And So It Begins

The view from the room

Cats on a road island. What's interesting is that the word Kuching is the Malay word for cats, and there is also a cat museum tucked somewhere in Kuching

A dish of Kolo Mee. This one had chicken and mushroom topping, slightly deviating from the original barbequed pork version.


This adorable 'don'ts' signage was photographed through a window of a building that may someday become a pub. I thought it was too cute to be not shared ;)

It has been said before that a vacation every now and then, no matter how short will always make you feel better about life, and give you the push you need to move things forward, to work better and generally keep your sanity in check.

After some planning, reading countless reviews, worrying (unnecessarily, unfortunately), and having a mad Wednesday that seemed to move too fast for my own good as I spent it worrying about a lot of things, from the fact that the advisers date of arrival has been pushed forward to Monday instead of the original Tuesday, to the fact that I had not completed packing as well as the feeling you get right before embarking on a journey to the unknown - where you're excited and yet you can't help worrying if there's something which will crop up at the last minute and destroy all your not so carefully laid plans. I finally completed all the work I had to do at work, got back and finished packing my stuff for the trip. An unbelievably light bag induced more worries (like what have I forgotten?), but all was cool until I accidentally woke up at 4.00 am when waking up at 6:30 would have sufficed.

Anyway, Thursday morning turned out to be a good day for travel, nice weather, the train came in on time, everyone involved was there and seemed jolly enough and things in general seemed to be moving smoothly. Even the plane left the airport on time (this particular airline is rather famed for it's delayed flights)

Finally at about 1:30 pm we touched down in Kuching International Airport, and what was really funny was that the pilot announced that we had landed in Kuala Lumpur International Airport instead which was greeted with laughter from us, the passengers. Naturally he corrected his mistake immediately, but it was funny nevertheless.

The roads in Kuching looked immensely clean and the traffic flow was so smooth. Honestly I'd move there if I could just so that I can leave all the traffic jams behind. We checked in into the hotel at about 2pm where we met two others who were part of the travelling gang (they had travelled earlier due to their decision to book their tickets later) Leaving our bags behind, we hit the road in search for food armed with a small road map as we were very very hungry at this time. It turns out that most places close around 3 and it was already 3 pm by then. After several disappointments, we finally found a place that had local cuisine which was still open. The place is called Chenxiang and that was the first time I tried this dish called Kolo Mee (lit translation: Kolo Noodles), which every Sarawakian food blogger talks about. A friend of mine tried Laksa Sarawak (another noodle dish served in a bowl of curry)

The food was pretty good. More walking around later - as some of us needed to stock up on bottled water as yours truly had decided to ditch carrying water thinking that the water, aerosols and gels ban on aircraft also applied to domestic flights. Silly me! We continued walking and realised that the destination we were earlier looking for (the food court) was nearer to our hotel than we thought. We had just mistakenly entered the wrong street and circled the whole area on our first afternoon there due to missing the streets on the map!

We checked out the area, walked into the shops there, laughed at a bar called Latino, checked out Hilton which was just opposite our budget hotel (they were having a live band performance in their lounge which we decided to check out later that night), and finally went back to our rooms for a quick shower before heading out again for our evening plans.

To be continued