Kuching to Miri

We anchored at the Santubong River along with several rally boats and over the next week most of the others arrived. As we were coming in we spotted 2 Irrawaddy dolphins unique to the area and kept a keen eye out for the crocodiles—no cleaning your hull in this anchorage!! Our first day we went up the hill to the road and caught the little mini bus into Kuching to explore the city. Kuching—means cat—is a city which despite the 600,000 people never seems busy. The city sprawls over a vast area with no high rises giving a great tropical laid back atmosphere. There are multitudes of many small stores selling multitudes of things—the mix in some stores is amazing—does the paint shop sell boots because he got a good deal on them? Perhaps the fishing store did not have enough sales volume and introduced coffee and bananas to up their sales? There are a lot of touristy stores which have a range from extremely high quality crafts and antiques to the mass produced tourist tacky things. Coffee and white and black pepper are the local food items packaged for sale along with Laksa paste which is the base for the delicious local curry soup. The lunch options were varied and we opted for a Turkish restaurant which was a change from the Malay/Chinese food we have been eating for months. Good quality coffee shops abound so we were able to treat ourselves and avoid the heavily sweetened Nescafe—the normal coffee fare. We caught the last mini bus back at 4pm—it turned out to be the commuter bus and for 4 ringits—about $1 locals were dropped door to door over the 45 minute trip. We were surprised at the number of obviously wealthy areas attesting to a successful timber and oil industry. Once again the people were warm and friendly and were interested as to where we came from. They have a difficult time understanding how we had sailed here from Canada over 6 years with only two of us on board—but then so do most of our friends!!! The following day we hired a van with Amazing Grace and Babadudu to do our check in. Ours was seamless, unlike other boats who had conflicting dealings with the officials—one is never sure here what the rules are as it seems to depend who you get at the counter—we managed to get our elusive brown piece of paper which will allow us to get into Miri. We also have 6 weeks to get our visa renewed—may need to go in Brunei which we probably will choose to do anyway. Lunch this day was the delicious curry laksa which has prawns and chicken and we had a disappointing visit to Cold Storage. These are expensive supermarkets where you usually can buy cheese and non hallal products—bacon and pork. Sadly a tasty cheddar cheese was not to be found. The fruit and vegs were all imported and packaged. We did get some bacon and ham which will be a treat. Once again I made the mistake and bought the fresh milk which comes sweetened and flavoured!! Need to read the labels—su susu is the key. Apparently it is to encourage the children to drink milk but what it appears to do is develop an amazingly sweet tooth. They even put spoons full of sugar in fresh squeezed orange juice. We spent the next few days doing boat chores but we did have a successful croc hunt at low tide as one was sleeping on the bank. The rally get together was on the dock followed by a great Chinese meal near the anchorage. The next day was the tour to the Orangutans which as we had already anticipated did not compare to our river trip in Kumai. However it is always a thrill as they swing their way through the trees to come and get the food which they are supplemented with. We visited the National Museum in the afternoon which was interesting with photos and artifacts of the “real Borneo” on display. The following morning we set sail to explore Bako National Park which is on our way to Miri—our next stop on the eastern side of Sarawak—in the hope of seeing proboscis monkeys. We dropped the anchor for the day close to the ranger station and went in to register and get a trail map. There is a restaurant there and some cabins with resident macaques hanging around waiting to share lunch. The rangers told us that the proboscis are likely to be spotted later in the day near the mangroves so we opted for a hike first to climb up and see the amazing varieties of pitcher plants. The rainforest growth and roots growing all over the paths will never allow “a walk in the park”. One clambers over and under roots, branches and rocks. It is obviously well maintained as I am sure otherwise would be impassable with the growth which abounds. After successfully finding the pitcher plants we descended to a beach on another of the myriad of trails. While taking a break on the lovely bay we saw the trees rustling and realised a troupe of proboscis monkeys were there. There were about a dozen and although they were camouflaged and fairly high above us we could see them interacting and feeding. It was quite a thrill and we watched for a long time. As we started back toward the ranger station we spotted several in the palm trees between us and the beach. We then climbed down to the beach and made our way to the ocean side of where we had seen them and were rewarded with a close view of a family as they sat unperturbed by our presence. It was thrilling and made our day!! After returning to our boat we motored to the recommended anchorage for the night to join several other boats. The day finished with “happy hour” on Babadudu. We set off the next morning and were delighted to get a 1-2 knot current with us and 15 knots of wind on our beam—a dream sail!!!! As we reached the top of the peninsula we found the tides would be favourable to take the river which wound inside the island for 30 miles giving us a protected anchorage for the night. Along with Amazing Grace we were assisted with the 3 knot current as the Irrawaddy dolphins swam around us. Tony had caught a huge wahoo—we had not caught any fish for so long we had given up but obviously there are one or two left—we joined them for a great fish fry. The next day we motored once again with 3 knots in our favour through the enormous waterway which was about a mile wide and had several ferry's crossing and the ubiquitous fishing boats. We kept a lookout for floating logs which are common in the area but saw very few and other than a few small thumps did not hit any large ones. I managed to find enough internet—no small feat as the cell towers here despite the phone signal give very low internet signals—to book our flights to the Mulu Caves and the head hunters trail. This involved going close to a tower and as soon as my device changed from red Ken had to slow the boat while I painfully waited as I followed the prompts to book the flights. It timed out several times but finally success and we are now booked on Friday so need to get going and do an overnight trip to get to Miri on Thursday in time to pack and leave. We left the next anchorage at 5am and are currently sailing with flat seas and enough wind to sail over 6 knots—once again the perfect sail—finally rewarded after so many weeks and months of motoring—yeh!!! The rest of the trip was uneventful as we passed through the oil platforms—we are close to Brunei so it stands to reason the the oil does not respect borders. We arrived in Miri early on Thursday morning so will have time to get the boat ready to leave for the six days we will be away in Mulu.