Saturday, September 13, 2008

Kuching to Mukah from the Air - Part I

I had to visit Mukah recently for work. It was my first trip there, so was really looking forward to it. 

Mukah is a coastal town in Sarawak with a population of around 50,000. It used to be a major sago producing area. Lately - as in most parts of Sarawak, it is slowly transforming into an oil palm town.

To get to Mukah from Kuching, you take the rural air service provided by Malaysia Airlines, under their subsidiary called MasWings. As the Mukah Airport can't take the regular Boeings, they use the tiny Twin Otter which carry only a miximum of 20 passengers. There is also a maximum weight limit so if some of the passengers are bigger then normal, then they either have to reduce the number of passengers or get rid of some luggage. As it happened on that day, they removed all our luggage. The luggage was sent down to Mukah separately by land, and arrived quite late in the evening. 

The flight from Kuching to Mukah takes about 1 hour. There is no inflight service, as there was no room for flight attendants except for the 2 pilots in the cockpit.

One good thing about the Twin Otter is that it flies quite low - below the clouds, so you can get quite good views from the air. I managed to get some nice pictures eventhough the airplane windows added quite a bit of distortion and discolouration. With the magic of Photoshop, I manages to wring back some details from the shots.

The small Twin Otter.

View of the BDC Housing area.

The Tabuan Jaya Housing Estate - one of the biggest in Kuching. 

View of the Pending Industrial Estate, one of the earliest planned industrial estates in Kuching. In the foreground is the Isthmas, an area earmarked for future commercial developments. You can see the new Kuching Convention Centre under construction in the middle of the Isthmus.

View of the Samajaya Free Trade Zone - one of the new High-Tech parks set up by the government to attract foreign investments higher up in the food chain. 

View of Telaga Air which is a popular seaside recreational area. 

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