Kuching

I arrived in Kuching with a head cold and a misread bus schedule, which is to say I arrived exactly as travel tends to require — unprepared, slightly wrecked, and immediately grateful. The guesthouse owner handed me a bowl of Sarawak laksa before I’d even set my bag down. This is the thing about Kuching: the city has a way of feeding you before it explains itself.

The Waterfront and the Weight of the White Rajahs

The Kuching waterfront along the Sarawak River is not the kind of place that announces itself. There are no grand monuments, no tourist-board superlatives painted on walls. What there is: the slow drag of brown water, the Astana — James Brooke’s old palace — sitting ivory and improbable on the far bank, and a string of hawker stalls that do more business at seven in the morning than most restaurants manage all day. I sat at one of those plastic tables on Jalan Gambier and worked through a bowl of laksa whose coconut-and-sambal broth hit the back of my throat like something medicinal and necessary. Lia photographed the river. We didn’t talk much. Some mornings just want to be watched.

The old shophouses along Main Bazaar still carry the smell of dried goods and floor polish that British colonial architecture always seems to produce. The Chinese traders, the Iban weavers, the Indian textile shops — Kuching never fully resolved into any single identity, and that unresolved quality is what makes it feel genuinely lived-in rather than curated.

Semenggoh and the Unexpected Ones

I had expected the orang-utans at Semenggoh Wildlife Centre to feel managed, choreographed. I had prepared a mild disappointment. What I had not prepared for was a full-grown male, easily ninety kilos, dropping out of the canopy six feet from where I was standing and loping toward the feeding platform with the unhurried authority of someone who knows they are the most important person in any room. The rangers called him Ritchie. He did not look like a Ritchie. He looked like a force of nature that had simply agreed, for the moment, to tolerate an audience.

The Semenggoh forest is secondary growth — the trees are not ancient, the jungle is not pristine — but in the early morning, with mist still sitting between the dipterocarps and the calls of rhinoceros hornbills carrying from somewhere unseen, none of that distinction mattered. The place was alive in a way that rearranges your sense of proportion.

Evening at the Riverside

By dusk we were back on the waterfront, eating satay from a vendor near the Square Tower, the skewers of chicken and pork arriving faster than we could finish them. A man beside us was feeding scraps to a cat — the city’s name supposedly derives from the Malay word for the animal — and the river had gone copper in the last light. Kuching earns its evenings.

When to go: The driest and most comfortable months fall between June and September, though Kuching is worth visiting year-round — plan around the Rainforest World Music Festival in July if the calendar allows.