Marina ParkCity set to transform Miri City into a lively cosmopolitan city

MIRI: Spanning 550 acres with a 1.25-mile frontage to the South China Sea, Marina ParkCity master plan envisions a new and exciting business district that will double the size of the existing Miri City Centre.

Streetscape, parks, shady tree-lined walkways and civic anchors will be introduced to create a vibrant, thriving and compelling commercial hub that will redefine Miri’s urbanity.

“Our aspiration is to expand and transform Miri into an atmospheric city that puts people first. It will be a visionary model of liveability, vitality, sustainability and community with an enviable quality of life and flourishing businesses,” said Loh Poh Khim, deputy sales director of Pantai Bayu Indah, the master developer of Marina ParkCity.

In striving for excellence in city planning and design, the developer is collaborating with forward thinking international consultants from the US and Denmark renowned for their understanding and experience in shaping cities. Their collective contributions will shape Marina ParkCity into a humane and safe destination where people can shop, work, live, relax and walk from place to place.

Its tree-lined streets, lively squares and verdant parks will provide the stage for these activities.

“Miri deserves a waterfront so our response is a picturesque, active waterfront along the sea edge, transforming it into a picture-perfect postcard tourist destination,” Loh said.

Conceived as an inviting and charming promenade, the waterfront boasts of a kilometre long boardwalk, a central park and strings of linear parks where people can enjoy a leisurely walk or cycle or dine at restaurants while enjoying the views, the breeze and the sound of the sea.

ARCADIA SQUARE

Arcadia Square, fronting Jalan Kubu, is in the heart of Miri City Centre. It will be an appealing commercial venue with first class shops and offices. It is designed to be the top address for work, shopping, dining and entertainment, delighting visitors with its open-air environment that is safe for walking.

Here, imagination spurs innovation in the design of the first class arcade-fronting high street shops and elevated courtyard shops that connect patrons to public places and spaces.

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Good prospect for Santubong to be tourism hub

KUCHING: Santubong can become a tourism hub with the support of Chief Minister Tan Sri Datuk Amar Adenan Satem.

Santubong MP Datuk Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said this confidence stemmed from the fact that Santubong had various tourism attractions.

“Santubong is endowed with natural and beautiful environment and is rich with ecotourism products. Therefore it has the potential to be a tourism hub.

“I am confident that our Chief Minister will develop this area,” he said when launching the distribution of BR1M 3.0 for recipients in Pantai Damai and Demak Laut constituencies at the Malaysia Productivity Corporation (MPC) hall here yesterday.

He believed that if tourism is developed in the area, its infrastructure and social economy of the local community would also be improved.

“Since Tan Sri Datuk Amar Adenan is also a state assemblyman for Tanjong Datu, I am sure he will give his full support to develop Santubong.

“The previous Chief Minister Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud was able to develop Samarahan and Mukah districts and I am sure Santubong will enjoy the same development too,” he said.

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A World War II bunker in Kota Kinabalu?

Kota Kinabalu: Heritage Sabah said it has rediscovered the remnants of a WWII bunker and tunnel that lay hidden in the heart of the city for over two decades.

It said its volunteers uncovered the WWII bunker - believed to be part of an extensive network of secret tunnels used by the Japanese military forces in Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu) during WWII - while checking on information given by the public.

According to sources, the Japanese troops occupying North Borneo deployed tactical measures such as bunkers and tunnels in the hillsides of Jesselton as part of their strategic defence.

"The rediscovery of this wartime military shelter could shed further light on WWII history in Jesselton as well as be a potential tourist attraction for Kota Kinabalu, just like the Chu Chi tunnels", said Heritage Sabah President Richard Nelson Sokial, referring to the world famous war tunnels of Vietnam, built during the Vietnam War by the Viet Cong resistance against the US soldiers.

He said the bunker's passageway into the hill where it was located is currently blocked by soil erosion due to last year's torrential rains.

"What we plan to do for now is to clear the site of unwanted man-made debris and invite war historians and experts who can work with us to see how far this bunker's tunnel goes and how it was used", he said.

"We hope in time that we may be able to share more of our discoveries with the general public."

Heritage Sabah aims to create more public awareness and appreciation among Sabahans for local historical sites and buildings and has been actively retracing old trails and marking paths used by early Jesselton town folk from the pre-war and post-WWII era in an attempt to shed more light on the study of Kota Kinabalu's city history.

Back in the 1980s, the rediscovered bunker was known as a refuge for vagrants and drug addicts, leading it to be sealed off and its location forgotten for almost 26 years.

Heritage Sabah refuted any speculative rumours that the tunnels may yield some hidden WWII treasure, believing it is highly unlikely that there is any hidden treasure in there.

"The most valuable aspect of the WWII bunker rediscovery is that it exists as proof of past historical accounts of wartime events that occurred in Jesselton during WWII. Through the efforts of Heritage Sabah volunteers, we are slowly but surely putting together more pieces of Sabah's untold war history," says Sokial.

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Malaysian Borneo! : Sematan waterfall adventures!

So, with all that shopping, we really didn't see much of Kuching on our first few days there, just China Town and the water front board walk. Saturday morning we caught a city bus for 1.5 ringgit to the Central Bus terminal, then headed to Sematan, about half an hour from Gunung Gading National Park, famous for its “stinking corpse lily”.

Sadly, none of the Rafflesia were in bloom at this time, as they only open up once every seven years and usually after a hot spell.

We were met at the bus station/fish market by Dr Kelvin Chong, a big, happy glasses-sporting Buddha figure of a guy. As we pulled up to the small government-run clinic where he lives and works, we spotted an ambulance and several police officers standing around.

“Uh oh,” he said, “Looks like I need to go to work for a few minutes. You girls make yourselves comfortable! We'll go to the beach when I get back.”

A short time later, he came back up the steps to his big, pink, wooden house-on-stilts. “Suicide,” he said conspiratorially. “Not much I can really do about it, we need to send the body to Kuching. I don't have the right paperwork here. Let's get our stuff in the car and go to the beach!”

So we basically packed up all the items in his kitchen, rice cooker and wok included—everything but the kitchen sink, quite literally!

Kelvin showed us his favourite view and the really good beach resort where we could visit if we stayed longer with him, and then took us over to the beach.

We rented a little hut with electricity service and began to cook dinner after a little wandering on the sand.

The beach was nice but a bit dirty, lots of garbage washed up on shore. I brought my swim suit, but despite having just bought it that morning, Grace forgot hers in her luggage! I stalked off on my own in frustration, and calmed myself beach-combing.

I found a number of interesting shells and a sea fan, and then I found a snake.

Borneo is home to any number of poisonous creepy-crawlies, so when I saw the snake, sticking out of a hole in the high-tide line, my first move was to jump back as quickly as I could. It didn't move at the sound. I had a stone in my hand.

I threw it in front of the snake. It didn't move. I threw another and hit the snake. Nothing. Cautiously, I crept up for a better view. Some wise-ass had found a rubber snake and stuck it in a hole in the sand!

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Orang-utans in the movies

TV channels broadcast many American detective crime sagas like ‘CSI’, ‘Law and Order’, ‘Bones’ and ‘The Mentalist’.

They usually begin with a murder, followed by the hero and his staff solving the crime and then order is restored to society.

However, very few people know that this sequence of events in story form dates back to 1841 and involves an orang-utan.

The first crime short story was ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by the American horror writer Edgar Alan Poe, whose tales still send chills up the spine. He is acknowledged as the first to write the modern detective story.

The story is set in Paris where the unnamed narrator meets a bankrupt member of the upper class, C Auguste Dupin. He has been reduced to poverty but doesn’t really care as his only desire is to read books.

The narrator, also in similar financial circumstances, befriends Dupin and together they stay at a “time eaten, grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions”.

They leave the mansion and are walking down the street when they hear shrieks from a four-storey home. Thirty people arrive and break down the door.

They search the house and find the body of a young woman shoved up a chimney head down. The second corpse is found in the back garden nearly beheaded. All of the windows and doors are locked.

Dupin and the narrator draw the conclusion that the attacker is not human from the evidence collected by the witnesses’ statements. The victim has orangey-red hair clasped in her fist, plus the finger pods are not human.

A description of the orang-utan of the time describes “the ourang-outang (sic) of the East Indian Islands as of gigantic stature, prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are known to all”.

Dupin hands this description to the narrator and both agree the killer is an ape. An orang-utan is labelled as the murderer and the hunt is on to identify it.

Through an advertisement, a sailor recently arrived from Borneo said he had taken possession of an orang-utan from a hunter who had passed away. However, the orang-utan had escaped.

The ape had been hidden in a closest. The sailor surmises that the orang-utan had learned the human behaviour of shaving through observation and had tried to shave the girl, inadvertently cutting her throat.

Remembering the whip for past misdeeds, the ape then flies into a rage and kills the younger girl. To hide this hideous act, he stuffs the girl up the chimney and hurls the remains of the older one into the back garden.

The sailor is turned over to the police. The fate of the murderous orang-utan is a mystery.

A film (available on YouTube) loosely based on the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, was shot in 1932 staring Bela Lugosi (star of the first ‘Dracula’ film) as a lunatic scientist who extracts blood from an ill-tempered orang-utan and injects it into virgin abducted women.

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