your hotel. Definitely take a ‘boat taxi’ (sampan or tambang) across or along the river.
Longhouse trips and visits to numerous wildlife parks in Sarawak are possible using Kuching city as a base. The easy option is to call Tourism Malaysia (011-41506105/08, www.tourism.gov.my), and check out a few of their aggressively marketed package tours — this will sort out accommodation and local travel issues, as well as provide you with a guide with inhuman amounts of information. You can also browse packages at www.virtualmalaysia.com.my. If you’re a little more enterprising, and privacy is an important consideration, do your research, hire a car and drive. You might miss out on breathless stories and information about each plant and building you pass, and also some of the more touristy experiences, but it might be worth it. See www.sarawaktourism.com for a list of tour operators.
What to see & do
Like any other region in the world, you can plan to do Sarawak quickly, and you can do it slowly and lingeringly. In terms of city sights, there is the lovely waterfront in Kuching — countless souvenir shops and little cafés and patisseries to take breaks at. There’s the Sarawak Museum, which gives you the whole of Sarawak in two hours — wildlife and history and all. There are mosques and Chinese temples (the Tua Pek Kong and the Hong San Si are two recommendations); a must, must do is a few hours in China Town, with its combination of old Chinese electrical shops where you can get plastic mannequins that light up and the very chic art galleries and cafés to get a drink at. Then, when you’ve shopped and walked and eaten nasi goreng and drunk frothy teh tarak (tea that is made creamy by ‘pulling’) on each street corner — go back to your hotel, get out your leggings and head out for some Kuching karaoke — early ’90s style. If that’s not for you, there’s a string of great café-bars on Jalan Green Hill — Havana, The Junk, Bla Bla Bla — where you can get a reasonable meal (local or Continental) and beer, with glass lamps and ironwood interiors to gaze at.
Outside the city, you can go for a one- or two-day trip to a Longhouse, a traditional communal house of the Iban, for a little rainforest adventure, and a taste of how this tribal community lives. Make time for the numerous wildlife parks around Kuching, not least the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, just 12km away, where you can lunch with a feisty lot of rehabilitated orangutans. The Sarawak Cultural Village (www.scv.com) is a must-do.
When to go
‘Thunderstorm’ is a default weather setting for Sarawak — this is something you work into your plans. July and August are relatively dry, and there’s the Rainforest Music festival, and a balmy buzz about town. August 30 and 31 see the annual boat race, when the city comes out to the waterfront to cheer.