I woke around 0600 and walked to the nearby Kuching Sentral Station about 30 minutes later to check on the availability of buses to Putussibau. From previous enquiry, BusAsia (Biaramas) will sell a single ticket to Putussibau but:
- puts you on their own bus (with destination Sibu) to Jelukong
- then arranges a pickup truck to take you to the border with Indonesia at Lubok Antu / Badau
- puts you on the DAMRI (Indonesian) bus at Badau to Putussibau.
I wasn’t sure if such arrangement was sustainable and I didn’t have high hopes for getting a ticket. The lady at the counter was uncertain and try to fob me off with a “come back later”, “ring the supervisor yourself to ask” but for some reason led me to another counter where the lady there organised the whole deal with a phone call and issued a single ticket for me. I did try to get an immediate departure but they couldn’t do it as it wasn’t enough notice to arrange the connections manually.
Yipee! I’m off to Putussibau in about 24h. In the mean time, I had plenty of time to kill. I changed rooms at my hotel as the air-con hadn’t worked properly. Then the serious work began for searching for accommodation in Putussibau and researching the best longhouses to visit. I managed to get a guesthouse by WhatsApp messaging which seemed better than any of the local hotels.
In the afternoon, I headed out for lunch with my friend Boo and the a wander around Kuching’s old Padungan district. He dropped me off at my apartment where I got a change of clothing so I didn’t have to handwash tonight.
In the evening, I used a Grab car back to the hotel where I grabbed dinner nearby and retired early.