Chinese New Year at the Boat Club – More beaches! – Brown Peter

The Lion dancers finally arrived at the Boat Club this weekend. All week they have been spotted going around shops and businesses dancing and making a VERY loud noise to scare away all evil spirits and to bless the business for the coming year. The same thing happened at the Club with a band of drummers first giving a pretty good drumming demonstration and then some very fit and acrobatic Lion dancing not only on the ground but on high poles as well. The 2 lads that did the lion dancing were very talented and I have to say in a very cheesy way, "drew gasps from the crowd as they leapt from pole to pole"!

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Then 2 further lions retired to the bar to entertain the kids a ilittle more and play very, very loud cymbals and drums for what seemed like a very, very long time. Howard and I retreated to the beach with a beer!

Sunday saw us doing a little more exploring of the beaches around. Golf was cancelled for Howard as the course at Eastwood was water-logged (it had rained most of Saturday). Hawaii Beach and Bungay Beach look pretty good! I found some nice shells on Hawaii Beach.

And Howard finally got to do a bit of off road along the cliff top!

And girls, look what we saw as we were getting a takeaway for our tea – a Brown Peter!

Trip to Lambir Hills - Hawkers Market

Set off with great excitement on Friday morning – our first trip out into the countryside. Only a really short drive – about an hour - to the Lambir Hills National Park but we actually drove past that to the Borneo Rainforest resort. New and not yet officially opened we were a bit apprehensive about what we might find. First thing was an off road drive to the hotel – glad we had the 4 wheel drive!

However hotel very nice and our little chalet was nicely appointed as they say, tucked away in the trees. We had a very pleasant if uneventful stay with actually very little wild life to see, but lots of rain! The Night Safari that we had signed up for was cancelled due to the rain. Food was disappointing – funny that as everywhere else we have found has such fantastic and cheap food. So not sure we will return to the resort, but as our first experience of adventure outside Miri on our own it was good. We will certainly return to Lambir Hills.

My book curling in the damp - imagine what our forefathers thought when they came to the Tropics with no a/c?!

Feeding fish - view across the forest - Howard at our chalet door

On Saturday we set off looking for a bit more adventure back into the National Park itself but the trails were closed because of the still continuing rain so we just headed back to Miri itself. Once we got back to the coast it dried up and we headed south looking for a nice beach we had heard about. Found it or nearly it but the sea was rough and we had no children with us desperate to swim so we happily hunted for shells and headed home.

We went to eat at the weekend hawkers market and that really was exciting. Loved everythgin we bought but we were very conservative. Maybe we’ll try the fish the next time!

This is suger cane being crushed and the juice saved and sold as a drink.

And finally on the way home we came across the Egg shop – selling only eggs!

Rain and Chinese New Year

I know this is the Tropics but I am still amazed at the amount of water that can fall at any one time! Like yesterday when I took Howard to work at 7 in the morning. There was a vast amount of water on the road and the wipers were having a hard time handling it. Between that and traffic coming the other way I was glad to get home again. One of the (watery) photos to try and illustrate what I mean:

Today in Chinese New Year and thus the start of a 4 day holiday here. Howard and I wandered down town last night to see what was happening but it was all very quiet so early on in the evening with shopkeepers simply closing up shop early. It was much later when we were home that things started hotting up! First of all it sounded like we were under sporadic mortar attack (what size are these fireworks?) but by the end of it we were in a fully fledged Dutch New year firework extravaganza – with the house literally shaking with some of the larger ones. And me? Well Howard could hardly believe it but I slept through the entire thing!

This morning (grey, rainy but warm – 29deg) we went out to examine the damage but everything was quiet and orderly again – amazing! Anyway we stopped at one of the templates which had giant joss sticks burning outside. Here's some shots but as you can see we parked the car in the wrong place with the windows open – it was full of smoke by the time we got back to it. Well, no evil spirits in the car this year!