Day 14 (19/01/2011) Batu Niah – Miri

Waking up early in the morning is not a pleasure if you had an absolute rubbish sleep. The noise from the next door room drove us crazy. It seems like the hotel is actually a home for a large family of course with loads of kids. They only had an ice cold natural shower. Anyway…we packed up our stuff and checked out.

We were looking first for a car that could drive us to the 11km away junction where we planned to take the Bus to Miri. A lady next door told us there is not cab or other cars that would drive, the excitement grow…

Walking to the nearby petrol station we got informed that the streets are flooded and no car would drive through it but a man offered us to bring us to the point where the water started and that we could hop on a lorry that might be able to get over. Arriving at the flooded street there was no lorry anywhere. Standing there with our backpacks the locals around us started to joke that we could swim over…mmhh not really funny after a night like this and the problem that we might get stuck there. After a while a small boat showed up and took us on board to bring us over. Relieved at the other side we were looking for a car that brings us to the now only 10km away bus station, but nothing….so we started walking. We tried to stop every car that passed us, after a few minutes one of them actually stopped and we hopped onto the back of the car and enjoyed the natural air con.

The bus waited already at the station and started after a few minutes. Just over an hour later we arrived in Miri and got to the hotel safely. Dirty and wet we took first a nice warm shower.

We started exploring Miri by foot and went first to the Visitors information centre next to the local bus service station and started planning our day tomorrow. With Map and a smile we walked around and got at one point to a fish market, the smell made us both nearly sick so we left and looked for something to eat in a nicer area.

There is not a lot you can do in Miri town, most of the attractions are outside. So we only paid a visit to a flower park, which wasn’t really flowery and felt lucky to be back in civilisation. Starbucks was next on the list.

The evening was spend in an absolute great bar, called BARcelona and was a Spanish tapas bar on the Jalan North Yu Seng. At the beginning it was quite empty but was filled up with locals and expat very quickly. After a few beers we decided to call it a night and wanted to pay and SURPRISE someone paid already, looking probably a bit shocked we wondered who paid it as not many man spoke to us that evening. Two young man next to us, who didn’t talk to us or even looked at us the whole evening, actually paid the whole thing. Of course we wanted to know why and ended up in some nice conversations with them. Thanks again D. and T. :) We stayed until the bar closed and got home a bit more drunk than actually intended.

Tomorrow will be a new day and I am sure some more adventures will come our way.