miri

This is the write-up of my trip to Miri, which is an hour’s flight
from Kuching. This is a business trip so I didn’t have time to go look
around the city much, but considering the limited time, I’m glad I
managed to visit as many places as I did. We went straight for the
presentation upon touch down on Miri airport (which looks remarkably
like a small scale version of KLIA).

Miri has changed a lot since the last time I was here…there’s a
lot of new structures coming up. This is all in line with her aim of
becoming a Resort City by 2005. I only managed to see a bit of the old
part of town (Miri is built like a satellite town, with multiple
satellites) after the presentation.

There is this sign on a hotel that says The Oil Town
which is what Miri is famous for – the petroleum industry. There has
been a change to concentrate more on tourism in the past decade or so
though.

I had lunch at Miri Taiwan Restaurant after the
presentation. This was where I met Joanne, and she asked me what I
ordered, and I said Mah Jong Noodles and she told me it doesn’t taste
good and told me what the specialty dish was, but I promptly forgot to
change my order as soon as we got off the phone. Must have been the
Xanax. :p

I ordered Drunken Lady for the drink, which is a concoction of fruit
juices. No alcohol though, blatant false advertising. 😉 I appreciate
the thirst quenching nature of the drink though, that day in Miri was
hot and I was in a suit!

This is the Mah Jong Noodles that I ordered. It’s not as bad as I
thought, but I wouldn’t call it good either. It was alright, that’s all
I can say. It’s a noodle based dish with gravy underneath and neat
piles of very thinly grated cucumber, carrots, and water chestnut
together with shredded fried eggs.

It was straight to a site survey after that, which took most of the afternoon, and I managed to visit the Miri City Fan
in the evening. Miri City Fan Park is dubbed as an “award winning fan
shaped (aerial view makes it look like a fan) sculpted park”. It looks
remarkably similar to the Suria KLCC park…

This is the Formal Garden, which has a fountain in the middle of it.
It’s carefully planned and developed with pathways lined with well
maintained brushes. It marks the beginning of Miri City Fan park (the
top most part of the fan).

Pustaka Miri, which is an IT library of sorts, stands beside it with
its imposing architectural design. It is also known as the Miri
Resource Center.

The Chinese Garden flanks the other side of the Formal Garden.

The Miri City Fan park has several themed parks and this is one of them. It has a lot of water and shrubbery native to China.

There are two small bridges to cross the pond in this garden, which leads to…

…a Chinese temple of sorts.

This is the Garden of Vision, which is supposedly the largest amphitheatre in Malaysia.

It has wooden seats molded into the grassy surface and the acoustics
is supposed to be very good for an amphitheatre of this scale, if what
the brochure says is true.

This is the Musical Fountain at the back of the Garden of Vision. It
wasn’t on when we were there; I think it only operates at night.

This is the “tip” of the Miri City “fan”. Think of the fans you see
at satay stalls and you get what I mean. It’s called The Civic
Promenade and marks the end of the Miri City Fan. You can see the Miri
Civic Center building at the back, the Miri City Fan park is not as
large as I thought.

The Civic Promenade is flanked with walls of sculptured art.

It features various scenes, the most relevant of all being this one showing the petroleum industry depicted in clay.

There’s a plaque under each molded scene. This one says “The scene
of early discovery of petroleum in Sarawak and the traditional way of
petroleum processing”.

The last part of Miri City Fan that we visited is the Islamic Garden.

The main feature of this garden is this mosque dome structure.

The stained glass panel has an interesting display of lights at the right angle.

Next up, we went to Canada Hill, which overlooks
the whole of Miri (coastal and town areas) and has an important bit of
history attached to it to boot. I’ve wanted to visit this place and
wasn’t sure there was time, but as luck would have it, we still had a
couple of hours to burn before our flight. This was the last place in
Miri we visited before getting a seafood dinner and flying back.

Meet The Grand Old Lady. This is the first oil well in Malaysia and it’s located on Miri Canada Hill.

I’m glad I managed to take a photo of this one. The 1st oil well in
Malaysia is depicted here in all of its glory. There’s a lot of detail
to this structure.

There are four clay dittos straight out of the kiln machine which
pictures the way petroleum was obtained in the old days. There are two
people on each side of a pole who manually turns it around for drilling
into the earth for oil.

Well, actually, there were three on one side that day, thanks to yours truly. I’m just doing my part, sharing the workload, being a team player and all that. 😉

There are also moulded depictions on the walls of The Grand Old
Lady, which depicts petroleum mining throughout the ages. Historical
stuff, basically.

There is also a mechanism of some sort, which was used back in the
old days of petroleum mining beside The Grand Old Lady, as the Miri Oil
Well Number 1 is fondly dubbed.

There are also concrete seats on Canada Hill which allows people to
sit and see the coastline of Miri as well as the entire town. You can
actually see the entire city of Miri from up here; it’s supposed to be
the tallest point in Miri. Here’s a video clip of the view from Canada
Hill in Miri:

Download: Miri scenic view [sixthseal.com]

It took all of my willpower not to make a calm running commentary
and then suddenly shout at the top of my lungs: “OH MY GOD, THERE’S AN
INCOMING TSUNAMI!!!”

I badly wanted to do that, but I was with my CFO and his friend and I doubt they would find it as amusing as I would. 😉