So, after a very pleasant day trip, we were up for something a little more ambitious.

I mentioned last time the restrictions we're currently operating under. Well, we're still working round them:

1. Limited radius for car hire. It turns out that if you pay a supplement (MYR 150 or GBP 30), you can travel further. We haven't been able to verify it, but we're told all Kuching car hire companies work like this. What they're all worried about is the Pan Borneo Highway (PBH), which (as I mentioned last time) is currently an endless -- endless -- set of roadworks...

2. Covid closures. Yeah, there are still plenty, but we weren't baulked many times on this trip.

3. Weather. Given that it has been super-wet recently, we were really quite lucky. But we didn't attempt anything too off-piste.

Otherwise, we just had to follow our hire car company's basic rules:


So we set off at 06.30 on Tuesday morning. It was a murky day, but not disturbingly so.


You travel across red earth, white earth, and yellow earth. You travel through every shade of green.

And the road was really not too bad until about 09.15, when we started to experience the diversions, rough surfaces, and one-way stretches that give the PBH its fearsome reputation. A friend had warned us that it wasn't a good idea to travel this route by night. And truly, in the dark, it would be really easy to miss a diversion and bog yourself down in the unmade road. In the daylight, it's not too difficult to stick to the right track. But you do need patience...



We stopped at Lachau, at about 09.30, for coffee, fried banana (the Terns are finding that you really can't do a road trip without indulging in fried banana...), and a little stroll.





After about 45 minutes, we were off again, and as the road climbed, we began to get more expansive views.


We stopped off briefly at Mount Hosanna Chapel, but this is sadly one of the casualties of covid, and you can't go in.


About five hours after setting off. we were pulling into Sri Aman. If you discount our two stops, we'd taken four hours to cover slightly less than 200 km. You don't travel quickly in Sarawak...

Now, I've been calling our destination Sri Aman, but it's a little more complicated than that. The town was originally called Simanggang. It changed its name to Sri Aman (aman means peace, while sri is an honorific) when it hosted the signing of a peace agreement between the Sarawak government and the North Kalimantan Communist Party in 1974. (There's heaps of fascinating history involved in this period, and I have a pile of wonderful reading to do on it when I can find the time...)



Anyway, last year, it was announced that the name of the town would revert to Simanggang, while the Sri Aman label would be used for the division it's located in. I'm sticking with Sri Aman, as that still seems to be what most non-residents call it.

It's a laid-back, low-key, pleasant town.

You can visit Fort Alice, which was originally built in 1864, but has been completely restored.





You can also visit the Tze Yin Khor temple, which occupies a beautiful spot by the Batang Lupar. In fact, this is a very auspicious site from the point of view of feng shui. It's a "live crab" site, and the roof colour is green, rather than the traditional red, to avoid "cooking" the crab.









But probably what Sri Aman is most famous for is its "benak". That's the local name for the tidal bore, which -- unusually -- is visible every single day here. I don't really understand the technical aspects of tidal bores, but this one is very, very impressive.

Don't, by the way, rely on the advice given here on the timing of the bore... If we'd looked up the time of high water in Kuching, and added 10 minutes, as recommended, we'd have missed the bore by at least 20 minutes two days running... Luckily, we'd got ourselves into position well early. And it's really not hard to put in the waiting time. These rivers are just so, so picturesque...









The first way the bore makes its presence felt is by its sound. You can hear the roar while it's still just a small wave in the distance. That roar increases as it barrels up the river, cresting impressively, and sending out large ripples that slap against the mud banks.





If you can, do as we did, and go twice. Wednesday's was bigger than Thursday's, but both were worth seeing.

AweSOME...

Anyway, this post is getting a bit long, so I'll continue in Part 2.