Chif's crib - Miri

After the excitement with the chief et famile we were all in a hurry to get back to civilization, the irish boys had a flight to catch, and Robbie and I didn’t want to have to spend another night in Sibu, this in mind we asked the chief’s son if he could help us organise a taxi back into town, to which he replied that there was one already booked and on its way for 10.30, great we thought. So 10.30 came, and so did the taxi, we were just about to leave when a very sarcastic Italian woman started to make her presence known, turns out the taxi was actually for their package tour and so despite there being room in the van, and knowing they were stranding us there, the Italians got into there precious taxi and drove off, I am sure I saw smug smiles on all of their selfish Italian faces.

Panic over, about 10 minutes later a taxi arrived, he had actually been dropping someone at the village and was so willing to take us back into town for a cut price, bet that will wipe the Italians’ faces clean.

We arrived in Kapit with just enough time to grab some takeaway noodles and jump on the boat back to Sibu. We were treated to such quality motion pictures as ‘Night in the museum – 2’ and something with no English and lots of fighting.

To cut a long story short, turned out we could get to our next stop, the oil town of Miri that day, so we bid farewell to the Irish lads and jumped on the pus, not really thinking things through. We got on a 6 hour bus at 5.30, you do the math. Arriving in Miri predictably late even the schumacheresque driving of our cab driver could not get us to a hostel that was still open. Robbie and I were forced to seriously consider staying in a real hotel, shock horror. As it turned out our luck was in and at almost 1am we somehow stumbled into a lovely little hostel called Mita.

The plan had been to use Miri as a jumping point for Gunung Mulu national park, perhaps Sarawaks most famous tourist site and home to the largest limestone cliffs in the world. After a good nights sleep we walked to the tourist information, only to find that a trip to Mulu would not just stretch our budget, it would tear in to shreds and then burn the remains, Mulu wasn’t an option. There are however several other national parks in the region so we resigned ourselves to going to one of these instead. That night there were some world challenge kids in the guesthouse and they told us of the Niah Caves which sounded pretty cool. Then came a stroke of pure genius. We decided to buy a tent. The cost of camping in Niah is a fraction of a guesthouse. We managed to find the worlds worst (and cheapest) tent. Imagine one of those play tents for kids that you put in the garden, well it looked like that, but worse. I could almost lie straight in it, so spare a thought for poor Robbie. All said and done we loved it. Next morning we set off bright and early for Niah, very excited about our tent.