la v and jak travel the world

July 8, 2006: Rubber trees, palm oil, pottery, and the Sunday Market (on a Saturday)

Saying goodbye to the lovely peacefulness of Batang Ai was a hard thing to do, but after a last breakfast on the veranda, we boarded our bus and headed back to Kuching. Along the way, we stopped first at a rubber plantation to see the workings of one of the leading industries in Malaysia. Small spickets are driven into the trunks of rubber tress and a thin strip of bark is then peeled away, which releases drops of latex that drip into little bowls. The process seems long and arduous, but apparently, most of the rubber in the world is produced in the same way.

We also visited a palm oil processing plant, another leading Malaysian industry. Palm oil is compressed from the fruit of a certain type of palm, and the oil is used in everything from cooking food, to makeup to potentially biodiesel fuel.
Yet another stop brought us to a pottery place, where native artists create and sell their work. Jack took a stab at the pottery wheel and actually did pretty well until I demanded a tall, skinny vase, at which point the whole thing imploded and he was left with a short stump of clay.
We finally made it back to Kuching by 4pm and had the rest of the evening to relax and enjoy the city one last night. Our guide Thomas told us about the Sunday market, a vast, open air market lasting from 12 noon on Saturday until 12 noon on Sunday. We hired a cab for 8 ringgits (less than 3 bucks) which tooks us to the little maze of streets that consists the market. We immediately headed to the food aisle, an intense and crowded array of food stalls serving different types of curries, fried noodles, soup and satays. For dinner, we settled on mee sup (chicken noodle soup Malaysian style) and some chicken and beef satay, which were about 30 ringgit cents apiece (less than 10 cents!) The heat of the cooking food and the increasing crowds drove us to eat quickly and move on, so we headed to the vendors, which once again, sold everything from woven baskets, to dried fish to door hinges! Definitely a fun place to hang out and I imagine that it only became more crowded as the night wore on. We were back at the hotel by 10 pm to get ready for the next day, a full day of travel to reach Sandakan, a town in the neighboring state of Sabah, on the eastern coast of Borneo.