Kapit

The fact that I am posting this trip report in a few small chunks belies the fact that it was a mere day trip.

We reached Kapit at about 1.30pm. My first impression about the place was that it wasn’t that ‘ulu’ at all. It was in fact a small town. Maybe about the size of Tanjung Malim town centre. (If you’ve never been to Tanjung Malim you should go check it out. They still have railway gates with bullet holes from the Emergency and I was told it’s the best place for pau in Malaysia).

Bernard said that despite having lived in “these lands” for the better part of 22 years, he still has never been to Kapit. This was hardly surprising. Apart from the fact that there is no other way of getting here but by the river and by air, there isn’t much to see in Kapit. The jetty seemed relatively new and this was where people got off to get boats to go further interior (just who would want to do that?). There’s a school near the jetty but I suspect there must be a few more around the area. There is a post office, a few hotels, and a wet market that was quite bustling.

I think I figured out why I wasn’t able to upload photos for my previous post. For this trip I’ve tried shooting RAW with my Canon 600d. Just to try it out. There are a few advantages to shooting RAW; namely I can readjust the brightness, contrast and even the picture style later on. The problem is of course the file sizes are HUGE. While I can easily get around 1000 shots if I shoot high quality JPEG on my 8MB SD card, shooting RAW means I only get around 200+ shots. Plus the images are not readily usable until after post processing and converting them to JPEG (...). In hindsight, for a non professional who just wants noise free pictures to record my travels, I don’t find shooting RAW to be worth the trouble. In fact to upload them here I had resize these photos to less than 1% of their original size and quality so that I don’t have to tear my hair off waiting.

The town square is a tiled piece of land about the size of a football (soccer if you’re American) field. Apart from these decorative shields around it there’s a concrete tower with what I assume to be a sculpture of eggs in a basket.

On the way to Kapit, I saw quite a number of long houses along the Rajang. Some old, some new, some had parabolas on them, and I think I saw one flying the Singaporean flag. I didn’t know there were Singaporeans living in the long houses!!? (Maybe it’s just some Iban fellow with a fascination for Singapore... or flags.)

Even more so than Sibu, the main language spoken here is Iban. Although most of the street signs are in Malay or English, it belies the fact that hardly anyone here speaks either those two languages.

As I mentioned earlier, logging is a big thing around these parts.

I stopped by a restaurant near the roundabout in front of the SESCO building as I got really hungry after the boat trip. I had mee papan (which turned out to be hot plate noodles) and roti canai special (just because it had ‘Special’ in its name). It turned out to be just a big roti canai with sardines and egg inside. The sambal however, is worth mentioning. It’s sweet. Even sweeter than Kelantanese ‘akok’. It’s more like Thai chilli sauce than sambal.

It started raining right after lunch so I had to cut my wandering around short and return to the jetty. Fort Sylvia, which looks more like a kampong house than an actual fort is actually right outside the jetty building. It was closed that day.

These boats are the main means of going further up river. Good luck.

You are required to register your name before embarking on the ‘express’ (as the locals would call it) home. It makes it easier to identify your bloated corpse when they find it a week later if the boat decides to sink...

This Celcom Mobile Broadband thing is giving me headaches. If I seem to ‘binge post’ here every now and again it’s because I have to write my posts in Microsoft Word a few days earlier while waiting for a high speed ‘window’ to post them.