Jungle or Coral Islands?
At first Miri looked bad. Then it looked good, with the sun setting across the spit of sand which separates the ‘Highlands’ backpacker lodge from the beach. I thought I’d catch the sunset. I had just finished catching up with the blog—which took 2½ hours—my clothes were in the wash and the showers were hot. Time to relax.
It looked bad again when I discovered that the advertised beach bars were actually off the map and not on square ‘A4’ as indicated. By then I had walked my feet bloody, trying to get to the beach which was inaccessible across the Miri River.
It was Saturday night. A Christmas procession wound its way down the road to the sounds of carols and the shimmer of lanterns. It made me think about two things: Christmas comes early here and there are a lot of Christians in Miri, but very little beer. Most of the food places had already closed by seven. I managed to get a horrible soup in one of them, accompanied by iced water, and went in search for a bar that wasn’t seedy or on the top floor somewhere. I found it directly underneath the hostel.
One good thing was meeting Captain David there, the Kiwi pilot who co-runs the hostel and flies Twin Otter planes all over Borneo. He told me about ‘positioning flights’—he will do the grand round of Kota Kinabulu-Kudat-Pulao Banggi (an island right on the northern tip of Borneo)-Sandakan-Tawau and back to KK on Monday and be back by early afternoon. P. Banggi is a positioning flight: hardly anyone ever goes there, but they have to pick people up. They are dirt-cheap. The whole trip to Tawau would cost me only 10RM more than taking the bus from Kuta Kinabulu to Sandakan.
“Are you in KK Monday morning?”
I didn’t understand—was he inviting me to come along?
Indonesia suddenly seemed close enough to touch, but all this flying business was making me restless.
“It is beautiful,” he pressed on: “just take a look at some of my pictures on the computer upstairs. And from a Twin Otter, going at 50 mph and not flying very high, you can see everything.”
As I said: restless. But I hadn’t even enquired about flights yet. Miri is the gateway to the Kelabit highlands and close to the world famous Niah Caves and Mulu National Park. I was dithering about stopping over.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to run through the jungle any more. I wanted to be on a coral island. And my visa period is ticking away—Indonesia beckons. I want to get away from all this noise and the tourist circus, but I should at least try to see the caves. A group of Dutch people had booked a van out there tomorrow, perhaps I could join them, then fly to Lawas on Monday as originally planned.
So I declined and David bade his good-byes, leaving me to smoke my cigarettes to the rock’n’roll beat from the bar (there is no smoking upstairs) until a drunken man sidled up to me and tried to chat me up, thinking himself clever. The cool ‘On the Road, Go where the Wind Blows’-feeling shattered instantly and I scurried back to the air-conditioned safety of the hostel upstairs.
There was no sign of the Dutch that night or the following morning. I waited in the dark, cool lounge for two hours from 8 am, then gave up and went to get breakfast and book my flight. The Niah caves are almost impossible to reach by public transport, especially in a day trip, and I wanted no more delays. I wanted out of Miri as quickly as possible.
The only available seat was for the 8 o’clock flight to Pulao Labuan on Monday morning. I took it.
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Denni