In Borneo, City Pleasures and Jungle Adventure
David Hagerman for The New York Times
Boating on the Sarawak River in Kuching, with the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly in the background. More Photos »
By DANIEL ROBINSON
Published: January 21, 2011
A SNOW-WHITE fortress in the style of the English Renaissance, garnished with crenellations, pepper pot turrets and an octagonal keep, is not quite what you’d expect to find on a steamy bluff overlooking an equatorial river in Malaysian Borneo. But Fort Margherita, built in 1879 by Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, is just one of the many charms of Kuching, a gracious and kaleidoscopically diverse city of about 600,000 just an hour and a half by air from Singapore.
An amble through its safe, eminently walkable streets will reveal dragon-festooned Chinese temples a few blocks from a 19th-century South Indian mosque; fortresses from the time of the White Rajahs (English rulers of the Kingdom of Sarawak from 1841 to 1941) a short walk from a high-rise district of hotels and icily air-conditioned shopping malls; and chic restaurants that would not be out of place in London a few streets away from open-air stalls redolent with half-a-dozen Asian cuisines.
The most extraordinary attractions in the Kuching area, however, are natural. Drive an hour or two out of town and you come to tracts of some of the most ancient and species-rich rain forests on earth. In less than a week, you can plunge into an exotic world of primeval flora and endangered fauna, visit — or live with — a local tribe, and still have time for urban pursuits — i.e. eating and shopping. In addition, many Sarawakians converse comfortably in English, making travel a breeze.
I first discovered the sundry delights of Kuching, which is the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak (pronounced sah-RAH-wok) several years ago. My soon-to-be wife, Rachel, was living in Singapore and we decided to escape it for a few days and explore some of Malaysia’s other half. In less than a day I was entranced and decided to return at some point — with a note pad.
When I went with Rachel, we stayed in the center of town, but for this visit I chose a guesthouse a bit off the beaten path. Kuching has several international-standard business hotels, but this place came with a good recommendation, and the fact that the co-owner of the Fairview Guesthouse, Eric Yap, a retired civil servant, offered to show me around was a bonus, especially since many of the places I wanted to go are not accessible by public transport. My game plan was to head to nearby national parks in the morning and explore the city later in the day.
One of my top priorities was to pay another visit to Asia’s only great ape, the orangutan, which is endemic to Borneo and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Early one morning, after a quick breakfast, Eric and I got into his late-model Honda and drove 20 minutes south from Kuching to the Semenggoh Nature Reserve, whose wildlife center was established 35 years ago to rehabilitate jungle animals rescued from captivity. The 2.5-square-mile area is now one of the best places in the world to see orangutans up close and on the loose.
So far, we were told, 5 of the center’s 27 orangutans — 16 of them born here — have kicked the habit of dining at park headquarters, but the other 22 often swing by (literally) to partake of the banana manna set out each day. We had been forewarned, however, that there was no guarantee that any of the orangutans — the world’s largest tree-dwelling animals — would show up.
“Yaaay-ooh!” the park ranger yelled, the second tone lower than the first, as he scanned the forest canopy, “yaaay-oh!” The energetic rustle of leaves in a distant tree was the first indication that an orangutan was approaching. “If a big male is coming, keep distance. He is unpredictable,” the ranger warned, adding nonchalantly, “he might attack, he might not.” But it was a smallish young ape making his way toward us, clambering from one tree to another, grabbing onto vines and branches with gravity-defying agility.
At one point, we — along with dozens of other visitors — could see five shaggy orangutans clutching trunks, branches and vines with arms that can reach six feet or more. A female orangutan with a baby clinging to the long hairs of her torso descended warily to a stash of bright yellow bananas, stuffed as many as she could in her mouth, grabbed a green coconut in one hand and scrambled up a rope. Soon the last of the climbers disappeared back into the canopy, and Eric and I continued on.
We headed farther south, through a patchwork of dense secondary forests, open fields, houses and small orchards. For tens of millions of years — until logging companies arrived in the late 20th century — Sarawak’s dense rain forests remained unchanged, but today only patches of completely untouched jungle remain.
Our destination was Annah Rais, a Bidayuh village whose residents — or most of them — live in longhouses, a collaborative habitation that serves as a home for the entire community. (The Bidayuh are one of the Bornean indigenous groups known collectively as Dayaks.) In a longhouse, each family retains a high degree of economic autonomy (this is not a kibbutz) but common areas are in constant use for cooking, traditional crafts, socializing and celebrations. If you were making a Dayak version of “Seinfeld,” you’d set it in a longhouse.
Although Bornean longhouses share certain features — all, for example, are built on stilts to insulate them from the damp tropical earth — each Dayak group has its own floor plan and decorative traditions. Among the Bidayuh, communal life is centered on the awah, a roofed, open-air veranda whose width is generally about 12 feet but whose length can exceed that of two football fields. Running along one side of the awah is a wall punctuated by doors to the apartments — or bilik — where individual families live. If you ask how big a longhouse is, chances are you’ll be told how many doors it has.
Annah Rais, whose three longhouses have a total of 97 doors, is one of the best places in the Kuching area to get acquainted with the traditions of the Dayaks. As at virtually all Sarawakian longhouses (especially those accessible by road), modern amenities have been embraced with gusto — locals can’t wait to get broadband Internet — but Annah Rais’s inhabitants have consciously decided both to preserve aspects of their traditional lifestyle and to welcome modern tourists. Several residents run homestays that allow paying guests the opportunity to meet local people, dine on Bidayuh cuisine (and help prepare it), drink home-brewed rice wine and try (mock) hunting with a blowgun. For day visits, after paying a nominal fee to the longhouse committee, visitors are free to explore the village, either on their own or with a guide.
The floors of Annah Rais’s public spaces are made of bouncy bamboo slats, which added a spring to our steps as Eric and I took a stroll. We soon came upon an older woman named Bawe who was cutting rattan into long, even strips in order to weave a mat. Her 47-year-old cousin, a traditional drummer named Pola Anak Nan, was seated nearby and we soon struck up a conversation in English. The mat is “for her own use,” he explained, adding that the Dayak mats available for sale in Kuching, many imported from Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo), are of “poor quality — people in the village don’t touch it.” Our parents, he added, smiling, “they very choosy.”
Our next stop was the head house, a legacy of the Bidayuhs’ days as fearsome headhunters. True to its name, the structure’s centerpiece was a cage containing about a dozen human skulls, blackened by smoke and suspended above an old brass cannon marked “Pieter Seest Anno 756.” (Pieter Seest was a bell and gun founder active in Amsterdam in the 1700s.) These days, almost all Dayaks are Christian (mainly Anglican, in the case of Annah Rais), and the heads are no longer believed to protect the village.
Back in Kuching, I took time to explore the city the way it should be, on foot and aimlessly. For a first-time visitor, most of the highlights — temples, mosques, Chinatown, several excellent museums, and restaurants — are within a short walk of Kuching’s Waterfront Promenade, a half-mile-long ribbon of flower beds, tropical trees and food stalls that is especially refreshing whenever a cooling breeze blows off the Sarawak River. Couples and families flock here in the early evening, when the hues of an equatorial sunset are gradually outshone by strings of colored fairy lights and their watery reflections.
The road that runs along most of the waterfront has long been known as Main Bazaar. These days, its arcaded, colonial-era Chinese shophouses shelter Borneo’s best selection of traditional Dayak artifacts, handmade by members of the Iban, Bidayuh and Orang Ulu (upriver) groups. This is the place to come if you’re looking for any sort of native tools and crafts, along with hand-woven textiles and sachets of Sarawak’s famously piquant pepper. Browsers are welcome and, in most shops, staff members are happy to explain each item’s origin and its traditional significance and functions.
Kuching’s increasingly sophisticated culinary scene reflects the city’s multicultural population, which is about 38 percent Chinese, 36 percent Malay and 24 percent Dayak (mainly Bidayuh and Iban). Over the course of my stay, I ate deliciously crunchy stir-fried midin (jungle fern tips), fiery Sarawak-style laksa (noodle soup), Teochew-style Chinese kueh chap (fish and prawn soup) flavored with crunchy-hot slivers of ginger, and delicious pepper steak at an elegant French-inspired restaurant. There are also several Indian restaurants and, for the spice-averse, KFC.
Another culinary highlight is the Weekend Market, half a mile from the town center on Satok Street, which runs from midday on Saturday until Sunday afternoon. Open-air stalls, many run by Bidayuh farmers from the interior, sell brightly colored local crops — winged beans, okra, ginger, bright red chilies — on tiny plates for a ringgit or two (33 or 66 cents). At a table piled high with bananas ranging from lemon yellow to dark red — some barely larger than my thumb, others almost the length and girth of my forearm — I got into a conversation (in English) with the owner, who gave me nine varieties to taste. Despite my protests, he refused payment and — not for the first or last time — I found myself astonished at Sarawakians’ generosity.
“A RAFFLESIA is flowering!”
It was with this exclamation that Eric’s wife greeted me one afternoon as I was pondering my next move. Because this bulletin — the local equivalent of a hot tip for the afternoon horse race — was both unexpected and time-sensitive, it made the decision easy.
Texas-size Borneo is home to some of the most extraordinary plants on earth and one of the rarest is the elusive Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower, some of whose species can produce blooms over three feet in diameter. Because Rafflesia flowers last for just a few days before rotting, we quickly made plans to leave the next morning.
After a 44-mile, two-hour drive northwestward, we arrived at Sarawak’s best place for Rafflesia spotting, Gunung Gading National Park, a 16-square-mile patch of old-growth rain forest overlooking the South China Sea.
The Rafflesia (pronounced rah-FLEE-zhuh) plant is a rootless, stemless, leafless parasite that consists almost entirely of the flower. It attaches itself to vines of the Tetrastigma plant, a member of the grape family, from which the Rafflesia’s filament-like tentacles suck prodigious quantities of nutrients. The genus Rafflesia is named after Sir Stamford Raffles, who discovered the flower for Western science while leading an expedition to the Sumatran rain forest in 1818. (He is better remembered for what he did the following year: founded Singapore.)
A few hundred yards into the forest, our guide turned off the plank walk and we followed him across a rocky hillside. Suddenly, there it was, nestled at the base of two moss-flecked boulders: an orange-red Rafflesia tuan-mudae 30 inches in diameter, its five meaty petals mottled with warty raised spots. The basketball-size diaphragm in the center, speckled with white spots on the inside, enclosed a disk resembling a spiky lotus flower.
The flower’s reproductive organs — each Rafflesia is either female or male — are hidden under the disk, but beyond that scientists understand little about how the flower, whose buds take nine months to mature, manages to reproduce. They do know, however, why Rafflesias smell like rotten meat: to attract carrion flies for pollination. I bent down and put my nose practically inside the flower’s core. Though the odor was hardly overpowering, you wouldn’t want to eat a chicken cutlet that had smelled like a Rafflesia before it was cooked.
As I neared the end of my stay, there was still something I had yet to see: a wild troupe of one of Borneo’s most endangered — and oddest — primates, the proboscis monkey. It was in search of this peculiar creature, endemic to Borneo, that I spent my final evening in Sarawak cruising through Kuching Wetlands National Park, whose pristine mangrove forests are accessible only by boat (easy enough to arrange through your guesthouse or hotel).
In the company of an Italian couple from Turin, Eric and I drove 15 miles north to the seaside village of Kampung Santubong and boarded an open motorboat. Along the shore — the tide was very low — mangrove roots poked out of the mud like thousands of fat, knobby pencils stuck in vertically, eraser-first.
Our affable guide and boatman, Sarbini bin Labong, slowed the outboard to a purr, pointing toward the shore at what he said was a monkey. All I saw were swaying branches. Then I heard the crashing of tree limbs and caught sight of a flash of reddish-brown fur — a potbellied proboscis monkey jumping from one tree to the next in search of choice young leaves. Grunts and chirps emerged from what we soon realized was a troupe of about 10 of the agile creatures. True to their name, the adult males cast an unmistakable profile thanks to their pendulous noses.
When darkness had fully fallen, we began hunting for Sarawak’s most feared creature, the man-eating saltwater crocodile, which can grow to a length of 20 feet or more (it is considered to be the world’s largest living reptile). We chugged into a narrow channel and Sarbini again cut the motor, rowing as he shined a flashlight toward the muddy shore. Little splashes emerged from the blackness as unseen fish broke the surface.
Suddenly we saw a gleam — reptilian eyes reflecting the boatman’s beam. Silently, we approached and spotted a snout and two greedy eyes just above the water line. As we drew near, the critter moved and, for the first time, we could make out its true dimensions. It was a baby — no more than two feet long; he (or she) would have been able to drown and devour a Barbie doll but that’s about it. Without stretching the truth (as long as we were vague on the details), we could now report to the folks back home that we had encountered a hungry crocodile in the wild and lived to tell the tale.
As we headed back to the main channel we slid past ink-black trees silhouetted against an almost black sky. Fireflies swirled around one particular tree, and for a fleeting moment, gasps of “bellissimo!” turned our boat into a tropical gondola. Then Sarbini revved the motor and we zoomed toward the twinkling lights of Santubong — and the creature comforts of Kuching.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
Kuching is about an hour and a half by air from Singapore. Flights are operated by Air Asia (airasia.com), Malaysia Airlines (malaysiaairlines.com), the Singapore Airlines subsidiary Silk Air (silkair.com) and Tiger Airways (tigerairways.com). Malaysia Airlines has frequent flights to Kuala Lumpur (one hour and 40 minutes).
If you would like help planning your visit, contact Borneo Adventure (55 Main Bazaar, Kuching; 60-82-245-175; borneoadventure.com), a travel agency that organizes highly regarded, ecologically sustainable tours and excursions.
Travelers with dollars or euros will find that Kuching offers excellent value, with costs significantly lower than Singapore but higher than Vietnam or Cambodia. International-standard hotel rooms are available for the equivalent of about $100 for a double (guesthouses cost a fraction of that), and at hawkers’ centers, as little as $3 will get you a possibly excellent Chinese, Malay or Bidayuh meal.
WHERE TO STAY
Annah Rais Longhouse Homestays (longhouseadventure.com). Guests sleep inside the longhouse in very basic rooms with fans. Two days and one night cost 98 ringgit, or about $33 at 3 ringgit to the dollar, per person, including Bidayuh-style board (298 ringgit with trekking, rafting and other outdoor activities). Situated 37 miles south of Kuching (by taxi, 80 to 100 ringgit one way).
Gunung Gading National Park (ebooking.com.my; sarawakforestry.com for general information; 60-82-735-144). Rafflesias, when they’re in bloom, can be seen on a day trip from Kuching, but to do a night walk you have to stay over. The park has basic dorm beds (15 ringgit) and six-bed chalets (150 ringgit). It’s 44 miles northwest of Kuching (by taxi, about 100 ringgit each way).
Hilton Kuching Hotel (Tunku Abdul Rahman Street, Kuching; 60-82-248-200;hilton.com). Comfortable rooms with fine river views from 369 ringgit. One of several international-standard hotels in Kuching’s high-rise district
Singgahsana Lodge (Temple Street, Kuching; 60-82-429-277; singgahsana.com). An atmospheric guesthouse with authentic Dayak décor and backpackers’ doubles from 98 ringgit.
Fairview Guesthouse (6 Jalan Taman Budaya, Kuching; 60-82-240-017thefairview.com.my) My home-away-from-home while in Kuching. Unpretentious and very friendly but the rooms (70 ringgit for a double) are pretty basic. It’s often full, so book well ahead.
WHERE TO EAT
Popular Vegetarian (Lot 105, Section 50, Abell Road, Kuching; 60-82-238-752). Tasty, strictly vegetarian Chinese, Malay and Bornean dishes cost 6 to 15 ringgit.
Teochew Chinese Hawkers’ Center (23 Carpenter Street, Kuching). Delicious Sarawakian and Chinese dishes start at about 4 ringgit.
Top Spot Food Court (Padungan Street, Kuching). Garishly lighted with colorful neon, this place is improbably perched atop a multistory parking garage. Fresh fish and seafood entrees cost 35 to 70 ringgit per kilogram.
Jambu (32 Crookshank Street; 60-82-235-292; jamburestaurant.com). French-accented cuisine, including luscious desserts, in an elegant colonial-era mansion.
Weekend Market (Satok Street). An extravaganza of tropical fruits and vegetables that brings Bidayuh, Malay and Chinese farmers and merchants to town from noon to 10 p.m. on Saturday and 5 a.m. to 1 or 2 p.m. on Sunday.
KEEPING IN TOUCH
To phone North America whenever and wherever you want for pennies a minute, buy a prepaid Malaysian SIM card (8.50 ringgit; signing up takes 10 minutes) at one of Kuching’s many mobile phone shops and install it in a 900/1800 MHz cellphone (available locally; from 120 ringgit).
Almost all of Kuching’s hotels and guesthouses have Wi-Fi, and many also offer Web-ready computers in the lobby.
