Simply simian

We arrived in Kuching, capital of the Sarawak side of Borneo, in darkness and were welcomed into Nomad, our home for the week.

Nomad is like a big house-share: a large living room scattered with giant cushions where inhabitants can sprawl out in front of the giant TV , a grubby little kitchen for making tea and toast, and free pancakes every morning. Chris, the tribally-tattooed owner, is like a kind uncle and his friends are all smiles and laughter.

We spent a couple of days ambling around Kuching, concluding that there wasn’t really much to do. There were some quaint old Chinese buildings, a riverside esplanade and a buzzy little Indian street but, shockingly, no Indian restaurants. Everything seemed to be shut for Ramadan so it was Chinese or nothing.

Oh, apart from Top Spot, a huge and bustling food court specialising in creatures of the sea, discreetly located at the top of a multistorey car park. We tucked into some delicious pomfret and prawns among the madness up there.

The real fun is to be had outside the city where the apes and monkeys live, so we went to visit the orang utangs in their post-rehab jungle playground. They’re amazing, orang utangs. Their name means ‘people of the forest’, and they really do look like people in orange monkey suits, swinging between the trees with their big hairy arms and stuffing bananas in their mouths.

We spent a night at Bako National Park, a pastel-coloured wilderness by the sea inhabited by bendy-nosed proboscis monkeys, ugly bearded pigs and cheeky macaques. We did a few short treks through the jungle, ending at twinkly little coves and cliffs. A night walk brought us to glow-in-the-dark mushrooms, snakes, a sleeping kingfisher and a sodding rainstorm.

Heading out for a walk at dawn, I was eating a small packet of biscuits; suddenly a stern-faced macaque leapt out in front of me and glared. I threw my biscuits at him. Mugged by a monkey.

We caught a bus out to the seaside and kayaked around a pretty jungly coast, all these little islands shrouded in mist and sea-sparkles in the distance. We found a teeny little soft-sand beach so stopped to frolic around there for a bit, then went back, sat in a cafe and watched the most ridiculously amazing luminous orange sunset ever while monkeys clambered around on the roof.

All monkeyed out, we jetted off to Singapore, our final Asian destination.