Sea Glass Kids: Adventures in Miri [Joshua Burke]

We arrived in Miri after a pleasant but wet two-day journey from Kuching. Miri City is just an hour drive from the border between Sarawak and Brunei. For a long time the city was just another town until they found heaps and heaps of oil reserves near the city. In 2005 Miri was accepted as a city of Malaysia and is prospering from the money the oil is bringing. We stayed at the Miri Marina. Like the cat is the animal of Kuching the sea horse is the animal of Miri. There is even a big seahorse lighthouse outside the marina!

Miri City

The first attraction we did in the city was the Miah caves. Aside from being an amazing cave site it was also a natural park. About a two-hour drive from Miri, the Miah caves are supposed to have some of the oldest human skeletons in Asia. Before we got to see the caves though we had to walk, a long walk through a jungle in pouring rain. Luckily we all brought umbrellas and you walked along wood boardwalk through the jungle. I saw no animals through the thick jungle vegetation but I heard weird noises.

The caves were mammoth and bats and swiftlets were everywhere! Also in the caves were wooden poles that people used to climb up to collect bird nests during the swiftlet breeding season. The workers worked on a single, narrow wood plank way up at the top of the cave. If you fell it’s game over. Talk about dangerous work! At some points in the caves there were so many bats that if you shined your light up at the roof many bats would fly away from the light beam. There were not as many scary creepy crawlies as I had seen in some caves but there were still some strange ones. This one grasshopper, or at least I think it was one, had antennas that were as long as it was!

Me in one of the many caves.

Giant cave.

Neat the entrance/ exit of the cave their was a dig site. They were digging up ancient human bones that were one of the oldest human bones found in Asia. The bones were 40,000 years old! The skull that they found in the cave looked very similar to a skull found in Tasmania. Maybe the humans in Sarawak migrated to Tasmania...or the other way around.

Miri well number 1 or the Grand Old Lady.

Another attraction we went to was the Petroleum Museum. Miri was home to Malaysia's first oil well and was named Miri well number one or the Grand Old Lady. The well first found oil in 1910. Thanks to the Shell Company, Miri realized that they had oil everywhere. The city was basically sitting on a huge oil reserve. Charles Brooke leased the areas that showed promises of oil to Shell for 75 years from 1909. During WW2 the Japanese took over Miri and the Shell workers suddenly found that they were no longer working for Shell, but the Japanese. Miri provided tons of oil and gas for the Japanese during the war. Miri is still pumping out tons of oil and the city has been getting lots of money from the industry. You can tell because of all the nice, new high rises and super malls being built everywhere.

At work for the Japanese.

Malaysia's fist offshore oil rig.

After the Petroleum Museum we went to the Mega Mall. There we saw the movie Home by Dream Works. It was an ok movie in my opinion. Mom also got me new Birkenstocks, which was a relief because my old shoes were causing blisters on my feet.

The Miri Crocodile Farm was amazing! The farm farms the crocodiles and sells the meat, skin and teeth of the crocodiles. You can even order crocodile meat at the restaurant they had there. Unfortunately we didn’t try some. We arrived at the farm just in time to see the crocodile feeding. A keeper threw in tons of chicken meat into a pen that contained about fifty crocs. It was amazing seeing the crocs fighting over the chickens and eating them. Aside from the croc farm there was also a zoo. At the zoo there was eagles, owls, snakes, goats, cows, you name it. I even got to hold a sun bear that was surprisingly soft and furry. I got to also feed goats.