Bumpy Sections - Part Two

I was beginning to realise by this time that road maps of Borneo only represent reality in an approximate manner, like TV comedy programmes. Just before setting off on the trip, I had dutifully purchased two folding road maps of Sarawak, Sabah, Borneo and whatever, and they SEEMED accurate. I also traced the route from door to door on Google Maps several times, noting down the names of towns and villages.

But the trouble is that none of these road maps, paper or electronic, are anywhere near accurate enough. I am used to the military precision and accuracy of the Ordnance Survey maps back in the UK. These maps offer you so much detail, from street and house level right up to regional and national and planetary level. No wonder the army uses them. But, I discovered that Malaysia does not seem to have an Ordnance Survey standard set of road maps for Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei. And to make things worse, decent maps of Brunei itself are even rarer and less detailed than the Malaysian ones.

I daresay there are two reasons for this – one comes from the old days of the Konfrontasi during the 1950s and 1960s, when it was not a good idea to let too many people know where Bukit Whatever was, or where Rumah Such and Such was situated, in case there were communist agents lurking about. The other reason comes from the fact that Malaysia in general is changing so rapidly that the layout of towns and villages sometimes literally changes overnight. This is true in Sarawak where, less than a decade ago, the road I took up to Sibu was largely a dirt and gravel track whereas now it is paved and much more civilised.

Yet it still begs the question of why on earth the maps cannot be updated more quickly, when electronic equivalents are more up to date. Well, slightly anyway. The latest Google Earth map of my area in Kuching still does not show the Spring shopping centre, nor the new airport!

So the long and the short of it is that using a map to guide you from Kuching to Sabah via Brunei is a somewhat inexact science, full of adventure and tantalising uncertainty!!

I found that it is much better to follow the road signs, rely on my excellent sense of direction (“Sibu is behind us, so Bintulu MUST be in front!!”) and, if the worst comes to the worst, ask a passer-by. Which is what we did in Brunei, when we got lost.

But I am getting ahead of myself here! Let me fill you in on the trip from Bintulu to Brunei, on the Second day of the trip. So I woke up groggy and somewhat puky at an unthinkably early hour on 17th September. We showered, packed and after checking out trudged down to the muddy car park to find the car perfectly safe and sound.

After getting under way, we didn’t have too much trouble finding the road to Miri (Road signs!!!) and pointed the blunt nose of the Matrix towards that town. The road to Miri is bumpy and hilly, like a strip of dark grey chewing gum with big lumps and long gaps where some of the gum has stretched too thin. I drove but after a while my arse and my stomach began to regret it!

We stopped in the huge and sprawling Niah Caves Rest Stop, where we had breakfast, stocked up on drinkies and nibbles for the journey, and most importantly filled up the petrol tank. Here is another useful bit of advice, gentle readers. On long journeys, fill up your tank at every opportunity. Don’t wait too long to do it, because you never know, there might not be another filling station for 500 kilometres!

This is especially true if you are heading for Brunei, because that country does not allow foreigners to buy petrol and in any case, it’s twice as expensive in Brunei as it is in Malaysia because of the exchange rate! So use the Niah Cave Rest Stop wisely!!

After the Niah Caves, it was on to Miri, where a lack of road signs for the Brunei border made it slightly difficult to find our way but, thanks to the constant phone contact between Mordiah and her friend (who had drawn a map for us!!) we were able to find our way, haltingly, to the border. I say haltingly, because again the lack of road signs knocked us off course at one point and two sets of passers by were singularly unsuccessful at pointing us toward the Sungei Tujuh border post.

Which brings me to another bit of useful advice – bring someone with you who speaks the local dialect. Or something like it anyway. Asking for directions might seem straightforward but even if you know standard Malay, the locals will speak back to you in their own version of it. Just to give you a flavour of the problem, the standard Malay word for ‘one’ is ‘satu’ but it is ‘sigek’ in Sarawakian. And in Miri they have their own special variety of Malay which I know nothing about but which I understand is even more different...

So thanks to Mordiah, our intrepid local interpreter, we eventually found ourselves at the Sungei Tujuh border point.

More later......

Bumpy Sections - Part One

Well here I am, back from a self-imposed three month break from blogging. I just got so fed up with people asking me when I was going to start blogging again that I decided I would take up my keyboard again and continue to serve my legions of fans.

So here goes...

“So what have you been doing with yourself all this while?” I hear you all scream. Well, my dear loyal readers, I’ve been up to many things, though most of my experiences since August are unutterably and mind-numbingly dull and not worthy of this august forum! But, I did do one thing that is worth mentioning. That is my mammoth drive across Borneo which I undertook at the end of September for the Hari Raya. I’ll happily share that one with you, dear readers, because I’ll never forget it, and neither will you...

Now, it’s bad enough trying to take a plane from Kuching in Sarawak to Tawau in Sabah at the best of times, let alone the Raya when just about every Muslim in Borneo is taking to some sort of transport or another at the same time.

So, imagine what it’s like taking the same trip by road? Yes, by road!!

Now I’ve been called many things in my life, including ‘screaming great lunatic’, ‘mad as a hatter’ and ‘silly as a box of toys’. Also, ‘one brick short of a full load’ and ‘out of his tree’. However, that’s nothing compared to people’s reactions when I told them I was planning a driving holiday from Kuching all the way across Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah to my wife’s ancestral pile in Tawau.

Why did I think of such a hair-brained scheme? Well, apart from the obvious savings in flight tickets, which are criminally expensive just before major public holidays in Malaysia, well, my wife and I just thought we would challenge ourselves, see a bit of the scenery that we had never seen, and basically do something that we had never done before. It’s the old NASA logic – we go there because it’s there!! Well, Borneo is there alright, as I found out.

Our trip was somewhat convoluted by the fact that my dear wife had different holiday starting dates to me. This meant that I had to set out two days before she did. She, of course, flew to Kota Kinabalu, by which time I had already driven there.

Needless to say, I did not travel alone to KK. There was my son as co-driver and our young friend Mordiah, an ex-student of my wife who knows all the local dialects and was brought along to help out and have a holiday. We set out from Kuching on 16th September at about 11.30 in the morning. We started so late because my dear son had left his passport in KL the day before and had to get it couriered over before we travelled. You can’t go through Brunei without a passport!!

As punishment for the passport incident, I made my son pilot for the first leg of the journey, from Kuching going roughly North sort of hugging the coast (well, waving at it from a safe distance anyway). We proceeded along a scraggly route to Serian (12.30 pm), Seri Aman (14.24) and Sibu (by 17.40).

Word of advice: DO NOT TRY TO DRIVE THROUGH SIBU DURING THE RUSH HOUR!! Or at any other hour in fact. We made the mistake of thinking we would look for a place to stay the night in Sibu, but the fact is that Sibu is so full of traffic and so lacking in places to stop, plus having a one-way system designed by Satan, that we decided to stop for a rest at a petrol station before driving through the dark tunnel of the night to Bintulu.

The trip to Bintulu was a night-driver’s playtime, which is why I took over the controls from Sunny. The road to Bintulu was narrow, bumpy and full of gargantuan trucks, and I was spending most of my time squinting past the blaring lights of oncoming vehicles and negotiating ways of overtaking without being smashed to pieces against an oncoming Hilux. We were nearly hit in the face at one point by a 4WD which must have swerved to avoid a pot hole (more about these later!). Further up the road we passed a car which had gone down in a ditch. Lots of excitement...

Eventually, though, after a 2 1/2 hour drive, the hot dark womb of the tropical night spewed us out at Bintulu, which is a very well lit oil town and major port with nice safe roads and, luckily for us, plenty of cheap hotels to choose from. Selecting a fairly safe-looking place called the Lee Hua Plaza, we checked in at around 22.00 and, after an excellent meal in the understandably deserted restaurant, we retired to our rooms for a well-deserved slumber.

Number of Kilometres covered in day one: 643. Number of petrol stops: 2.

Next Part will follow (honestly!!!!!)