Globetrotting

Last week, we had a day off on Friday, so I took the opportunity to go on my first real trip away from Singapore since I arrived in January (I went to Bintan, an island in Malaysia, a couple of weeks back, but that didn’t really count since it was organized by my employer and I didn’t have to do anything). With a group of ~15 people, we went to Kuching in Sarawak, one of the two non-mainland states of Malaysia, on the island of Borneo.

On Friday, we went to Bako National Park, which is a jungle reserve on a peninsula in the South China Sea, and did a hike over the day, which was really beautiful. The scenery kept changing, from steep jungle trails which were basically 99% roots, to rocks, to clay paths with huge puddles. The trail took us after ~2 hours to a waterfall (which was not as exciting as we had imagined) and then to a nice and relatively secluded beach. Six of us who had decided to spend the night in the park and booked a chalet for that purpose, hiked back to the headquarter where the chalet was located; the rest got picked up by a boat from the beach.

In the evening, when we were sitting on the porch of our chalet, some proboscis monkey stopped by for a visit. There are a lot of monkeys in the national park, especially macaques which you see all the time and which will steal your bags and food if you don’t watch out, but the proboscis monkeys are supposedly much harder to spot since they are too shy. That wasn’t the case for those monkeys that visited our chalet, however: two of them were sitting right next to us for approximately twenty minutes, happily munching away leaves from different trees. This alone was worth the stay in the park.

The next day, we went back to Kuching. We initially had planned to do another trek that day, but it was raining all morning so we decided to leave the National Park. The remaining two days we basically spent relaxing and sightseeing. Kuching is a really nice city, which is not as touristy as some of the cities on the Malaysian peninsula such as Melaka or Penang. We looked at the different temples, visited the Sarawak museum which shows Sarawak culture, art and nature, had a lot of good food and relaxed before the final week of classes for the first period.

Some pictures from the trip: