Kuching - Sarawak Cultural Village

After being picked up about 8am in the morning we headed north to the Sarawak Cultural Village which is about a hour from Kuching.

The Sarawak Cultural Village is a large area laced with paths and walkways and about 25 culturally significant buildings including traditional houses and meeting places for the cultural groups in Sarawak, including the Bidayah, Iban, Penan, Orang Ulu, Melanau, Malay and Chinese people. These groups have traditionally lived in different areas throughout Sarawak, and the cultural village brings them all together... for tourists to see...

I was a little worried the trip would be a bit boring at first, as I am definitely not overly into museums and things like that, and from what i heard this place was a bit like a museum, however i was happily surprised with how much we both enjoyed this trip. Definitely a must if you do not have time to travel around to all the different areas of Sarawak.

We spent the better part of two hours wandering around the buildings, each of which has representatives of the cultural group on site to give you a bit of the history of the group, and also several had stall which sold traditional goods including some clothing, jewelry and food. One of the buildings we visited was a village meeting place and there were real human skulls hanging in the centre. We discovered that this was from the " headhunters" which was a term used to describe the practice of village boys needing to get the skull of a man from another camp to become a man.... a practice which is obviously no longer undertaken!

The Melanu house was one of the most surprising. It resembled a colonial house, with more western looking carved wood furnishings. Not to sure if there was some influence here, but it stood out among the other houses which we mainly bamboo construction and had little or no furniture.

After our tour of the houses we headed back to the theater room, which ended up being a large modern amphitheater with very comfortable seats, and settled in for a 45 minute dance show which included traditional dances from each of the cultural groups represented at the centre. This was by far the highlight of the visit and some of the music and acrobatics of the dances were amazing.

Me on the bamboo bridge

and bec...

Awesome little green lizard we found!

One of the staff making musical instruments...

Carved monkeys from coconuts

Me having a go at blowing darts... quite easy surprisingly.

The Melanu house... very colonial looking.

Bec.... hard to find shade in the like 40 degree heat!

One of the several cultural dances.

Fairly large display of dancing. At some stages there were about 20 dancers on stage

Guy balancing on a pole... was pretty cool to see him climb up there.

These guys did a sort of hunt dance and then got people up on stage to blow darts at balloons.. was quite entertaining.