Well I finally got to visit a bit of Borneo. Don't ask why I was there because it just makes me too angry and upset to talk about. Never mind the reasons, I got to go to Kuching and see the land of the White Rajahs at last. I learned a lot from this lovely little place, which still has a bunch of dinky little forts and proper old school colonial buildings there, a lot like Singapore would have looked before it got bombed to crap by the Japs I would imagine. This place was a Crown Colony after the war, whereas Peninsular Malaysia never was (only Penang, Singapore, Malacca, British North Borneo (Sabah and Sarawak) and Labuan. I'm pretty sure that Brunei was there as a protectorate or something. So after the war Sarawak was given over by the Raja as a Crown Colony, and stayed that way for a few years after the rest of Malaysia was made independent. It has to be said, the crown colonies actually did a lot better out of the deal, in terms of livability of the cities, what with Singapore and Kuching having roads that actually make sense, and pavements that you can walk along without falling in a hole. Kuching is really very lovely indeed, very peaceful and calm, with the mighty Sarawak river running through the middle of it, it feels almost a little bit European, what with it having a nice riverside promenade (all the big rivers in urban Peninsular Malaysia have had their embankments concreted and look about as inviting as a sewerage treatment plant).
Despite what I would have previously imagined, it turns out that people think quite highly of the White Rajas here (Mr James Brooke, his nephew Charles Brooke and third one was Charles Vintner Brooke) and were ever so nice to a simple English lad like me. I imagined people to be infused with that nationalist pride (often misguided and ignorant) that they have on the peninsular, but not a bit of it. The Chief Minister is married to a British woman, and he even drives a Rolls (which is hilarious, as there has been a lot of media hoo-haa the past few weeks, because an opposition state said they wish to buy Mercs for their Ministers and the government made a big fuss because it was apparently an insult to the National Car - the Proton Perdana, which is, well, a Proton - and yet here is the Sarawak CM, obviously not an opposition boy, driving around in a real car instead of one whose windows don't work. Ha ha ha).
Kuching is really very lovely, I had a few lovely evenings spent just walking around, because it was such an incredible novelty to take a walk in a city, down a pavement instead of along a road, down PEDESTRIANISED streets, not constantly having to be on the lookout for broken paving slabs, collossal drains, missing manhole covers, uneven footways. Even more fabulous was not having to constantly dodge around cars that are parked 3 deep on the road, or all over the pavements, or in the middle of the road, or virtually inside the restaurants as you get in the peninsular. The worst jam we had to wait in was 5 minutes because of a traffic light, as opposed to hours. They also have roundabouts. My god, it was like being back home again, only hotter.
One of the funniest things about Kuching is the fact that it is called "Cat" (as in kuching means cat in malay) and because of this they have in recent years obviously tried to come up with a cat gimmick. God only knows why, but they seem to think that a gimmick is necessary for a city, so they settled on cats. Thus you find several roundabouts with excessively tasteless cat statues on them, as well as a veritable abundance of little cat sculptures all over the shop, shops too have a plethora of tacky cat statuettes and some crazy bugger decided to open "the worlds first and only" Cat Museum. Bloody cat museum, what a bag of crap that was. Here is the statue that has in recent years become the symbol of Kuching - and how marvellously twee and tasteless it is. Yes, it does look exactly like a bigger version of that horrible ornament that your elderly (and slightly drooling) friend would put on the mantlepiece and say "isn't it beautiful" and you would nod and say ""yes, lovely, very erm, erm, lovely, did you get it from the pound shop?", "no" she'd say "It was £380 paid in 6 installments, it was in Womans Weekly and I couldn't resist it". Well, Kuching city council couldn't resist it either, so here it is.
I find it wholly incredible that a state that simply teems with artistic ability, and native art being so incredibly beautiful and ornate, that they should commission an "artist" whose idea of art is akin to that what a spastic might come up with. Maybe he was a spastic and it was care in the community, who knows. Oh, I'm not allowed to say spastic am I, OK, so it was done by a mong.
Here are some Orang Utan. Ha ha ha. Proper cool that. Are you envious? I hope so.
Kuching's got lots of nice museums (exempting the highly tasteless and utterly strange Cat Museum of course) and they are in my humble opinion the best museums in Malaysia. As in they have actually got interesting things in them, are well curated and have members of staff as well as educated local volunteers who come in and take you around telling you everything for free. The local volunteers were amazing, and you could just tell that they are immensely proud of where they come from, as well as immensely proud of their heritage and above all really proud to have such a fab museum. It was proper amazing in there, despite the fact that it was full of stuffed dead things (a la Woolaton Hall and other Victorian museums where a picture just wasn't good enough so they had to shoot it) there were some amazing exhibits. My favourite was the 2 elephant skulls that were painted by a local tribesman sometime in the 1950s (when they had a really good curator it would seem cos he did lots of good things). The elephant skulls aquired the legend that they were Giants Skulls, as the local population of reformed headhunters put a lot of stock in a good skull they came from miles around to see the "Giants Skulls". I don't think anybody had the heart to tell them that they came from a pair of Siamese elephants that were imported to drag logs out of the forest. I couldn't get a photo cos I got told off. I did manage to sneak a couple of shots, one here is of the 'Tree of Life' that another local tribesman artist painted in the 50s, which is amazing, the other is the blur shot of a human head. This is one of about 20 heads hanging up at the back of the museum inside their fake Longhouse. It was very dark in there. Apparently the heads are known as the "laughing skulls" and the Iban people who donated them to the museum said that they chuckled late at night. Spooky. The museum building is proper nice, and was designed by some Frenchie who was friends with Rajah Charles Brooke (the 2nd one) as a copy of Normadie Town Hall, allegedly. Opposite was the Natural History museum (the one with the huge and highly unattractive butterfly on top, why???) but sadly it was never open.
And I went to see a Longhouse village too, which was nice, and they gave me Tuak which is the local moonshine, and it has a fair kick to it no doubt. It was a village that is open to tourists, and you know, it's a bit like that but there weren't actuall any tourists there. All the locals seem to live quite normal lives (fridges, satellite tv etc) but their whole village is contained in one long building, with individual appartments, and common areas, there were lots of old ladies sitting around splitting bamboo with huge machetes and stuff like that. The whole place was made of bamboo, walls, floors, gutters and roofs, amazing but a little worrying when you are fat like me and the bamboo is old and rotten as it often was.
Other stuff looked like this
So that was my first trip to Borneo, and if anyone else decides to come and visit I'm going to bring you here.
