And so to the Kuching Museums!  Our hotel was right next to the museum complex.  I like the exterior of the Natural History Museum of Sarawak – a colonial building surmounted by a giant bug:There’s this carved boulder outside the Sarawak Art Museum.  So dinosaurian, or water-monitorian – whatever the reptile, it’s distinctly representative, and highly decorative.A local artist specializes in some of the ubiquitous materials – soda cans and slices of corrugated iron roofing – to create giant chickens.  Here’s a cock-fight:Carved doors are a good status symbol. Here we have indigenous carving designs, with the later addition of islamic calligraphy.  

I am very fond of this statue.  This fierce man is wearing a pangolin hat.

Nearby in another colonial building is the ethnological museum, which has good exhibits on indigenous cultures upstairs, and a lot of stuffed animals downstairs – badly stuffed, and pretty dusty. But the 30-foot python skeleton is impressive. And they have a few lovely touches in museum architecture that remind me of the grand museums of the west. Here’s a nice arched doorway in this colonial building: And here’s detail of the artwork around the inside of the arch.

Cross a footbridge over one of the main streets in Kuching and you get to the newest of the Sarawak museums, which has a really good series of exhibits on burial traditions in Borneo among the various populations. Outside there is a huge totem carved from one tree, with a little house on top that would typically have contained ancestral bones.

Burial traditions are important because there’s a long tradition of burying ceramics with the dead, and the ceramics are both native and trade items. So they can tell you a lot about local history, which is handy if there’s no extant textual evidence.  Trade with India and China has happened in Sarawak for thousands of years. There’s a quite good collection of enormous Chinese decorated urns, and a really terrific exhibit on native pottery traditions. Then there’s a good solid scholarly archeological exhibition, which shows how the nearby caves have yielded pottery shards that provide evidence of rice cultivation about 6000 years ago – perhaps the earliest in southeast Asia. Well, I was excited about this, although the rest of my family found it expedient to hang out in the gift shop reading books for the extra hour that I spent in this area. We emerged with a few goodies from that shop, including a book entitled “Man-Eating Crocodiles of Borneo.” Who could possibly resist?

We went to the Anna Rais longhouse, which is about an hour’s drive from Kuching, to see how life is lived among modern Dayaks.  The Dayaks of Sarawak belong to three main categories: Sea Dayaks who live at the confluence of rivers and the South China Sea, and earn a living by fishing; the River Dayaks, who cultivate rice inland (along rivers), and the Upriver Dayaks, who live at high altitude by hunting, farming and foraging.  The  people at Anna Rais are River Dayaks.  They grow rice and pepper, the indigo the need to dye fibers blue for their weaving, eggplants, okra, and somewhat surprisingly, cacao. These are cacao beans drying  before being roasted and ground into chocolate.  I never realized how much they resemble silkworm or other coccoons.

The longhouse has floors in its public areas made of cross-layered bamboo.  The cat is optional. These floors get relaid every year, and are tied into place.

Or if you’re not comfortable with your feet rolling over the rounded bamboo, you can visit houses where the hosts have smashed the bamboo flat.  Flat areas seem to attract cats, who are good at discerning comfortable spots.

A longhouse has a long public area bordered by connected rooms with lockable doors.  So the size of your longhouse is denoted by the number of doors.  This seemed to be a 35-door longhouse.  We peeked inside several doors as we went by, and they gave onto simple but comfortable rooms, with painted walls, linoleum floors, small gas stoves and TVs.  This village has both electricity and running water, and a guesthouse where adventurous tourists can stay with a family.  But one door gave onto a home that was maintained in the traditional fashion – except for the flush toilet in a little room off the back – and it had two levels.  See if you can figure out how to get up these stairs:You need strong toes to get at the storage area in the loft.

There is plenty of non-traditional architecture in the village, like this bridge connecting two different longhouses and creating a village:

This cat is assisting in rice processing.  The rice grains have dried out in the public area, on this hand-woven rattan mat, when it was open out in the sun.  Now the grains are folded inside the mat, which has been moved to the sheltered area that acts as a covered hallway connecting the doors of the longhouse.  If you walk on the mat it helps hull the rice. So having tourists clump about the place is helpful.

Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, and this is the state parliament building:
Pretty cool, and it looks even better at night:
Very pretty, but we never saw anyone go in or out in our four days in the city. Considering the shennanigans of the U.S. Congress when in session, that could be a good thing.

The river is the most important feature of Kuching. If you want to go to Parliament, or to the muslim part of town you hop into a sampan, a water taxi, and for 50 sens (half a ringit) you pop across the river:
But the south side was enough for us, between the restaurants and the riverside walk. Here are the crocodilian canons in front of the old fort:
In the evenings they shoot water into the river – and provide the only play structure to be found in the city.

Night is the most spectacular time on the river. Here is the Astana, the governor’s official dwelling. The governor has lived there for forty years and shows no signs of budging.  Can’t say I blame him. I’d like to live there, too.

The riverside walk is lit for about a mile, along a curve.

But even during the day it looks great – the surrounding landscape and clouds are quite beautiful, as you can see in this view from the eighth floor of the hotel.  This is an easy city to love.

We also saw Irrawaddy dolphins.  They have small round heads, no elongated beaks like California dolphins.  Highly endangered, but the guys who run the river wildlife cruise know where to find them.Proboscis monkeys nest in the trees over the mangrove swamps at dusk.  I think this picture is of some at the Singapore Zoo, the only place outside Borneo to cultivate these creatures successfully – again, highly endangered but totally protected in Sarawak.  They have four-chambered stomachs, like cows, to enable them to digest the salty plants they live among.  They can’t digest sugar.The cruise showed us some fireflies that cluster around rubber trees and eat the sap – they glow a gentle blue, so the trees along the river looked like Christmas trees in a fog.  And there were Silver Leaf monkeys as well, although they were farther away and not as cute as the Spectacled Leaf monkeys we saw in Langkawi.  And we saw a small crocodile perched in a tree, which was aggravated by the pilots’ lights and slithered into the river.  Here’s a bigger specimen, preserved at the Sarawak Natural History Museum.  Crocodiles (same as the Australian Salty) are protected in Sarawak as well, except for those who make a habit of dining on the people who live along the rivers.  This one was found to have a watch in its belly:And of course there were some cats.  Not in Kuching, but in a longhouse village an hour away.  They’re on traditional hand-woven mats and bamboo floors.  The one with the short tail is not a victim of violence – southeast Asia has a lot of short-tailed cats around.

There were various attempts to revolt against British rule in Sarawak, by various ethnicities.  The Dayaks mounted an armed rebellion, but their leader was killed.  The Chinese coolies came close to toppling the White Rajah, but their rebellion was put down as well.  The local Malay sultan, who’d effectively been usurped, plotted and fulminated for decades in various locations, but never did get around to an armed insurrection.  I could be wrong, but this seems to me a typical pattern for Malays in power – lots of concern with honor and titles but not a lot of practical results.
Anyway, the place joined the current Muslim state of Malaysia, with a few stipulations; first, Sarawak and Penang are the only two Malaysian states ruled by governors, rather than sultans; second, Sarawak controls its own borders, so that even penninsular Malaysians going there have to have their passports stamped. Theoretically this allows Sarawak to keep from being overrun by Muslim Malays.  BTW, the current governor of Sarawak has been in office for over 40 years, and is in his 70s, so in effect he IS the sultan. Like the prime minister of Italy, he seems to have an unusually vigorous interest in very young women.

Kuching is interesting in that it is a city with two mayors. North of the Sarawak River there’s the muslim Malay mayor, and south of the river there’s the Chinese mayor. Malaysia is a muslim state with sharia law courts, but muslims are the minority in Sarawak, so there are parallel legal systems for muslims and for everyone else. These cover everything from land ownership (only ethnic Malays can buy certain kinds of land) and restaurant inspection (halal rules for muslims). Very interesting, not least as a challenge in the daily lives of the citizens.
One side effect of Sarawak’s joining Malaysia is that the Bahasa Malay word “kuchin” means cat. So a whole tourism industry has arisen to take advantage of this – much as the Singapore tourism industry has created the Merlion as mascot of the city. Kuching has a lot of cat statues to visit.

A nicer one is this:

And there are various stories about cats being parachuted into the city to save the people there from a plague of rats – but no evidence or proper documentation of this whatsoever.