South-East Asia

After our lousy experiences at the Brunei border and a couple of days lost on the road, we came to Kuching, which is the capital of Sarawak, the other Malaysian province at Borneo next to Sabah. The city is a pleasant and relaxed cultural mix influenced by Indians, Malaysians and Chinese. Consequently, as in most of the other cities, there are Little China and Little India with lots of home-style shops and restaurants, but we really fell in love with the Malaysian fried rice here, and the beer was also pleasantly cheap.

This is worth mentioning as the local differences of the beer price in the country seem to depend on which religion is the strongest in the part you are located. While we could get four beers here for less than four dollars in promotion actions in Kuching, in the Muslim-dominated areas you end up paying five dollars for one can, and on Langkawi, beer counts as duty-free item and you get the can for half a dollar. Pretty weird, and one wonders why not making big money by shipping cheap beer within the country...
The city also had some cultural offers, and next to the less interesting agricultural fair hold in the city, I pretty much enjoyed my first cinema visit in 4 month, though Transformers 2 was a movie the world could live without.

The beach outside Kuching was nice, though the hotel which owns the beach pretty much abuses its rights by shocking prices for even basic items such as water and icecream.

One day we spent in Bako National Park, famous for several beaches and an abundance of monkeys. Unexpectedly, there was no accommodation to be found, so we had to run through the park trail in order to catch the last boat back to the bus station. With its sandstone formations and boreal needle tree flora, the scenery here was much reminiscent of Saxon Switzerland and Baltic Sea to me.