Most of my entries just talk about the places and not so much about the people and because its just as much about the people that you meet that make a place interesting or not I`ll dedicate this one to the ones I met in Kuching.

Chris, Ernesto and the staff at Nomad Borneo

On the recommendation of some peole I met in Miri I stayed at Nomad Borneo, a relatively new hostel in the centre of town. The two owners of the place were Ernesto and Chris, really nice guys who were always very friendly and helpful. Both Dayaks from upriver somewhere it seemed as though they opened the place primarily so that they could shag as many foreign women as possible, and they were doing pretty well by the looks of it. They seemed to spend a lot of their time walking around shirtless showing off their traditional tattoos. I remember one night Hannah, the girl who had recommended the place to me in Miri, returned and within 30 seconds Chris and one of the other staff had their shirts off. It made me laugh.

 When he wasn`t out showing his latest girlfriend around, Ernesto worked in his tattoo shop a few blocks away, Borneo headhunters. Apparently he`s one of the few people who can tattoo using traditional Dayak techniques (they use sharpened bamboo) and designs. When he isn`t tatooing he was on the guitar playing the same song again and again. He`s something of a popstar in the local area. Chris mostly sat around on the internet (I`m guessing that he was on msn messager chatting with all his foreign girlfriends who had gone back home) and laughing at nothing. He had one of those infectious laughs that you listen to for a while and immediately makes you start laughing along even though you don`t know what the joke was.

james

James was an enigma. Originating from somewhere in Alaska and looking like a cross between an NBA player and a bikie, he was travelling around South east Asia, landed at the hostel and decided to stay. he`d been there for a couple of months and it looked like he was settling in for a very long stay. He seemed to either be eating, sleeping or watching Animal planet. He rarely left the hostel and when he did it was to get some takeaway noodles. After a farewell for someone leaving and some heavy drinking, James managed to sleep for over 30 hours. We thought he was dead after 24 hours without moving but he woke briefly to get some noodles and went back to sleep for another 7 hours, woke and started watching Animal Planet and promptly fell asleep again.

The place was a mecca for people wanting tattoos. Simone, an aging punk/hippie from Bristol (think dyed dreads, a lot of piercings and loads of tats), had the best tat I`d ever seen. It was a tribute to local lad Banksy, the most well known/notorious street artist in the world. her whole right calf was covered in a banksy stencil of a young girl hugging a bomb. It was the first time I`d seen anyone with a stencil tat and it looked so good that I`m surprised that more people don`t have one. I`m not into tats or body art but if I ever got one I`d be a stencil for sure. Simone had gotten a tat by Ernesto, a small lotus flower design, but didn`t have the cash to get it done on the other side (Dayak tats are always balanced, so the designs are symmetrical on both sides). her boyfriend in Bristol was a tattoo artist so she figured he could copy it for her for free.

Another Englishman, Darren ( i can`t actually remember his real name), was due to have a tattoo done but ran out of time after a trip with Chris to a Dayak longhouse upriver. I didn`t go on one of the tours because they were really expensive and by the sounds of it everyone ended up drinking for the day or two that they were there. rather than the cultural experience it was meant to be it seemed more like a piss up at a local village. Darren was testament to this as he couldn`t actually remember any of his trip. After a 6 hour drive they arrived and were promptly handed a bottle of very strong tua (local palm wine). he polished off 2 bottles over the course of the night and ended up trying to fight Chris, who was acting as guide (it was his family`s village) before throwing up into the early hours.

Michelle, an English woman who was also on the trip, was appalled at his behaviour and wouldn`t speak to Darren afterwards. She worked for a publishing company who had decided that they wanted to produce a guide book on Borneo. They sent her over for 6 weeks to get the information for it. 6 weeks. What a joke. You could barely manage to cover Sarawak, the southern part of malaysian Borneo, in that time let alone kalimantan, the Indonesian part. She expected to get all of the information on accomodation, transport etc. in that timeframe. After a few days she realised the futility of it and decided to treat it more like a holiday. She ended up spending a week just in Kuching who knows how far she got in the other 5 weeks.

marie

Marie was the best thing about nomad Borneo. A beautiful Danish girl who you knew you could marry and live happily ever after with even after only knowing her for a few days. unfortunately someone had got in there first. marie had spent the last 5 months in Sarawak doing research into the impact of tourism on Dayak tribes. She lived at a few Dayak villages for most of that time. She was finishing off notes on her research and heading back to Denmark for Christmas. It was actually a bit sad when she left because she was almost like the hostel mum always trying to give you food and make you cups of tea. i ended up leaving just after she went because it felt a bit empty without her there, especially since all the other women there, with the exception of the chainsmoking retired Swedish lady, had hooked up with the male staff.

there were quite a few other people who came and went.: the Canadian teacher working in Kuala Lumpur; the British girl working as an engineer in China that had a breakneck schedule which put everyone else to shame because she saw more in her 5 days there than those who had been there for weeks; the crazy little French guy who would spontaneously break into a jig for no apparent reason. They all left their mark, literally, as everyone who stayed at the place had write on the wall somewhere.

i guess I should write something about Kuching itself. Its definitely the nicest of the cities I visited in malaysian Borneo. It had some interesting Dutch colonial era architecture and a nice riverside setting. It seemed less chaotic and more relaxed than other malaysian cities and a lot smaller than its actual size. there are some really nice national parks within close vicinity and a few daytrips to other spots that are worth doing. Although I seemed to spend most of my time watching DVDs there (can`t say no to brand new priated movies that haven`t even been released in the cinema yet) I did make it to a couple. Gunung Gading national Park was pretty cool. I got to see a raffelsia, the world`s largest flower, in bloom. It was impressive but not as big as I was expecting (they grow up to a metre in width) and it definitely smelt better than it was meant to (its often described as smelling similar to a rotting corpse). There was a nice waterfall there which I got to climb around nude because there was noone else around. 

Bako national park was also very impressive. i stayed for 4 nights there checking out probiscus monkeys closeup and swimming at the beaches there ( I managed to find a spot where you could bodysurf  small shories). On the way to one of the beaches I managed to get a large caterpillar on my shorts (about as big as my index finger) which I didn`t notice until I had brushed my hand and leg up against its hairy back. I spent close to an hour with a pair of tweezers getting all of the sharp hairs out. There were hundreds of them and they itched like hell afterwards.

Perhaps the highlight of my time there was my trip to the Indonesian embassy. Lonely Planet tells you that its not possible to get a visa there and technically they`re right. But for some stupid reason if you ring up before you go in you can actually get one. They managed to get mine done in less than 4 hours because they were going to be closed for 4 days afterwards and they didn`t want me to be without my passport. I reckon its the fastest you`ll ever get an Indo visa. I left Kuching on the 23rd with visa in hand hoping to get to a beach in Kalimantan for Christmas.