Kuching & Malacca

We hadn’t quite realised how far east we’d travelled getting to the South Pacific until it came to us getting our flight back into South East Asia. It took three flights & seventeen hours to get from New Caledonia to Kuching in the Sarawak province of Borneo. Our longest journey so far. We were tired & in need of sleep as we exited the airport to be wrapped in a blanket of heat & humidity. Not quite the type of blanket we wanted.

Kuching means cat in Malay & the references to cats around the city were numerous. There were cat cafes, cat statues on roundabouts, cat murals on walls & neon cat lights illuminating the streets at night. The origination of the name depends on which tale you want to believe; the name of the river on which the original village was built, shortened from Sungai Mata Kuching (meaning Cat’s Eye) to Kuching, or when the first British settler asked the name of the town the locals thought he was pointing to a cat & so answered Kuching or, for the more cynical, the name was changed from Kucing (pronounced the same) purely to use cats as a marketing ploy. Whatever the origin, cats are very prevelant.

We stayed in Kuching both before & after our longhouse trek staying in different areas each time & this gave us the chance to see two very different sides of the city. We initially stayed in an apartment overlooking the Sarawak river which sounded lovely on paper & whilst the apartment itself was really nice, it was in the most bizarre complex. A pale pink monolithic structure looking something like The Grand Budapest Hotel where the elaborate entrance led to a vacant echoing lobby. Many apartments were themed – the ‘Sir Gawain’, for example, just down the corridor, complete with mock wood castle entrance, yellow & black flag & knight’s shield was particularly imaginative. The area around was deserted for all of our four days there. We’re not sure whether this was all due to the extended public holiday or if everything was just abandoned. On our second visit we stayed across the river in a small, basic guesthouse in the Malay village, where the call to prayer rang out throughout the day, our host left warm chicken patties hung on our door for breakfast & where we needed to take small wooden boats back & forth across the river to the city proper, frequently needing to wake up the boatman to take us. We liked it there much more.

As with many of the Malaysian cities we’ve visited on this trip, Kuching has a rich mixture of cultures all living side by side harmoniously. We wondered whether here this was a legacy from the White Raj era, a history we knew absolutely nothing about until we visited a couple of the fascinating museums. It read like a Boys’ Own adventure:

Well-off British army veteran James Brooke buys a yacht & sails to the Malay archipeligo where he happens across an island (Borneo) where there’s a lot of tribal unrest. He’s asked for his help & in thanks for crushing a rebellion gets rewarded with his own state, Sarawak. Over the following decades he continually enlarges his territory until he’s taken most of the island from the previous rulers, the Sultans of Brunei. As part of his new state he creates his own money, laws, flag & national anthem, integrates with the locals, adapts to their cultures & dress and then, along with his decendents, the family reign happily for 100 years. They decide to cede their territories to Britain after WWII, much to the local’s distress. Rather unusually, the native tribes of Sarawak seemed to love their white rulers.

This was the Brooke dynasty, the White Rajas of Sarawak.

Whilst Kuching itself is a huge sprawling city, the Old Town was very small, perfect for wandering around for a few hours before making strategic pitstops for air-conditioned relief from the excessive heat. Many of the buildings built during the White Raj reign still exist along the river front. The lovely whitewashed residence of the Raj & Ranee, the Astana (a variation of the Malay word for palace) overlooks the Sarawak river opposite the city, along with the crenelated Fort Marguerite & the Old Courthouse buildings, which now houses a lovely cafe serving particularly delicious cake. The pure white of the colonial buildings sits serenely alongside the brightly painted Chinese shopfronts and the jumbled chaos of India Street overflowing with a kaleidescope of cheap clothing & the wonderful murals painted on walls around the city. These older buildings contrast sharply with the modern striking new structures that have sprung up around the Old Town, courtesy of a provincial government keen to impress the importance of the state with a hope that it may one day become independent from Malaysia. The multi arched gold & glass Borneo Culture Museum now dominates the green padang surrounded by low white colonial buildings. An incongrous curving S-shaped suspension bridge with towers that look like hornbills crosses the Sarawak river to the circular state assembly building topped with a nine-pointed conical gold roof. Both are lit up at night providing colourful reflections across the water. It makes for a very eclectic area nicely scattered with lovely cafes serving local foods, the Kuching speciality Kek Lapis striped layer cake & Gulag Apong, the very morish palm sugar icecream.

One of the big draws of Borneo is the chance to see orangutans. The Semengghoh Orangutan Reserve just outside Kuching is a sanctuary for rescued & injured orangutans where they’re left to forage for their own food but have the opportunity to get fruit a couple of times a day should they choose to. A semi-wild existance. We arrived to a sign saying ‘fruit season, there is a slim chance of seeing any orangutans’. Not ideal & we were sure June wasn’t supposed to be fruit season. But we were here & it seemed churlish to just turn around & get a taxi back. It was ridiculously hot, as usual, so I easily managed to persuade Simon we should get the electric buggy the 1.5km uphill to the reserve entrance. It was a very good decision. As we arrived there was a huge male orangutan sat on the wooden deck of the feeding station. Large rounded face, long orange hair, he posed elaborately to collect his desired fruit then sat munching & watching the humans as they watched him. When he’d eaten his fill he decided on an alternate route back into the jungle. He climbed down off the platform & headed directly towards the fence & the onlookers, panic ensued as all the local visitors scrambled to get away. He really wasn’t going that quickly. Ignoring the chaos he’d just created, he climbed the fence, wandered past & then sauntered away into the trees. As he went the leaves rustled overhead, another male, bigger, darker & less hairy appeared. He sat nonchalantly eating all the fruit ignoring the crowd & turning his back. A young male, 8 years old, hung from the ropes too afraid to come down when the male was there, instead he hung upside down from high in the trees to catch the fruit thrown up to him. In another tree a mother with a year old infant clutching on to her front, skillfully kept hold of the baby with one hand whilst leaning to catch bananas, oranges & even a huge coconut with the other. The infant desperate for coconut milk lost his grip & tumbled through the branches squeaking in panic. The mother calmly clamboured down to rescue him not letting go of her fruity meal. Unlike the local visitors who quickly lost interest & reverted back to doom scrolling, we were entranced. It feels very special to be able to see such amazing creatures, so like us in mannerisms, so close. A fabulous experience & very unexpected.

After a few days break in Brunei, we returned to Malaysia, this time to the city of Malacca (Melaka) back on the Peninsula & our last stop in the country.

Malacca was very much in the same vein as Ipoh & Georgetown, a mixture of cultures & architecture, as Kuching was, but here there was the obvious tourist impact. And it wasn’t for the better. It was definitely the Asian tourist market that was the target. At night the attractive red brick Dutch buildings were washed with flashing multi coloured neon lights, when a warm white glow would have been so much classier. But this was subtle in comparison to the tourist transport of choice; a fleet of cycle rickshaws decked out in horredous over the top pink Hello Kitty, yellow Pokemon or blue & red Spiderman decor. All had flashing lights & music blasting out at full volume, each one a different awful tune. But they were so popular as they processed along their circular route down to the river full of adults clearly quite happy with the tackiness of it all. It was dreadful. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could this be a UNESCO listed city?

In daylight, in their natural colours, the buildings were so much better, a very eclectic mix. The red Dutch buildings surrounded a central square below the remains of the Portugese fort & church. Both had elaborate stone carvings & gigantic tomb stones over 6 foot high lining the church walls. All commemorated European people who had died young, the result of being in the tropics. Across the Malacca river was the Chinese district where colourful shop fronts lined the streets all with ornate lettering & bamboo blinds, pastel through to bright primary colours. Wandering the narrow streets where ceremonies at Chinese temples broke the quiet with drums & cymbols we were enjoying how few people were about. And then we got to Jonker Street, a wide thoroughfare crammed with kitsch souvenir shops & heaving with Chinese tourists posing for the usual inane selfies.

Luckily at that point the heavens opened & we beat a hasty retreat to a lovely quiet cafe immersed in a jungle of greenery while the rain lashed down for a couple of hours turning the streets into rivers. Food in Kuching had been particularly good & it was the same in Malacca. We found great places for breakfast, lunch & dinner both Western & Malay cuisine, all very tasty & pretty cheap (a relief after our expenses in the South Pacific). Unfortunately though, the bars in Malacca were more of the tourist variety with crap lager & rubbish cocktails, none of the Borneo craft beer here.

Malacca has a really interesting history with all the different colonial powers fighting for control of the trade routes but little of that is included in any of the museums. Instead there were newly created paintings of tribes in the jungle purporting to be illustrations of the original founding along with life size models of sailing ships in pretend lagoons with plastic dolphins swimming alongside. Whilst escaping another downpour we happened upon the ‘Enduring Beauty’ museum (that’s enduring as in pain, not everlasting). Here was a room full of grotesque photos of lip plates protruding several inches from upper & lower jaws, mutilated feet caused by foot binding where bits of the foot rot & drop off & whole body scarifications. It was fascinating in a macabre sort of way, but why was it in the city?

Malacca wasn’t the city we’d hoped for & like much of Peninsula Malaysia it didn’t live up to it’s promise. All trace of exoticism has gone, now anything of interest has to be uncovered amidst the overwhelming neon tat. It also rained, a lot.

Kuching on the other hand felt very different to Peninsula Malaysia, in a good way. It was more authentic & far more interesting & we really enjoyed our time there. Malacca not so much. Peninsula Malaysia won’t ever make our favourite country list. Borneo however was wonderful.