Kutching, Malaysia

We arrived in Kutching on 27th March. We were staying in our last Tune hotel of the trip in a really good location, just off the Waterfront - Kutching is situated on the Sarawak river. We were directly opposite the Hilton. Our hotel leaflet actually urged us to go and hang about in the Hilton's reception to boast to their guests about how little we were paying in comparison :)

This hotel, like many other places we've stayed at do not allow guests to bring in two kinds of fruit to the rooms, namely Durian and Mangosteens. And you can understand why. The juice of the Mangosteens is an inky purple colour and stains everything it touches. The Durian's consistancy has been compared to custard, the smell like old socks and over ripe cheese and the taste like vomit. But they are for sale all over South East Asia so someone must like them.

There are many statues of cats in Kutching. The unlikely story goes that when Rajah James Brooke arrived in Kuching along the river, he asked his local guide what the settlement's name was. The guide, thinking that the English adventurer was pointing towards a cat, said 'Kuching' - Malay for 'cat'. And the name stuck. Or something like that. But Sarawakian Malay for cat is "pusak" so this explanation does not hold much water. It might be a variation on the Indian name for 'port' - 'Cochin' - as the area was first settled by Indian traders.

We had three nights here and planned to do a lot of chilling out; the last couple of weeks had been incredibly hectic and we were all a bit exhausted. We'd all come down with a cold in Sandakan which we were struggling to shake. We had toyed with the idea of making a day trip to the Bako National Park to see the proboscis monkeys, but we were just too tired and also didn't really want to rush the park, which really needs more than just a day to do it justice.

So we did lots of walking (Cliff did a couple more early morning training runs - 6 and 10 miles) and eating. We found a really good place in Chinatown serving good Indian and Malay food. The day before we'd walked through Chinatown, and found it closed for the end of Chinese New Year. And we found a veggie place just up the road from the hotel. No meat allowed!

We went to the Natural History Museum because I'd read that Alfred Russel Wallace had been heavily involved in the setting up of the displays. Wallace was a British naturalist who is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution (that pushed Charles Darwin to publish his own theory). I'd been interested in Wallace since I'd done an essay on him for my OU course. But unfortunately it was closed for refurbishment, so we went to the art gallery and the aquarium instead.