It's never so much fun going home... 

But the weather has been getting piddlier by the day, so we've definitely done the right thing. And we had a great six days.

We were on the road by 0615 on Wednesday. It was drizzling. But by sunrise, the rain had stopped (for the time being), and wraiths of mist were enhancing the scenery.



When I say "on the road", the road I'm talking about scarcely merits that designation. It is the Pan Borneo Highway (PBH), a route I've had many opportunities to complain about before.

As we had only two days to do the return journey to Kuching, we didn't really have time to re-do the ferries between Sarikei and Mukah. So the PBH seemed the best option. Actually, we could have taken the coast road as far as Mukah, and then joined the PBH at Selangau. That would probably have been no slower, and would definitely have been more comfortable, given that on Wednesday we encountered the full gamut of the PBH's unlovable characteristics: mud, potholes, chicanes, dust... We had to pay the hire car company a whacking MYR-600 "outstation fee" for this trip, but you can certainly see why...

Then there's the confusion... With all the weaving on and off new and old stretches of road, it's SO easy to go wrong. At one point we found ourselves facing two backwards-pointing arrows on the tarmac. "Shoot," we thought, "we're on the wrong side of the road." We carefully reversed (luckily, there wasn't much traffic at that point), headed off down the unfinished left-hand carriageway, and popped back onto the right-hand one a bit further down when our section dissolved into a building site again. Whether that was actually the right thing to do we never found out... Later, a guy in front of us missed one of the segues to another loop in the slalom, found himself imminently confronting the diggings, and had to do a rapid swerve to get back on course.

Occasionally you can't get by at all:


Because hardly any of the PBH is dual carriageway at the moment, the busying up of the traffic means you also start to encounter more and more heavily-laden and crawling trucks that you have to manoeuvre your way round. Many lorry drivers are very good, however, about signalling when it's safe to pass.

We had a 10-minute break at Selangau (where we'd stopped on the bus from Sibu to Miri that time), but at 8.50 we were off again.

What the slow journey does give you plenty of opportunity to take in, however, is the large quantity of longhouses along the route. Some longhouses are REALLY long; and the structures vary considerably.




We arrived back at our hotel in Sarikei at 1105, so the travelling time was exactly five hours. The distance covered was 268 km, meaning our average speed was 54 kph. It definitely pays to start early...



The highlight of the rest of the day was our visit to the Glory Cafe. This is famous for its tom yam prawn noodles, which are served up in a coconut, and are really, really delicious...

We ordered the MYR-28 ("small") option. "Small" refers to prawn type, as far as I can tell, because there's otherwise nothing that would match that epithet. You get four weight-lifter prawns, along with various other bits of seafood, a generous helping of noodles, and lots of a wonderful, mildly spicy, lemongrass-infused, lime-sharpened, coconut-enriched soup. It's all incredibly flavoursome, and any flesh that remains in your coconut by the end is now beautifully soup-sodden, and just begging to be scraped off.


Otherwise, we spent a while watching the river, a hive of activity in this post-lunch period; we revisited Coffee Code, a very modern coffee establishment that sits right next to Aik Seng's traditional equivalent (on the two occasions we visited Coffee Code in Sarikei, we'd already eaten, but their cakes do look phenomenal); and we shopped at Doremon...






Yesterday morning we left Sarikei at 0600, in a fair amount of murk.

There were no problems with any of the three ferries. We were kept entertained during the brief wait for the first one by some really virtuoso birdsong (and there are snacks aboard this boat too, which I didn't notice going the other way). Times from rolling up to rolling off were 16, 19, and 35 minutes for the Krian, Saribas, and Lupar ferries respectively. 


With the day's ferries behind us we made four stops before arriving back home.

First up, Sebuyau, which is just off the main road. This is another very attractive little coastal town, and we'd have stayed longer if it hadn't been so incredibly busy...








Next, Kampung Jaie. You remember Simunjan, in the vicinity of which Alfred Russel Wallace spent nine months? Well, Wallace's much-respected Sarawakian assistant, Ali, is -- according to some accounts -- buried in Kampung Jaie. (Here and here you'll find diverging versions of Ali's life and resting place, and this piece demonstrates the extraordinary lengths people will go to in order to get clarity on this tantalizing subject.) Whether or not this is his grave site, it's very tranquil and beautiful, and Ali's life is a fantastic example of how reliability and enthusiasm can ensure rapid promotion: hired initially as cook and servant, Ali became Wallace's "head man", a skilled collector (responsible for the acquisition of thousands of specimens, and the preparation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bird skins), and an invaluable purveyor of knowledge.




Third stop: pisang goreng, from the little market down by the Sungai Sabang, which is where we first established the road-trip-fried-banana tradition.

And finally, back in Kuching, the Green Heights Mall, to hoover up one of Wonderboom's awesome all-day breakfasts, and to go Christmas shopping (for festive cheese, wine, and charcuterie).


We were home by 1515.

Over the course of this eight-day trip, we clocked up a total distance of 1,444.6 km (so we definitely owe it to the environment to sit still again for a while...)

So good, though... Of course, it's all covid-adapted travel. The very fact that we're road-tripping, rather than using our preferred travel mode, which is public transport, is a covid-induced mutation. Likewise, we avoid indoor places like museums, crowded places like markets, self-serve food, any eateries that look too busy... We're ever ready with the masks, wipes, and sanitizers. So it's not the carefree travel of old. But it's travel, and that's good enough for me. 

We always round off our road trips with a final breakfast, to make the most of the hours before the car is collected. Today, by way of a change, we went to The Breakfast Factory, one of the stalls at the continuously humming Song Corner foodcourt. They do a number of versions of the classic Western fry-up breakfast, in very satisfying quantities, for a very reasonable price. So I started my day with sausage, scrambled eggs, baked beans, relish, coleslaw, and toast, and Nigel had all that plus cheesy sausages, turkey bacon, and a hash brown.

What better way to round off a road trip than a truck-driver's breakfast?