Robert Tyabji, Shah Alam 2017, updated 2020
The 3-day Rainforest World Music Festival (RWMF) held annually in Kuching, Sarawak, celebrates the diversity of world music with daytime music workshops, cultural displays, craft displays, food stalls, and main-stage evening concerts. The festival has been awarded one of the best 25 world music Festivals by Songlines for six consecutive years, 2010 - 2015. The festival features a wide range of performances from traditional to world fusion and contemporary world music.
We attended three of these events, in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Each was a treat for ethnic and world music types like us.
The festival is held in the grounds of the Sarawak Cultural Village located 35 km north of Kuching. Activities take place in and around the traditional houses of Sarawak’s many tribes, within the pristine rainforest. Workshops with the performers are organized every afternoon while the main performances happen on two main stages nestled against the base of Mount Santubong and against the very edge of impenetrable tropical jungle. This must be among the world's finest natural music venues!
While every continent is represented, it's worth noting that Sarawakian musicians were given some prominence - after all, theirs is a true rainforest society! The mellow, spiritual notes of the Sarawakian sape, the traditional 3, 4 or 5-string lute of the Kayan and Kenyah people, the amazing nose flute and the percussive world beat fusion of musicians jamming on native Sarawakian instruments in the stirring ambience of that unforgettable setting makes for a truly unique experience.
Our house guests came with us twice to the festival, first Bob and Susan and then Clara, Tony and Qais. Bob, a keen musician and festival-goer himself, noted that this was the best music festival he had ever been to.
Right next to the Sarawak Cultural Village is the Santubong Holiday Inn (now called the Damai Lagoon Hotel), an airy 3-storey hotel and bungalows set in sprawling grounds with a huge meandering swimming pool, set by a quiet, sandy private beach. This was our preferred residence for the festival plus a few extra days to explore the surrounding countryside and the Bako National Park nearby. On one visit to Sarawak with Michel, Adil and Tariq, the four of us climbed four hours to the peak of Mount Santubong for panoramic views of the entire area.
With Clara's permission, I am reproducing below parts of her letter about the festival...
"...the main event of this part of our journey was to go to the Rainforest Music Festival in Sarawak. R & H have been three years running, and we’d wanted to go with them last year but couldn’t make it, so were very keen to join them this year and the timing was great. So back onto Air Asia (boy is that a low-cost carrier that Virgin could learn from! No bullshit, just get them there on time and very very cheaply!) We flew into Kuching (Cat in Bahasa; finally, I was at home in the City of the Cat!) which is a great little town, just declared by the WHO as a model healthy city. It’s based around a corniche that wends its way down a riverbank (Sarawak as the rest of Borneo also is crossed by huge, brown meandering rivers) and is also a very Chinese city 30% of the population. So very interesting...
"We didn’t really have time to hang around, but headed straight out to our hotel, the Damai Lagoon which is about half an hour out of town but right next to the festival venue. Sarawak is amazing, so much nicer than Kota Kinabalu everyone! Go there!
"The resort hotel isn’t anywhere to the standard of the Shangri La that we stayed in in KK last year with Mike & Mel, but it’s nicer than Nexus Mel! It’s got a great beach, nice pools and the rainforest setting under the bulk of Mount Santubong is to die for. Cheap too ... And if we’d thought we’d seen dense jungle in West Malaysia on our trips to Cherating or even to the elephants, this was NOTHING to the density of the jungle here in Sarawak. We’ve all read about impenetrable jungle, well folks this was it. You literally cannot see more than a few inches off the side of the road. You’d literally need to hack your way through, the growth is so dense. Every square inch has something growing on it, even the plants are covered in other plants – it’s just unbelievable. You can understand why the rivers become the major highways; you just can’t travel through this level of jungle. We’ll definitely come back here for longer next time to explore. There are resorts (fairly spartan I’m sure) up river, and we’d love to climb Mt Santubong amongst other things such as shopping for antiques both Chinese and from Borneo ...
"Anyway, to the main point which was the festival! It was fantastic. It’s a world music festival, with artists from all over the world. The crowd was very international also, with heaps of young groovies from KL but a really eclectic mix of ethnicities and ages! Highlights for us would have to have been Shannon (sounds so weird but they’re a Celtic group from Poland (!!???) who had the most fantastic sound! great rock musicians with bagpipes and flute who come on in kilts and bare chests and tatoos galore, yes I know, sounds truly strange but they were VERY good! Also. some amazing singers from Mongolia, an extraordinary gypsy band, some stunning Iranian drummers; a troupe from the Cote D’Ivoire who were just amazing, very professional and incredibly athletic (read spunky); fantastic Pakistani qawwali devotional singers, and of course artists from Sarawak itself. And even, drumroll please, a trio called the Old Spice Boys from Byron Bay! (know them, Phil?) Of course ... the venue is absolutely wonderful, it’s a natural amphitheater in the rainforest where they build 2 stages, one big and one small. The music only goes from 7 pm each night for 3 nights, so it’s not too much to take, you’ve got the days free to explore or just relax, it’s extremely civilized and very well run as they rotate acts from stage to stage so there’s no down time between performances. We’re already planning our trip there next year from the 7th to 9th July if any of you want to join us, and we recommend that you do!!!! R & H reckoned the lineup wasn’t QUITE as it had been in past years, but still was an excellent event. And Qais enjoyed it too, as his first major music event, so that was a good thing too. He probably preferred the blowpipe he bought from the longhouse, but that’s another story, thank goodness we don’t have any poison frogs here in Oman for him to experiment on or else I’d be worried about the local feral cats ...
"So back to KL for the last few days of our holiday. A bit of shopping, some more sightseeing around KL itself ( a trip to the Royal Selangor pewter factory which we thought would be pretty naff but actually was really interesting!) and now as I mentioned before I write this on the plane heading for Dubai and Muscat. We have collected the most amazing amount of baggage ... stuff for the house including two large bamboo mats for the TV room from Bali (always knew we’d find another use for that board bag one day!!!) and it’ll be really nice to be able to put them into place and spend a bit of time being at home."
