Eight days in Borneo: Sarawak for the river, Sabah for the sea

The old town runs along the south bank for about a kilometre and it is the only stretch of riverfront in Malaysia left to pedestrians rather than sold to a developer. Start at the Chinese temple on the rise at the eastern end, which has been there since 1843 and predates almost everything else in the city.

Then cross. The boatmen work from wooden jetties all along the front, the fare is a ringgit, and the hull design has not changed in a century. On the far bank stands the fort the second rajah built to stop pirates coming upriver, and behind it a Malay kampung whose houses are painted the colours of boiled sweets.

Get up for the laksa. The famous shops open at about seven and sell out before eleven, and a bowl costs eight ringgit and is the best thing you will eat on this island.

Then the museum, which the second rajah founded in 1891 after Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent over a year collecting in Sarawak and worked out natural selection while he was here, told him a museum was what the place needed. It is the oldest in Borneo and it is free.

The city mosque with its gold domes is five minutes away and best seen from the water in the late afternoon, with the sun behind it.

Forty minutes north, under a mountain on the coast, seven full-size traditional houses have been built on one site: Iban and Bidayuh longhouses on stilts, a Melanau tall house, a Chinese farmhouse, a Malay townhouse. It reads like a theme park and is a great deal better than that, because the people demonstrating the blowpipes and the sago processing come from those communities.

On the way back, the city's own joke. Kuching means cat, and there is a municipal museum of four thousand cat objects on a hill inside the north city hall: porcelain, advertising, taxidermy, Egyptian replicas. It is completely sincere and it is the strangest hour in Sarawak.

Ninety minutes across the top of the island, with a passport check at each end because Sarawak and Sabah run their own immigration. Take a morning flight and you have the whole afternoon.

Start with the little that is left of old Kota Kinabalu. The clock tower on the rise behind Gaya Street went up in 1905 for a district officer who died of malaria at 28, and it is the oldest structure in the city, because in 1945 the retreating Japanese and the advancing Allies between them flattened everything else.

Then climb Signal Hill for the last hour of light, and eat at the fish market afterwards.

You can see the islands from the hotel window and the ride out is fifteen minutes in an open speedboat. The park was gazetted in 1974 and the water is genuinely clear: reef fish, soft coral, and on the quieter islands a beach you can have to yourself before ten.

Come back in the middle of the afternoon and spend the end of the day at the mosque on Likas Bay. It is built out over a lagoon so it stands in its own reflection, and the hour before sunset is the only time to see it properly.

Sabah's war is not much talked about outside it. A resistance group of Chinese, Kadazan, Suluk and Malay men rose against the Japanese occupation in October 1943, and most of them were executed in a village south of the city in January 1944. The memorial there is quiet, free and almost never visited, and it is the clearest account of the period you will find in the state.

The state museum a few minutes away is built to echo a Rungus longhouse and covers Sabah's thirty-odd indigenous groups, the trade in ceramics and the chartered company years. The state mosque, with its gold-decorated dome, is beside it.

Sabah has around thirty recognised indigenous groups and the cultural village east of the city reconstructs five of them: the Kadazandusun rice farmers, the Rungus, the Lundayeh, the Bajau and the Murut, each in their own house with their own people in it. It is a different set of cultures from the Sarawak village, not a repeat, and the guides are frank about which parts are demonstration and which are still done.

In the afternoon, the city beach. Four kilometres of grey sand and casuarina trees ten minutes from the runway, where people from Kota Kinabalu swim in the morning and eat coconut ice cream in the evening. It is not the best beach in Sabah and it is a good last evening.

Two streets of Chinese shophouses and coffee shops sit behind the waterfront, and they are the closest thing this city has to an old quarter. Have breakfast in one of them, buy dried fish or a bottle of tuhau chilli relish to take with you, and go.

The airport is six kilometres out and about fifteen minutes away, which is the one genuinely easy thing about leaving Borneo.