Kuching

If you've all being paying attention, you'll know from Katie's excellent Cameron Highlands missive that the secret location which we decided on a whim to visit was Borneo. Specifically, we flew from Kuala Lumpur to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, one of the two states that make up Malaysian Borneo (i.e. the part of the island that is Malaysia, rather than being Brunei or Indonesia).

Sarawak's quite interesting historically. For a hundred odd years it was its own country, ruled by the White Rajahs. The story goes that in 1841, the area was nominally under the control of the Sultan of Brunei, but that the locals were not too happy and were kicking off against this. Meanwhile, fresh out of the East India Company due to injury, and with a sizable inheritance to blow, British adventurer and trader James Brooke bought himself a warship (as you did back then) and set off to sail to the East Indies. On the way, though, he came across the struggling Sultanate, and spotted an opportunity. In return for putting down the rebellion of the locals, he was given Sarawak to rule over by the Sultan of Brunei. Personally I'm somewhat sceptical about this - he rolled into town with a military might far superior to everyone else in the area and put down the rebellion, fine, but to be just "given" Sarawak by the grateful Sultan seems dubious. But anyway, that's how the Brooke dynasty came to be in charge of this part of the world. He was succeeded by his nephew Charles Brooke, who was succeeded by Vyner Brooke, who was succeeded firstly by the Japanese (it was WW2) and then who ceded control of Sarawak to Britain (meaning Britain picked up a colony at a time it was largely shedding them). In 1963 Sarawak opted to become part of the new country of Malaysia, and that (barring some border skirmishes with Indonesia and some trouble with local guerrilla communists) largely brings you up to date. The three Brookes are known as the White Rajahs, and seem to be generally viewed kindly - they supposedly protected the rights of the local indigenous peoples, the Iban and the Dayaks particularly, while at the same time letting Chinese and Indian immigrants into the town of Kuching to trade. No doubt in reality the Brookes were vicious colonialists who kept order using opium, gunpowder, and divide and conquer tactics, but I don't know much about it.

Though this colonial history is fascinating, we weren't really in town to see this aspect of Kuching (it doesn't really play it up that much anyway - the old fort that the Rajahs built is not even open for tourists). What brought us to Borneo was the wildlife. Kuching is handily placed for day trips to various different animal hotspots, and we took in three: the Santubong river, Bako national park, and Semenggoh Wildlife Centre. I shall proceed through them in that order.

Santubong river cruises are not all that cheap - in fact they're quite pricy. What you want, therefore, before going on one, is to make sure the weather's not going to be rubbish. Asking at the local tourist information office provided us with the following conversation. Me: do you know what the weather's going to do this afternoon? Tourist information officer: It could be sunny, or rain - it's a rainforest so we get both. What he did there, you see, was confuse "weather" with "climate". Needless to say, when we were picked up in the minivan to take us to the boat it was chucking it down.

Still, you can't let weather get the better of you, and after a glum 35 minutes where we sat on the jetty with 20 other tourists waiting to hear whether the tour would go ahead or weather the storm was too dangerous to be going out on a boat in, we were given the all-clear and set off. A doom-foreshadowing German couple drove morale down yet further loudly informing every couple, family, and group of tourists individually and separately that they had been out on a boat in the rain the day before and had seen nothing. Spirits were low.

But if you're feeling gloomy, there's an obvious perfect tonic: the most phallic looking aquatic mammal you can imagine. Ladies and gents, I give you the Irrawaddy River Dolphin. Critically-endangered, these are likely not to be around much longer (at least outside of Bangladesh, where 80% of the world's population of these beasts live), so it was a real treat to see one. Plus neither Katie nor I had ever seen a wild dolphin of any species before. It's phallic appearance was sadly not too obvious as all we saw was its back popping up for air. It came up to breathe three times in the same spot, then up came its tail and down it went, before resurfacing for another repetition of this in a different spot. It was really great to see. At this time it also stopped raining, and a glorious sunset revealed itself. All was right with the world.

The next animal to be spied on our river tour was the equally-wonderful Proboscis monkey. This is brilliantly known as the "Dutch monkey" or "Dutchman" in Malay because Borneo residents said the Dutch colonists also tended to have large noses and bellies. We saw troops of these bizarre simians, which are only found in Borneo, eating leaves in trees at the shoreline of the river. Couldn't get close enough to clearly see their massive snouts, alas.

Seeing as it was now dark, we needed a torch to engage in our next animal spotting adventure: croc hunting. The guide had a high powered job which he would shine at likely places on the riverbank. A crocodile's eyes shine bright red in torchlight, like an LED. The doom-prophesying German could get in on the act here, too, amusingly strapping on his head torch and also shining away, frequently into my eyes. We saw one croc, or rather its eyes - by the time boat got close it had slithered off. Katie and I did see some telltale v-shaped ripples on another occasion, however...

The final part of our tour was when we stopped at a tree, which we flashed. By this I mean that the boat flashed its running lights on and off. This odd practice was soon rewarded by answering flashes from a load of fireflies in the tree - "it's always Christmas in Malaysia" joked our guide, making me wonder whether he knew that Ramadan is coming soon (actually is here now, as I write this, not that there's any visible difference that we've seen). Fireflies are cool, but there weren't too many of them.

So, that was the Santubong peninsula. The next day we went to the Bako national park, partially following a tip from Mr James "Trev" McClure. The park was reachable by a combination of local bus and speedboat, and afforded one many opportunities for walking. Not being big fans of walks, we chose a short, easy route that promised the best chances of seeing wildlife, and were immediately surprised by the difficult going (well, Katie was moaning about this at any rate) and lack of animals. To be fair, in the latter case it was simply because we were stuck behind a noisy larger group of aging French tourists (who put Katie somewhat to shame in their game attempts to keep going on an awkward jungle trail and thus stopped her moans to some extent). On the way back along the trail we were rewarded for our quiet by seeing yet more Proboscis monkeys, this time really close so that we could see their noses and bellies. It was marvellous.

In addition to seeing these sensationally-schnebbed simians, we also saw some Macaques with their babies, and (joy of joys) on the boat ride back to the bus stop, more Irrawaddy dolphins! This time I spotted them in the distance and made our boat driver head over to where they were - two of them, side by side, and this time a spotting of their heads. Marvellous.

Our final wildlife spotting trip was the next day, to Semenggoh Wildlife Centre. The purpose of this trip was to see the other primate for which Borneo is famous: the orangutan. Semenggoh Wildlife Centre is a rehabilitation centre for everyone's famous ginger ape, with a few acres of forest set aside and 26 orangutans living there semi-wild. They have the run of the place, but they're fed twice a day at feeding platforms (though they don't always feel like coming along since they also feed themselves from the jungle, as the staff at the centre are at pains to continually reiterate). We were fortunate: we saw loads of them. The highlight was the massive dominant male, with whom you would really not want to mess. He was built like a weightlifter: a ginger weightlifter with a huge grey face and a poncho made from thick orange carpet apparently draped over his shoulders. An impressive sight. There were also baby orangutans, which drew appropriate "aaahhh" noises from the crowd.

The orangutan spotting was so enjoyable that we missed our bus back. Fortunately one of the park rangers gave us a lift to the nearest appropriate bus stop from where it was simple to get back to Kuching. Doubly fortunately we weren't alone in our predicament, but shared it with a friendly Canadian couple. Our enjoyment of their company continued later on in the day, when we went for dinner with them and then to a super-cheap (by Malaysian standards) Chinese bar/cafe where we got through a staggering number of cans of beer between the four of us. A good time was had by all, but Katie wasn't feeling quite the thing the next morning for our plane journey back to peninsular Malaysia. In fact even that evening in Kuala Lumpur she was still whinging about being hungover. Insert some comment here about "being able to take the girl out of Margate"...