Alexandre à Sarawak

Aujourd'hui, je vous propose de découvrir l'état malaisien de Sarawak, situé sur l'île de Bornéo.

Mais cette fois, c'est Alexandre qui prend la plume ... en anglais !

En effet, il y a effectué mi-janvier un voyage scolaire de 3 jours, et il a été chargé, avec 4 camarades, de rédiger un compte-rendu à l'attention de la direction du LFKL.

 

 

Kuching, City of cats

This trip is not like most trips, this is an educational trip where the 1eres discovered bits of Sarawak’s biodiversity, history and university life as well. The reason why, Kuching is called the city of cats is because of one, there a lot of cats in the area and two, when the Indians immigrated to Sarawak, they thought that it’s quite similar to one of their cities, Cochin. But every culture has its own version.

 

University

On the 13th of January, we students have arrived at 5 am, where we took the bus to go to KLIA 2. Our flight was at 8:20 and about two hours later, we arrived in Sarawak. Our first schedule for the day was to visit Unimas, a local university. We were warmly welcomed by Professor Soba, the school vice chancellor. They did a brief introduction of the university and to show respect, we also had some students do a presentation of our school.

 

 

We were very intrigued by Professor Niell’s presentation about his faculty. His focus is on amphibians and reptiles. He studies their behavior and use those data for numerous domains. For example, he observes the frogs call and determines whether or not the weather is good. Borneo is a great observation center thanks to its vast biodiversity.

At the end of his presentation, we asked a couple of questions. Here is an extract of the interview:

- “Since Borneo is a shared island, do you collaborate with the Indonesians on the researches you guys have done? (Student)

- No, well not exactly. We do collaborate from time to time because we have this language barrier between these two countries. The Indonesians don’t use English, unlike us which is a shame to be honest. Because I would like to collaborate more. (Professor Niell)

- What kind of education attraction do you guys offer to your students? (Student)

- Well first of all, I think that it’s really important to educate from a really young age, not only our students. And with that we offer a variety of events, one of them is in April called “save the frog day”. It consists of a small trek race (near a park in Kuching) where we try to find and especially observe the different frog species. Other that, we also have fun activities for the kids. (Professor Niell)

-What are your views on deforestation and dam construction? (Student)

- Bad. It is destroying the forest and is disrupting natural habitats. Replacing running water to standing water is really a bad change for the environment.” (Professor Niell)

After his presentation, another student, this time from the faculty of engineering, explained how the school is trying to create renewable and reusable energy from bio waste and to as well clean dirty water using coconut. Some are a success and are being marketed.

CULTURAL VILLAGE AND MUSEUM

Museum

 

On the second day we visited the national museum of Sarawak which showed all the different types of species that are found there and some information about Sarawak’s history and culture. Then we had a glimpse of the small aquarium next to the museum. Finally we left for the cultural village.

Cultural Village

After the museum visit, we went directly to the cultural village. We got a passport and we had to explore the site and different long houses to get a stamp. But before the exploration, we assisted a tribal dance and a small demonstration on how to use shoot a dart. For the closing act, the dancers asked people to join their dance. And so we did, it was hilarious and fun at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Bako Park

We took a boat from the Bako Jetty (Kuching coast) for about 20 minutes, travelling at a speed of 40 km/h, to go to the Bako National park which is the oldest national park in Sarawak, eastern Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. It covers an area of 27.27 square kilometers at the tip of the Muara Tebas peninsula at the mouth of the Bako and Kuching Rivers. It is approximately 40 kilometers by road from “Kuching”.

We slept in wooden cabins in the park where animals are free. We could find snakes, plenty of different types of flies, long-tailed macaques, silvered langurs or leaf-monkeys, plantain squirrels, wild boar and mouse deer are all found there. Bako also contains an incredible variety of plant species and vegetation types. At Bako it is possible to see almost every type of vegetation found in Borneo. 25 distinct types of vegetation form seven complete eco-systems - Beach Vegetation, Cliff Vegetation, Kerangas or Heath Forest, Mangrove Forest, Mixed Dipterocarp Forest, Padang or Grasslands Vegetation and Peat Swamp Forest.

 

That night we went on a night trek where we were told that we would see flying lemurs, pangolins, mouse deers, various bats, tarsiers, slow loris. Unfortunately we mostly saw spiders and snakes.

 

The next day we left in the morning to do a different trek, the Telok Pandan Kecil. We didn’t see anything except a centipede. The trail ended on a cliff overseeing the beach. We then took a small path leading to it where we all ended up in the water.

 

We came back to the hotel and ate and soon left to the airport.

This ended our journey.