‘A good omen’

WEDNESDAY this week, Miri saw a plane called Scoot landing at its airport to mark the beginning of an air service link between Sarawak and Singapore, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This maiden flight is a good omen: slowly, but surely, foreign tourists are coming to Sarawak via Singapore, to begin with.

Let’s hope that this is a forerunner of many more flights to come.

It has always been the conventional wisdom among the members of the hospitality fraternity that if the Sarawak-based travel companies could tap a fraction of the tourism market in Singapore, there would be a sizeable piece of the pie for Sarawak’s tourism industry.

Tourists from Europe and America bound for Bali used to by-pass us because there was nobody to lure them to our shores at the most advantageous junction at Singapore.

Our attractions are what the world tourism trade calls ‘niche’, where prices are generally higher than Bali or southern Thailand, but we can still try to divert at least a few of the eager travellers to Sarawak.

Government, hotel chains, tour agencies all have to be proactive – work with Singapore-based agencies to lure the visitors to turn to Borneo.

I would suggest that, initially, the state government should help any Sarawak-based tour agency with funds for setting up of basic promotional facilities in Singapore. In fact, not many years ago, Sarawak had such a tourist office there. There being no news about it lately, I don’t know if the Sarawak shop recently set up in the city is doing the job of luring tourists to Sarawak as well as selling our vegetables and fruits. I am being curious.

Singapore / Kuching / East Kalimantan

Once the new capital of Indonesia, Nusantara, is fully operational in East Kalimantan, my guess is that there will be work and business travellers flocking to the new city. From Singapore, they will fly all the way across Kalimantan, unless the tour operators at Singapore working with their counterparts in London or Amsterdam or Zurich or San Francisco or Beijing, have made arrangements for stopovers in Kuching.

Now here is a good chance for the local tour operators to work with the hoteliers to, through their world network, persuade those en route to Nusantara to spend a night or two in Kuching.

The financial benefits are obvious to all concerned.

Happy cruise
Meanwhile, what about attracting foreign and local visitors to Sibu and places of interest upriver? Not just upriver, though our new road system would make that possible, but by boat.

I am thinking aloud about a luxurious cruise ship like the RV Orient Pandaw in its day.

A dozen of years ago, tour companies used to take foreign tourists on river cruises on this quaint vessel, mostly trips from Sibu up to Kapit and down to Kuala Rajang.

For 10 days full of adventures in the steaming jungle of Borneo, always relieved by the quite luxurious accommodation and services on board, our visitors on the whole enjoyed the unique journey.

The Pandaw was part of a shipping company originally founded in Burma. When this previously ‘locked’ country was opened to the world again, tourism trade on the Irrawady boomed.

The Pandaw had to return to Myanmar to serve a more lucrative route than up and down the Rajang. For those people living along the banks of the Rajang, it was a sad day when the ship set sail into the sunset in March 2012.

Locally-built cruise boats

I am sure that the trips on the Rajang would continue to be popular with foreign tourists.

Elderly people like to visit exotic places in comfort and security, with not too much uphill trekking and spending the night in mosquito-infested tents in the jungle. And, don’t forget – one segment of the ‘grey market’ has money to spend! If the promotion is enticing and the service is good, they’ll come.

Calling local entrepreneurs with a bit of money to spare: are you prepared to invest in a leisure boat like the Pandaw? The ship can be built in Sibu, where river craft of every imaginable kind have been constructed for decades now.

These shipwrights should be able to build bigger boats with comfortable accommodation, not squashed-in seating with bags and bundles on everybody’s lap! Nice little launches, suitable for a cruise up and down the mighty Rajang. Good for tourism, good for the shipbuilding industry.

Tour operators taking their clients would be advised to familiarise themselves with the history of the places along it. A running commentary will be appreciated by the visitors – geography, ecology, history, the lot!

Foreign tourists intending to go on this trip rely on the brochures in several languages (German and French) for bits of information about the place that they visit.

I’m happy to note that the state government is doing its best in getting the foreign tourists back. There are a number of plans, some, no doubt, still in the pipeline, with which to attract tourists to Sarawak, Covid or no Covid.

Up the Sarawak river

I don’t know if there is a plan by the local tourism industry to take the visitors to the state by boat to Siniawan. It would be educational to listen to the tour guides telling about the history of the Sarawak River and Siniawan and of other sites visited and written about by the travellers during the Brooke regime.

Near Siniawan, there’s the famous mountain called Serambu where the first Rajah of Sarawak, James Brooke, had built a bungalow. On native customary rights land – by the way!

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