Borneo, the island known for jungles, Orangutans, Probiscus monkeys and some serious environmental degradation threats. But I am getting ahead of myself...we last left you at the Tioman Islands, lapping up the sunshine and gorgeous aqua water. Trade that for being becalmed in the South China Sea, drifting and hoping against hope that some wind would come around and give us a lift. It never happened. We experienced some squalls which had some very short lived blasts of wind, but nothing to transport us the 400nm east to Kuching, the capital of the southern Malaysian state of Sarawak - Borneo. We even spotted a water spout (in the distance, thankfully) before a 40kt squall blasted through.
One afternoon we were drifting, approximately two thirds the way to our destination and there was not a breath of wind. The water was so flat we could see our reflections in the glass. Such a strange experience to be in a sea, open to all the elements and there was not a wave nor a tremor on the face of the water. A pod of dolphins came by to say hi, it was one of those special moments and we got some neat snaps of our reflection in the water off the boat.
So 6 days and 5 long nights after we left Tioman we motored into the grubby Sarawak River and anchored next to the small town of Sajingkat. Excited as we were about getting to land and eating some food off the boat (we had failed to catch even one fish on our long journey), we had heard and read warnings about boat safety and we took a measured approach to leaving the boat on the first night and enjoyed a few coldies to celebrate arrival at a new and mysterious destination.
Kuching the Malay word for 'cat', is a busy town, dominated by port comings and goings, logging and oil shipping. The town was given its name by a British merchants' nephew, Charles Brooke the Raja here from 1868-1972, not entirely sure why but it has become a great reason to theme the town with cat related paraphernalia. Borneo is an intriguing island, divided north/south between Indonesian and Malaysian ownership, with Brunei having its own northwest segment and not a party to either of the other two nations. This eastern part of Malaysia has quite a checkered history of land ownership battles with Japan, federated Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. The intervention of British and Australian troops to maintain the Malaysian border during the Indonesian Konfrontasi in the late 1960s exemplifies the strong links that Malaysia maintained with its former Colonial ruler.
But onto today...Hugh went off to town to check-in with the Port Master and Customs, while I stayed and minded the boat. It was now 7 days since I had been off the boat and I was getting a bit tetchy. But it was all training for the longer legs that we would be doing as we made the big journey eastward. Turns out that Hugh had made a new 'friend' in Mr Wan, a guy with a car who was hanging around the jetty, who would drive him around to get 240lts of diesel to fill up our tanks, for a modest tip. Filling up the boat with fuel is always fun, as it involves obtaining enough containers and transporting them to the petrol station, back to the dingy, from the dingy to the boat and then filling up the tanks, one laborious jerry can at a time. This level of 'fun' is always enhanced by inclement weather which can have the dingy bouncing up and down against the side of the boat, making the lifting of the jerry cans onto the boat quite a challenge. Sometimes getting fuel can take a whole day...imagine if it took a day to get the fuel for your car every time you filled up!
Incident free, the fuel was procured and the boat was now full. Hugh also managed to check us in in one day, which is not always the case as it can sometimes take 3 days to check in and run around town to all the different officials who can be 'at lunch', 'on a walk' or just 'finished'. So now we were free to get on the internet (excited face!), check out the town and buy some vegetables. We didn't want to leave the boat for too long, so we were not going to go to any of the number of National Parks to do any trekking, this time. So we made our way out to the main road and it looked like the last bus had been here sometime in the 1990s, and Hugh had found out the day before that taxis are a bit expensive, so we tried the old fashioned 'thumb out' trick and managed to strike gold with a lovely lady called Lily, a Chinese Malaysian, who turned into our tour guide for the day. She took us to the cat statue, a restaurant for Chinese breakfast and the fruit and vegetable shop. We were not your average tourists!
Cat Bizarre. The next stop was the Kuching Cat Museum which was, well, quite kitsch, in a quality Malaysian way! The displays containing family photos of pet cats, the cat food section and the birthday cards with cat images left me in stitches. Next was the taxidermy cat section with sad disjointed cats looking mournful with their crooked glass eyes. It was all too much and time to go back to the boat. With a teary wave, we said goodbye to Lily and got back to the boat ready to depart for our next Borneo stop - Labuan. On the way out we could hear the commercial shipping captains' calling the Kuching pilot, calling on the radio with "meow pilot, meow pilot, meow pilot" followed by their call sign. Good to see that the locals enjoy the humour of the town's name as much as we did.
The 370nm northward trip to Labuan was comparatively quick, taking 4 days and we were even able to sail most of it. The coast was busy with fishing boats, merchant ships carrying lumber and oil and the enormous oil/ natural gas drilling rigs which we were weaving in and out of. Some of the structures were in 50m of water, such incredible infrastructure connected on the sea bed by a pipeline which delivered the crude oil or natural gas to the mainland for shipping or refining.
We arrived at Labuan and are now in the marina, another Government constructed and owned facility. There are about 7 of these dotted around the Malaysian coast, all brand new and yet in a state of disrepair. It looks like one bloke drew up the plans for the marina on the back of a napkin while on a 3am caffeine high then had his brother and cousin build it before the weekend was out. The designs are always quite strange, usually with little consideration of the local weather effects and only a few of them include sea walls, such that they are suffering badly from swell impacts or wake from passing water traffic. This marina has the visiting yachts tied up on the farthest arms, and you walk along a 200m long 2-foot wide concrete 'gangway' with no rails to exit the marina. Here's hoping that I don't slip and take a dip in the nasty marina water after having a couple of G and T's!
20/5/2014
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| Water spout and accompanying squall in the South China Sea |
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| Reflections in the glass like Sea |
Kuching the Malay word for 'cat', is a busy town, dominated by port comings and goings, logging and oil shipping. The town was given its name by a British merchants' nephew, Charles Brooke the Raja here from 1868-1972, not entirely sure why but it has become a great reason to theme the town with cat related paraphernalia. Borneo is an intriguing island, divided north/south between Indonesian and Malaysian ownership, with Brunei having its own northwest segment and not a party to either of the other two nations. This eastern part of Malaysia has quite a checkered history of land ownership battles with Japan, federated Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. The intervention of British and Australian troops to maintain the Malaysian border during the Indonesian Konfrontasi in the late 1960s exemplifies the strong links that Malaysia maintained with its former Colonial ruler.
But onto today...Hugh went off to town to check-in with the Port Master and Customs, while I stayed and minded the boat. It was now 7 days since I had been off the boat and I was getting a bit tetchy. But it was all training for the longer legs that we would be doing as we made the big journey eastward. Turns out that Hugh had made a new 'friend' in Mr Wan, a guy with a car who was hanging around the jetty, who would drive him around to get 240lts of diesel to fill up our tanks, for a modest tip. Filling up the boat with fuel is always fun, as it involves obtaining enough containers and transporting them to the petrol station, back to the dingy, from the dingy to the boat and then filling up the tanks, one laborious jerry can at a time. This level of 'fun' is always enhanced by inclement weather which can have the dingy bouncing up and down against the side of the boat, making the lifting of the jerry cans onto the boat quite a challenge. Sometimes getting fuel can take a whole day...imagine if it took a day to get the fuel for your car every time you filled up!
Incident free, the fuel was procured and the boat was now full. Hugh also managed to check us in in one day, which is not always the case as it can sometimes take 3 days to check in and run around town to all the different officials who can be 'at lunch', 'on a walk' or just 'finished'. So now we were free to get on the internet (excited face!), check out the town and buy some vegetables. We didn't want to leave the boat for too long, so we were not going to go to any of the number of National Parks to do any trekking, this time. So we made our way out to the main road and it looked like the last bus had been here sometime in the 1990s, and Hugh had found out the day before that taxis are a bit expensive, so we tried the old fashioned 'thumb out' trick and managed to strike gold with a lovely lady called Lily, a Chinese Malaysian, who turned into our tour guide for the day. She took us to the cat statue, a restaurant for Chinese breakfast and the fruit and vegetable shop. We were not your average tourists!
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| Kuching sight-seeing with our new friend Lily |
The 370nm northward trip to Labuan was comparatively quick, taking 4 days and we were even able to sail most of it. The coast was busy with fishing boats, merchant ships carrying lumber and oil and the enormous oil/ natural gas drilling rigs which we were weaving in and out of. Some of the structures were in 50m of water, such incredible infrastructure connected on the sea bed by a pipeline which delivered the crude oil or natural gas to the mainland for shipping or refining.
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| One of the dozens of drilling rigs we sailed through on the west coat of Sarawak |
20/5/2014
remarkable reflections photo on an 'ocean'? Sounds like there is a marina D+C opportunity there - nm
ReplyDeleteThat reflection shot is not even touched up.
ReplyDeleteYep, loads of D+C opportunities, I just need to perfect my "you should try it this way" in Malay!