18-29 May '04

A few days in Bangkok to catch our breath and then we took the sleeper-train to Sungai Golok, the Thai-Malaysian border. The South of Thailand has been exposed to violence against the government for several months already. When we woke up, the normal passengers were outnumbered by Rambo's with guns and sunglasses, mustered for extra security on the train. Somehow, it did not really contribute to the feeling of a safe trip!

After passing the border we took a bus to Kota Bharu, a town in North-East Malaysia that strongly reflects that Malaysia is officially a Muslim state. The women in town were wrapped up with headscarves and most signs were in both Bahasa Malaysia and Arabic. The city is also the base for a trip to the Palau Perhentian, two idyllic islands close to the East coast, which we reached the next day.

We stayed on the smaller Perhentian Kecil, that is not yet fully "resorted". It was very quiet: Thai advice to stay away from the border area has had dramatic results for the tourism on the islands.

29-30 May '04

After a very short night in Kota Bharu, we headed for the station and bought ourselves tickets for the so-called "jungle train", towards our next destination: Melaka. The jungle train is an interesting railway that crosses peninsular Malaysia from north to south through some of the last remaining parts of the primary forest in Malaysia.

To see something during the journey, we had to take the day train, which is a very, very slow train that stops at every station and even more. Instead of doing the whole trip in one leg (more than fifteen hours) we decided to stop halfway through, in Kuala Lipis, a small town with a strong colonial past.

We visited the town the whole afternoon and it was quite pleasant and indeed interesting: the centre area still had nice colourful houses (Chinese shops) and most of all, the suburbs are really charming: an old golf club, a gracious hilltop Governor's Resthouse, and many huge colonial mansions that are now abandoned and being reclaimed by the jungle. We managed to break into one of them: the one that seemed the most creepy and mysterious; but after a good inspection of all the rooms, it was definitively not haunted. During our walk, we made some pit stops to have some drinks: one with an Australian gold miner, and a couple of others with two Chinese badminton champions in the Pahang Club (old colonial building turned into a sports club).

The next morning we jumped once again on the jungle train (which was two hours late), and stepped off in Bahau where we caught a bus to Tampin first, and then finally to Melaka.

30 May - 05 June '04

After all the corals and the woods, the busses and the trains, Melaka was a great and welcome change. The city overflows with cultural heritage from all over the world. Historical powers that ruled the famous port, as well as traders who came from other countries, all left their traces.

The first non-Malay rulers of Melaka were the Portuguese, who arrived in the 16^th century. Most Portuguese buildings have vanished except for a few ruins, but the Portuguese blood survives. We had dinner at the Medan Portugis, where the descendants from the "Conquistadores" are living. Believe it or not, Cornelia ordered a delicious sweet-sour crab and had a chat with the waiter, who spoke sort of 16^th century Portuguese!

The Dutch seized Melaka mid 17^th century and the basic layout of the city is according to their design. Streets with names such as Jonkerstreet and Heerenstreet are not used anymore, but certainly not forgotten. The "Stadhuys" is now a fine museum of history and culture. In the ruins of the initially Portuguese St. Paul's church, Dutch gravestones are displayed, some of them absolutely worth to be read.

At the start of the 19^th century, Melaka became English, but the golden era of the port was passed. Several buildings were added to the town, but Melaka is not the most explicit of British colonialism.

Proud of its prominent role in international sea fare, Melaka boasts with its naval and maritime musea, the latter partially housed in a reproduction of the "Flora de la Mar", a Portuguese vessel that sank off the coast. Plukje and Rendy got all excited and tried to sail the ship into the Melaka strait, to continue our voyage by boat. We could hardly persuade them this was not a good idea (see the photos)!

We skipped the "Museum of Traditional Torture and Mutilation", disguised under the name of "Museum of Beauty" in which people with elongated necks, extended earlobes, overstretched lips stuffed with saucers and tattoo's on the most painful places were advertised. We also skipped the "son-et-lumiere", afraid the recollection of Brussels' sound-and-light spectacle might make us homesick. However, we did roam around the well-preserved China-town where houses with very impressive wooden sculptured walls serve now as souvenir shops and restaurants. The food of Melaka's Chinese Malay, the so-called baba-nonya's, is one of the town's specials.

03-04 June '04

Cape Rachado (Tanjung Tuan)

Rumah Api is the lighthouse warning ships off the treacherous rocks of the Tanjung Tuan, ever since the Portuguese era, then still called Cape Rachado. It seemed a reasonable day trip from Melaka: although getting there would be a bit of a hassle, it would surely be worth to see such an old lighthouse!

We took one bus, then another, that dropped us off at the wrong place. We walked a bit and then some more, to arrive in the Tanjung Tuan Nature Reserve, where an evil looking macaque blocked the road. Fortunately, a car came by and we managed to slip passed the devoted gatekeeper! The next kilometre was very much uphill and then.....

The guidebook had forgotten to mention the original lighthouse was destroyed and rebuild by the English around 1840. Nothing wrong with a 19^th century lighthouse, but not what we had hoped for. Besides, even from the high hill, we could not see Sumatra across Melaka's strait: the weather was not clear enough.

The way back was a bit more stressful because we were threatened by last buses leaving, but finally we managed to make it "back home".

Muar

The second daytrip, to Muar, was a piece of cake: many direct buses went to and fro the old colonial town. One of the treasures of Muar is the Masjid Jamek Mosque that nicely depicts the Victorian fantasy of what a real mosque actually should look like. The result is a building with all kinds of balconies and towers, decorated with stars and crescent moons. Large Britton buildings such as the courthouse are standing in the same boulevard, that ends in a huge and well maintained park, where we had a siesta.

The next day we took a bus to Johor Bharu, passing through some of the oil-palm plantations that cover thousands of square kilometres in Malaysia. There we took a flight to Kuching, East Malaysia, Borneo Island. Now the attentive reader may have noticed a new change in the basic planning of our trip. Time is pressing and if we want to arrive in Australia, we have to make some choices in: either Sumatra and Java, or Kalimantan and Sulawesi. All of it is too time consuming. We chose to go to Borneo and enter Indonesia there.

06-11 June '04

From Johor Bharu we arrived in Kuching, the capital of the state of Sarawak, in the northern part of the island of Borneo. In this part of Malaysia, we immediately noticed a difference with peninsular Malaysia: much less Muslims, more Chinese, and of course local people from Borneo, coming from the numerous tribes upriver in the jungle, the Orang-Ulu (i.e. the Iban, the Kayan, the Kenyah, etc.). No, they do not go headhunting anymore, nor do they have bones through their noses, but yes, a lot of them still live in traditional longhouses, have very nice tattoos everywhere, and have their ears pierced with the holes widened up to ten centimetres!

Kuching is a very pleasant city (one of Fab's favourite up to now) and the people here are very friendly (we were invited by a local to have beer with him all night!). The colonial past of the town is very rich, and the Sarawak Museum is one of the best we've seen in South-East Asia, with a nice collection of stuffed animals, huge aquariums, and the reconstruction of a traditional longhouse with real skulls and human bones hanging everywhere and excellent woodcarving.

We also managed to finally get our 2-months Indonesian visa from the small Indonesian consulate in Kuching, which was a great relief, but a real pain: for a visa more than one month, you normally need an onward plane ticket out of the country, which of course we did not have. We thus spent some time trying to find the cheapest flight out of Indonesia, and we miraculously found one with Air Asia on the internet, flying from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur in August, for only... ten Euros! (attentive persons certainly will notice that that flight is not in the good direction for Australia, but no worries, we will not take that flight: our visa was thus ten euros more expensive, which was acceptable).

09-10 June '04

11-14 June '04

Always heading more to the east, towards Brunei, Sabah, and Kalimantan, we had the choice of either taking a direct bus from Kuching to Miri (near Brunei), or taking boats on the rivers, deep into the jungle, via Sibuh, Kapit and Belaga. We of course chose for the exotic solution: on a boat through the jungle was indeed more attractive than a long journey in a night bus on a highway (it was maybe longer, but certainly more charming to use the "traditional" highways of Borneo).

Kapit

The first step was to get from Kuching to Kapit. Luckily, the transportation on the rivers of Sarawak is well organised and we did not have to paddle in canoes: several express boats (hydrofoil sort) go from Kuching to Sibuh, and then directly from Sibuh to Kapit. We arrived at around 5 PM in Kapit, and it was unfortunately just too late for getting the permit for upriver travelling towards Belaga. They had just closed and it was very bad news because it was Friday, and they would only re-open on Monday morning!

So there we were, in the small town of Kapit, in the middle of nowhere, stuck for two days. So be it? But no! Luckily, the next morning, we ran into the only foreigner living in the region, Bill, who not only informed us that the permit for upriver travelling was not necessary at all, but he also told us lots of very interesting things on the region and more broadly over Asia. He invited us in his nice (haunted) house where he lived with his Japanese wife and dozens of chickens, ducks, and Bill's favourites, geese! His job is to co-ordinate all the schools of the district so he really had the privilege to visit very remote parts of the country where nobody ever goes. He could tell us a lot about the different cultures and tribes around here. Besides, he also knew all the bars and pubs in town, and with him we visited some of them - a very pleasant afternoon!

Belaga

The next morning, without any permit, we took the express boat to Belaga, and it was quite an experience: we found ourselves a small place between the luggage, on the roof of the boat; all seats inside were occupied. We shared the roof with almost a hundred kids, all going back to school on Sunday afternoon after the school holidays. We sailed for five hours through the rapids of the Batang Rejang river, and stopped at every longhouse to pick up always more kids.

In Belaga, we found ourselves a hotel and had a small chat with counsellor Daniel who arranged us a Land Cruiser back towards the coast together with three other locals. Daniel also introduced to us the term "rubber time", which he generously demonstrated the next morning. Nevertheless, in the end we headed for our next stop in Sarawak before Miri, the Niah Caves. The first part of the journey was on a rather decent logging road, and once on the highway, we jumped into a minivan that brought us to Niah.

14-15 June '04

We had tried to hurry to arrive early in the afternoon in the Niah Natural Park, so an afternoon visit of one of the world's largest caves would still be possible. In the caves, thousands of swiftlets and bats are living and at the end of the afternoon the birds come home while the bats come out, an experience not to be missed.

The boatman brought us across the river, stressing the time of the last crossing back to the head quarters: be late and swim. We though we had plenty of time to visit the aptly named "Great Cave" and "Painted Cave". So, enthusiastically we set of over the wooden footpath that led us through the woods, across swamps and over pinnacles to the cave.

The Great Cave was very impressive. On the time of arrival, the air was full of the chatting and winging of the swifts, but they were hard to see against the dark ceiling. The footpath continued into the enormous hollow and past the archaeological site where in prehistoric times people had lived. Although the 250 meter wide entrance let in a lot of daylight, it became darker as we entered into the heart of the hill. In addition, the air became increasingly unpleasant. The cave is literally paved with the foul smelling "guano", the excrements of bat and bird, collected as a fertilizer.

No electric lights were here, only the wooden footpath, slippery with the "guano", bats, birds and wooden poles hanging from the ceiling of the huge underground halls. These poles are climbed to get to the nests of the swiftlets that hang at tens of meters of height. These edible nest are worth a fortune in China.

After half an hour we came to a tunnel that we had to enter to go to the Painted Cave. It was pitch-dark, but we had flashlights (and a footpath) and it seemed to be endlessly descending. It took us again half an hour before we came to an exit, leading us to the jungle again, and to the painted cave. The paintings were somewhat faded, which can be expected after 40.000 year, and it was hard to see them because we had to look from some five meters distance. But what we could see looked quite nice.

We had to hurry back now if we did not want to cross the river swimming. On the way back, the tunnel seemed a lot shorter, now that we knew it was going somewhere. Back in the large halls, the high-pitched squeaking and the clapping of the wings of the bats had replaced the noises of the birds. Once back at the entrance, the sight of the silhouettes of the bats against the dark blue sky, high above us was amazing!

When we arrived at the river crossing, the boat was, of course, at the other side of the river and the boatman was not to be found, even though we were not late. It took us 15 minutes of distress and a lot of noise before he cheerfully showed up to take us across.

At night we had dinner with the other guests and the next day we chartered a minivan with them, because everybody was heading in the same direction: Miri.

15-18 June '04

The town of Miri was just a short stop on our route always more to the east. It is the departure point for buses to Brunei, a passage towards Sabah, another Malaysian state located in the north of Borneo Island.

So after a day spent in Miri, we headed for Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah. We managed to do the trip in one day only, which was a real achievement! First, we took a bus to Brunei's border and got our passports stamped. In Brunei itself, we had to change five times buses, we passed through the Seria oilfield (one house, one wellhead, one house etc.) and through the capital of Brunei: Bandar Seri Begawan (which of course you know). We got out of Brunei in a place called Muara (and got our passports stamped again) where we took a boat to the island of Paluan (a tax free paradise island). From there we jumped onto another boat to Kota Kinabalu! It took us almost 12 hours, with six different buses, and two boats.

The town of Kota Kinabalu is not very interesting and we spent most of the day arranging our trip towards Indonesia through Sabah.

18-21 June '04

Our planning forced us to hurry through Sabah. To get to Tawau, the border crossing to Indonesia, we could take the usual route, via highways and city of Sandakan, but it appeared there was also a passage through the interior via a place called Sapulut. Both the guidebook and the lady at the tourist information were very sceptical about this jungle road, which encouraged us all the more.

Sapulut

Getting to Sapulut was a lot easier than we thought. A bus took us to Keningau where we found ourselves a land cruiser to Sapulut. On our way there, we wondered whether accommodation would be a problem in this remote village, but we were automatically dropped off at the place where Orang Putih, the white man, are usually hosted.

We made a walk through the town, that lies scattered in different valleys, and the scenery was beautiful. Sapulut lies in the land of the Murut, but we were invited by an Iban family (from Sarawak) to drink Tapay with them: a home brew rice and tapioca spirit. The grandfather, 71 years old now, was still covered with traditional Iban tattoos. He had come in 1954 from Sarawak. When Fabrice asked how, all romantic ideas of Orang Ulu paddling in their canoe up the river for 100's of kilometres were shattered. The man had come by plane.

Our host, Philimon, was very kind but he could not help us in getting to Tawau: land cruisers go from Keningau to Tawau and vice versa and pass nearby, but no cars go from Sapulut to Tawau. The only option would be to hitchhike with a very low probability of finding a car with enough space to take us. Nonetheless, we thought this would be a lovely experience, much better than returning to Keningau, so the next morning we set off.

Getting to Tawau

We waited at "the gate" a checkpoint for logging trucks, where a nice logging truck checker (?) offered us coffee and lunch. Sometimes he would help us with asking for a ride. Some 15 vehicles passed by, of which five went to Tawau, and all were full (according to Malaysian standards; not according to Cambodian or Burmese!). We were about to start to believe we would have to spend the night on the porch of the gatehouse, when an empty car stopped.

The driver, a road engineer returning home form a project, took us to Tawau. What would have been one of the most expensive and tedious rides, we got for free and a lot quicker and more comfortable than with a packed shared land cruiser. Most of the 6-hour journey was over a logging road through the jungle. It all looked beautifull but the amount of tree trucks we overtook on the road indicate heavy logging still goes on in the last parts of the rainforest of Sabah...

Tomorrow we'll cross the border to Tarakan in Kalimantan, Indonesia, our last country before Australia!