Malaysia to Singapore to Australia

I spent another few days in Kuala Lumper... eating nice food and relaxing...
Caught a bus to Singapore and then a train to the airport so I could get on a plane to fly back to Darwin, Australia.

Here is the site for my next blog going through Australia...

http://www.craig-vermeulen.blogspot.com/

Sarawak

Finally got into Miri and found a place to stay for the night.

We went to Niah caves and walked about 10ks on this day... Stayed the night in a fairly nice cabin in the national park...

Next day travelled to Bintalu.
While having breakfast at the junction I saw a strange prehistoric turtle in a fish tank...

There was some some strange fruit here too so had to try that...There is not a lot in Bintalu but had a good feed and a few beers. There was a bike festrival on and there was the usual cook up with lots of smoke...Left next day across some ranges by 4WD (179ks) via logging roads (four and a half hours) to Belaga. This is looking down on Belaga (with a rain storm) on the way in.. It is a small inland riverside town with about 2500 people. Not a lot to do here but an ok spot to relax for a bit.
Left a couple of days later on a long boat to Kepit (the next main town down river) ....
Here is mum sitting on top of the boat... 155ks down a river by boat and down through some of the Sarawak inland....

Here is an old totem pole out front of a longhouse...

The people make really long houses where up to 100 families (up to one thousand people) live in them. This is one of the longhouses from the boat... Through some rapids (Window photo)...

Not a lot around Kepit but we had a look at an old fort and the museum and just walked about and had some good foods. This is on the river front in Kepit...

One more boat and we were into Sebu for a night...Found a pretty good friendly Chinese lady who ran a good eatery here.. very nice chicken and veggies.Here are some chickens ready to take home...Got another boat from Sebu to Kuching...Didn't think much of Kuching at first because we walked into the older part of town and it was a bit dirty. Ended up walking along the river for a bit until we walked into the new part of town.. not bad really...There is a lot of good food here, lots of veggies and some pretty mean Malaysian curries... unfortunately it is the same as the rest of Malaysia, cooked in a lot of heavy oil (It might be Palm oil, not sure). I will have to have a cholesterol check up when I get back to Australia.
On the other side of the river they have an old run down fort....There are easy day trips out from here too.
Went to Gunung Gading National Park and saw a Raffesia flower (Meant to be the biggest flower in the world although this one was only about 400mm diameter....We also did a bit of a climb up a hill... to a bit of a view point looking back towards Lunau...Went to Semengok Nature resrve where they have more Orangutans...

Brunei

Beaufort.
Got in here late in the afternoon and found the worst place I have ever stayed at in my entire travels. The room was smokey, there was no hot water, the TV had 1 station which was fuzzy and there were cigerette burns in the carpets. There were some burger boys at the front door who made a stuff up with our burger order and gave us too many burgers and they were not even eatable.
One good thing in town was a nice satay house across the street.

Caught a bus next morning to Memonbok and changed over to a small boat for a rough water crossing to Palau Labuan...

Palau Labuan port...Waited in Palua Labuan for an hour or so and caught the next boat out for Brunei...
Mosque on the way into Bangar Seri Bagawan...Found a couple of OK places to stay in Brunei for reasonable prices which was a bit surprising since the Brunei $ is close to the value of th Astralian $.
There are some nice buildings and Mosques in Bangar...
We went for a river trip one afternoon...This is a heap of houses on the water on the opposite side of the river to the main city centre...These houses stretch for over 8 kms along the river and it is where most of the people live...Past the Sultans Palace...to see the Probiscus monkeys (they have very big noses)...They did not come real close to us but there were a lot of them in the trees around the area.
Here is mum with her backpack on when we were leaving early the next morning...To catch an old bus...which we thought was going to be a straight forward trip crossing the border into Sarawak.
Going past some oil fields on the way...We ended up riding on 5 different buses and had to cross a river in a little boat...It was apretty good day though.