Patrick Comerford
Although Kuching stands on the banks of the Sarawak River, and for decades served as a working port and harbour, it is quite a distance from the sea. Kuching is built on a coastal plain with lots of rivers flowing into the sea, but it is about 15 km inland from the sea.
So, although we have been here since mid-October, I only had my first walk on a beach in Sarawak last weekend.
We had watched one or two races during the closing hours of the Sarawak Regatta on Sunday afternoon. But a long and steady shower of tropical rain throughout later in the afternoon, accompanied by a showcase thunderstorm, brought a dampening end to the regatta that had been going on all weekend.
It was our first wedding anniversary, and we thought we might celebrate with a romantic dinner in a nearby restaurant without walking too far or getting too wet.
But suddenly, later in the afternoon, the rains stopped, and it was possible to catch just a tiny glimpse of the skies between the dark and brooding clouds. On the spur of the moment, we decided to head north to the Santubong Peninsula and the slopes of Mount Santubong, and to go for walks in the sunset along the shores by the resort hotels facing out onto the South China Sea.
The Santubong Peninsula is cut off from Kuching by the Santubong River, and I had been in the area a few days earlier visiting the Sarawak Cultural Village. It took us 40 or 50 minutes to get back there late on Sunday afternoon, and we first stopped at the Damai Lagoon Resort.
Damai Lagoon Resort is a five-star resort between Damai Bay and Damai Beach and describes itself as the ‘Jewel of Sarawak.’ It was previously known as Damai Puri Resort and Spa, and before that as Holiday Inn Damai Lagoon, and it went through a major renovation and rebranding before reopening last year.
The tide was in and we walked along the hotel terrace and by the waves, looking out to the South China Sea. Although the cloud cover left us without a clear view of the sunset, we could see the Talang Talang islands off the coast and wondered about the marine park with its turtles – but it was getting dark and we would have needed a permit too, and lot more planning.
We then walked through Damai Central Permai Rainforest Resort, an eco-resort by the sea and under the rainforest covered foothills of Mount Santubong. The treehouses there mean guests can sleep among the rustling trees and wake to the sound of the sea lapping against the shore.
It was a five-minute walk from Damai Central to the Damai Beach Resort, with 90 acres of grounds by the sandy beach of Teluk Bandung, also facing the South China Sea.
It seemed like a long time since I had a walk by a beach or by the sea. My last beach walks had been during a short visit to Bray, Co Wicklow, last June, and before that when I was back in Crete in April, when I stayed in Rethymnon and also visited the beaches at Platanias, Panormos and Hersonissos and the sea at Iraklion.
Now I had not just one but two walks by beaches north of Kuching and facing out onto the South China Sea.
As dusk turned to darkness we decided to linger a little longer over dinner at the Damai Beach Resort before calling a taxi for the 45-minute drive back into Kuching.
On the previous evening, during the Eucharist in Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, Kuching, commemorating All Souls’ Day, one of the hymns we sang was ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’, written in 1870 by the Revd John Ellerton (1826-1893).
As we were returning to Kuching in darkness on Sunday evening, I kept thinking of one particular verse in that hymn:
The sun that bids us rest is waking
our brethren ’neath the western sky,
and hour by hour fresh lips are making
thy wondrous doings heard on high.
Two minutes on the beach at Damai Beach Resort at dusk (Patrick Comerford, 2024)
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