All About the Food

So today was a tour consisting of food - breakfast, lunch and dinner.  James' partner, Mary, was our tour guide today as James was off caving with another group, but did meet us for dinner at the end.  Mary is of Bidayuh heritage, so is very knowledgeable about native foods, not to mention the people and the language.

Our first stop was for laksa, a Chinese breakfast, consisting of vermicelli noodles, chicken/shrimp, all cooked and served in a spicy broth.  Very good.

Our next stop was to a local village where a shop processes birds' nests for bird's nest soup, again a traditional Chinese dish.  They believe it makes women's skin younger and more vibrant, and makes men...well, more vibrant.  So they take down nests made by the Swiftlet (a type of swallow), and they're made, by the way, of Swiftlet spit.  Yep, entirely of saliva.  This is the raw product.

Then they have a bunch of people with tweezers picking out all the impurities after the nests have been soaking for a while.

Then they reform them back to sort of what they looked like before cleaning them, and they dry them, so they end up looking like this.














We then went off to the market in Bau where a local could find any fresh produce or meat they could ever want.

And we saw some sights there that would turn your stomach.  Mary is holding up a sago worm that people will buy to eat.  The sago worm eats dead bamboo stalks.

Then Mary took us to her brother's place, where her sister-in-law, Leo, demonstrated how to make some of the food we were going to eat later for lunch.  It was fantastic, and the food was too.

Here she ground up garlic and various other herbs and spices and squeezed the juices onto some pork along with soy sauce.  It was absolutely delicious.

Then she made a similar marinade to go with chicken and put it in a bamboo shoot to cook.  Again, delicious.

In between preparing these dishes and eating them, Leo cooked these items as well as some vegetable dishes while we went off to explore the Fairy Cave nearby.  We all donned miner hats complete with lights.

It was an extensive cavernous cave.  The Chinese believe there is a fairy queen here along with other fairies, and they light joss sticks to her around the stalagmites.

We did make it back out, and went back to Leo's house to eat.

Here's the bamboo cooking, and we're sitting outside ready to eat.

After lunch, Leo played the slotuang (I think that's it).  She plays it by striking the bamboo and tapping the top.

When we were finished here, we went to one last Bidayuh village where they celebrate an annual festival with a village across the border in Indonesia.  The village people walk from one to the other.  One year they come to Malaysia, the next year, they go to Indonesia.  It's about 1 day and a half walking through the jungle.  And guess what?  They have heads!  A couple in our group lost theirs, I think.

After we left the Head House, we went back outside to a storm brewing.  The sun behind storm clouds gave this beautiful view.

After we left the village, we went back to Kuching and finished up the evening with dinner at a Chinese restaurant chosen by James and Mary.  We met up with James there as well.

All in all, another terrific, long day.  Tomorrow we are off to Kuala Lumpur.

We Kept Our Heads About Us

We've gone back in time.  I can't believe what we saw today.  It was absolutely incredible.  James picked us up this morning at 8:15 to take us to the Orang-utan feeding.  There are about 24 Orangs living in an area of about 10,000 acres just outside Kuching.  The jungle sustains them somewhat, but until the fruit ripens in the jungle, which will be very soon, they feed them in a designated area.

They don't all come for the feeding, but there were about 10 or so that did come out.  Here was the biggest guy we saw, eating bananas.

This was a mother and baby who walked right out to the area where people were standing, through the parking lot, and with a detour, walked up the road a bit.  The feeder guys were busy trying to keep people away from them because they can be vicious.  Here she stopped to eat some more pineapple.

The Orang-utans hung out for a bit, then they would just wander off back to the jungle, one by one.  Quite an amazing sight.

We then went off to the Bidayu villages.  The first stop was at a river near a village.  Here are boats the people would have used on the rivers (and still do when floods wash out roads) to get from A to B.

After a while, James then took us to 2 different Bidayu villages.  These are village people of Borneo who have lived in the mountains/hills for centuries.  Their way of life is changing (i.e.) education, cell phones, TV, cars, but their way of living hasn't changed.  They live in longhouses as a community, with separate units.

And the longhouses are built up on stilts, to keep away from the creepy crawlies, you know, cobras, king cobras, pythons...just the usual critters.  And the water, which can wreak havoc.

Here is James is between 2 women offering rice wine.  It was actually quite tasty.

A photo of a cat.  Notice the cats here typically have sort of bobbed tails.

And this is rice they've picked themselves, drying in the sun on a mat they made themselves from bamboo and other fibres.

So, we're walking along in the longhouse, and we come to the Head House, which sits a little higher up.  

So we thought it belonged to the head of the longhouse.  But nooooo...it was actually where they kept THE HEADS!  Skulls of people - as in head hunters!

This is a practice not very long out of vogue.  Basically, people from "across the river".  I remember reading about the people of Borneo in National Geographic when I was a kid, and about the head hunters.  Wow!

James then took us to a place for lunch.  It was a house owned by a friend of his.    First we had to walk across this bamboo bridge to get to her house.

Dolly served us traditional Bidayu food from the jungle.  It was all vegetarian - phew.

Here are some village children and a woman dragging a bamboo stalk back to the village.

One village only had access via a bridge.

James took us down to an area by a cave and a waterfall.  The 2 kids were at the top and followed us down to the waterfall where they put on a show for us, swimming in the pool and jumping off a rope strung across the top.

All in all, it was quite a day.

Near Kuching are these Chinese cemetaries.  They all face the same direction and all look similar.

We finished up with dinner at the James Brooke Cafe on the river.

Kuching

This morning we didn't have to get up too early.  We had an 11:45 flight to Kuching, so we met downstairs to catch a cab to the airport around 9 am.  We did that and thought we'd eat breakfast at the airport.

Our flight today was on Air Asia.  We've never flown with them before, obviously, so we weren't sure what to expect, but they were fine.  Our flight was on time and without incident (just the way we like them).  A very different security process in Singapore.  The security screening was right at the gate rather than a large security process for everyone.  Different.  Here's our plane.

We arrived in Kuching around 1:30 pm.  We were met by our guide, James Handfield-Jones with "Kuching Offroad".  James is an Englishman transplanted to Kuching and does tours with his partner, Mary.  A custom tour guide.  He picked us up and immediately we toured Kuching.  He pointed out various restaurants, places to avoid, places to go, etc.

Our first stop was lunch at the Aroma Cafe.

Here's our guide, James in the middle.  He's quite an individual.  Done a lot in his life, but he's now chosen to do what he's doing here in Borneo.  We have him, or his partner, as a personal guide while we're here.

We drove through a driving thunderstorm, with street floods to match.  It eventually eased, and we boarded a sampan (same sort of boat as in Hong Kong) to go to the other side of the river.  This is one that was on the river.

And this was from inside ours.

There, we walked a path to Fort Margherita, which was set up to protect Kuching from pirating in the 19th century.  It's currently under restoration.  We're walking along the path from the river here.

We checked into our hotel, the Riverside Majestic.  I have to say, it's relatively cheap to stay here in Malaysia, especially compared to Hong Kong and Singapore.  Here's our hotel...the one in the back.  

We have a great view of the river area from the 17th floor.  We also have a club room we can access, and have all we can drink between 5 and 7 pm every day, along with hors d'oeuvres and munchies, for free!

The elevator buttons are kind of funny.  They're along the side.  Don't rest your butt on them, or this happens!

After eating and drinking in our hotel, we weren't very hungry any more.  But we went to a recommended place called the TopSpot, just around the corner.  It's kind of like the hawker stalls we saw in Singapore, but on top of a parking garage!

James told us to go to '25', so we did, and just had veggies and rice.

Overall, it was quite the place.  We had this, 2 large beers which we shared, plus some ice cream, for about $20 Cdn...all 4 of us!

Tomorrow, we're off to places unknown in Borneo.

What a Zoo!

We had heard the Singapore zoo was one of the best there is, especially for its rainforest category.  So we took them up on it and decided to head out to the zoo to see for ourselves.  I have some great pictures of animals, but again, I can't show them all here.

Let it be known I have somewhat of an aversion to zoos.  I'm not convinced the animals are better off in this kind of habitat, but I also know they're not necessarily better off in their natural environment either for different reasons. What it does do, however, is try to make people aware of the things not to do to encourage poachers and the like.

Enough said...here is a beautiful white tiger.  Absolutely gorgeous creature.

And the king of the beasts.

This could be Jeffrey.

Elephants doing tricks.  I was watching the trainers carefully, hoping they were treating them well.  They seemed OK.

A baby can't remember - it was only 3 months old.  I think an orang-utan?

And then this character.  He demonstrated how we felt by the end of it all.

We spent about 3-1/2 hours there and were absolutely whipped in the 32C heat, and humidity higher than that.  So we opted to head back to our hotel and sit out at the pool while having a cool one and some food.






























The 3 people in the bottom of the photo are me, Gerard, and Joanne.  No idea who the guy is on the right.  You also get an idea of what our hotel was like.

And this is our pool from our balcony in the hotel.

Quite a pleasant spot.  When we were thinking of going to Singapore, we never thought of relaxing by a pool in the middle of the day.  But it was too hot to be doing much more wandering around.

Once it was time for dinner, we headed out to wander along the Singapore River.  It was right outside our hotel.  We decided first to enjoy a Margarita as there was a Mexican restaurant nearby.  A pitcher was in order because the heat was still over 30C and never went down.

Then we started looking for a place for dinner.  I had read chili crab was a specialty of Singapore.  So we finally found a place that could deliver.  Sorry the photographer couldn't deliver very well - must have focused on the back one.

But the views while eating along the river were beautiful.  It was just such a wonderful way to wind up our stay in Singapore.  What a terrific cosmopolitan city.

Tomorrow we're off to Kuching, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo.