Kuching, Malaysian Borneo: Night Market

July 24, 2010

Every Saturday night in Kuching, there is a night market that runs from 5pm Saturday to midnight, then from 5am Sunday to noon. It's probably the best market we've ever seen. It was so alive! It was filled with every possible kind of Asian produce, 200 kinds of dried fish, and they made special treats for you. Ken discovered fresh cane juice after we'd all stood transfixed by the cane juice maker feeding an entire sugar cane into his juice machine. Ken had a big smile on his face drinking it.

Ken's smile got bigger once he tried the Apam Balik which seems to be some sort of thick crepe covered in butter, sugar, and nuts. And, they had fish, rabbits, hamsters, puppies, and some thick gross-me-out worms for sale for seemingly for all the animals to eat.

Malaysian Hawker Stalls

Mom heard about some Hawker Stalls outside of our hotel in Penang and we decided to be brave and eat there. Why is it brave? Malaysian Street Food is famous the world over, but it's also known that your stomach takes a while to adjust to street food here. We were told we had to wait a month before eating Hawker food. We waited a few weeks. My parents, Patrick and Brendan only waited a few days.

The "Long Beach" stalls backed onto the beach, with stunning sunsets at night. All of the stalls surrounded a covered courtyard. Here's how you'd order: You'd go up to any stall -- the Assam Laksa soup stall, the Singapore fried noodle stall, or the Pancake Queen stall, for example, you'd place your order, they'd ask your table number, then they'd deliver the food, then you'd pay.

We all became such big fans of the "Singapore" stall that the stall chef actually said to Mom on our third night there, "Singapore again? You need try something new." Properly humiliated, we ventured to different dinners but we stuck with the same dessert every night -- Pancake Queen's pancake with fruit and ice cream on top (Grif preferred chocolate pancake with chocolate sauce). You assume you've had this before, right? No, you haven't! There's some magic to that pancake -- more fried, more butter, more something mysterious we haven't put our fingers on. But, each time the hawker's young son delivered the pancake and demanded his money, we didn't ask any questions.

The whole meal would cost each of us no more then $3 to $5.

Yesterday in Kuching in Malaysian Borneo, we hit another set of hawker stalls called "Top Spot," this one "higher end," meaning we paid as much as $6 each for our meal. In this one, we'd go up to the seafood stall and choose our fish, our lobster, our shrimp, ourselves! I even hand-picked the vegetables. Then we told them how we wanted them cooked -- lobster grilled with "bbq sauce," veges with oyster sauce, our grouper fish dubbed "Spottie" with garlic and ginger sauce. My god, it was so delicious that Ken had a smile pasted on his face the entire time, rare for a cynical New Yorker.

Borneo: Wild Orangutans

July 25, 2010

We've seen orangutans in zoos before, or so we thought. Each guidebook warned us that the orangutans often don't emerge out of the jungle for the feedings because these wild orangutans are free to come and go at Semenggoh.

Were we ever surprised to find an orangutan, before we even left the parking lot! It was a momma orangutan, feeding a banana to her baby up in the tree. Delima, she's called, was fiercely protective, it turns out. After we stood less than 10 feet from her and her baby, the keeper later told us that she had once bit him so hard that he needed 24 stitches. She tends to bite when she thinks she needs to protect her baby. The kids heard that story and repeated it amongst themselves for the next half hour.

Then a young girl orangutan swung along the ropes course, watching us watch her with a potato in hand, sometimes stopping to throw vines on the tin roof to make some loud noise and shake up the humans under the roof. Her favorite trick was swinging so she was in a tree above a human, then aim her pee down towards the human.

We went deeper into the jungle where the male orangutans were, 6 of them, including Ritchie the big Daddy of them all! They seemed to be all around us. Before we knew it, one had swung right above Ken then landed near me and Boom for his feeding from a keeper. Boom and I were right behind the keeper as he'd hand coconuts to the orangutan. The orangutan would then swing over to a palm tree and loudly crack the coconut against the tree.

Then, I noticed something I hadn't noticed before, we were surrounded by sounds of cracking coconuts, a regular symphony performed by the orangutans. As I watched, Boom started whining. The keeper turned around and did the only thing he could think of doing, he handed Boom a banana. At first Boom felt too sheepish to eat it. But after he started ripping into the banana, I quietly started freaking out, picturing the orangutan jealously swinging up to Boom to grab his banana back.

This is a video Griffin made with his camera of the girl orangutan: