Miri, Malaysia - down memory lane

On Wednesday 24th March, we left Turtle Island at 7am to head back to Sandakan, to catch our flight to Kotakinabalu, we only had a short stopover there (time for an excellent Italian meal) before catching another flight to Miri in Sarawak, still in Borneo.

We lived in Miri for a period when I was fifteen and my dad was working there for Shell, so it was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. Miri has changed beyond all recognition, well, it has been 27 years, ha ha.

We stayed at a really lovely guesthouse (the first without an ensuite bathroom - wow we are really slumming it now!) called the Dillenia. But we did have a huge shower room just down the hall and we had the place pretty much to ourselves, only two other guests on another floor. We hired a car the following morning so that we could drive up to the Niah national park to visit the caves. On the way out of town, we took a detour passed where I used to live, I'm pretty sure we found the main road, but too much development had taken place to be sure of where our actual road was, let alone the house.

The national park is about a ninety minute drive away and the caves are reached by a quick river crossing, followed by 45 minute boardwalk through the jungle. The main cave is massive (about 1 km long by half a km wide) and is home to both bats and swiftlets and therefore full of their guana (droppings). The guana when collected provides an income to the local people. The swiftlets also make birds nest from their own spittle and these are are collected for the famous bird's nest soup.


When I visited before, twenty seven years ago, we only went this far. The cave is an important prehistorical site where human remains dating to 40,000 years have been found. This time however we ventured further to the Painted Cave that (surprise) has some cave paintings (at least a 1000 years old) and the remains of some wooden 'death boats'. The caves were used for burial purposes.

To get there we had to go through part of the cave which was pitch black. When the book said 'bring a torch and good walking shoes' they meant it. We walked for about 15 minutes in absolute darkness up and down some very slippery boards and steps with the BIG spiders and the bats for company. Out in the light there was another board walk to the Painted Cave. I can't honestly say that all this effort was worth it for the paintings themselves, as they were fairly faded and behind a fence. After a short break here, where we lamented our decision to only bring three bottles of water, which were now empty, we made our slow way back to the main cave. It was a hard slog in that heat but definitely worth the trip.

The following day, I dragged Cliff and Liam around all the old places in Miri that I remembered and that were still standing. We managed to find the old meat, veg and fish market and the place we used to pay the rent for our house, although the office is now a cafe. So we stopped for a drink.

On the morning of our departure, three nights later, we had a really good lunch at a cafe around the corner from our guest house and Cliff was trying to get us not to watch the tv, calling us zombies (well, it was showing the last ten minutes of Mrs Doubtfire!).