Riverboat

We missed the afternoon ferry to Sibu yesterday because it doesn’t run any more. Serves us right for relying on a guidebook – especially one other than the LP. That gave us the afternoon free to wander the riverside and get more involved in daily life. I spent a couple of hours talking to a local man by the river, mostly talking about Australia, but getting a bit of an insight into his life in Kuching. I’ll try to get it down as a character profile in a later entry.

We were heading to a food market on roof-top carpark for dinner, but were distracted by a big tent on the other side of the river. With no bridge, the only way across was to take a gondola-style river boat. The operator stood at the front with two paddles crossed in front of him and leaned on them to propel us forward. He also used a rope to switch a motor (in the rear) on and off. Even without the motor, it only took about 2 minutes to paddle the boat weighed down with 10 passengers across the 40m wide river.

We shared the boat with a group from the Indonesian part of Borneo, most of whom were working at a small national park that only saw 100 tourists each year. They were on a research trip to see how the Malaysian parks attracted so many people. The tent we’d seen turned out to be an eatery, as we’d hoped, and we sat with the head of the group to have dinner. He pulled out his laptop and showed us pictures of his beautiful park with orangutans, proboscis monkeys crocodiles and other animals that tourists come to see. They also had two ultralight planes that they use to spot fires and loggers to be dealt with from the ground. One day they plan to offer tours in the ultralights.

After dinner, we returned to our side of the river and sat in a tent outside the information centre for a concert of local acts including some finalists from some competition. The photos will do it more justice than I have time for now, but the opening act included a guy climbing a bamboo pole and balancing on it with the tip on his stomach and being spun around at dizzying speeds. Some of these people are crazy.

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Categorized as Malaysia

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