I Love Sarawak is a guide to the Land of the Hornbills — its rainforests and rivers, its longhouses and kolo mee, its festivals, people and everyday life. It covers 54 places across the state, from Gunung Mulu in the far northeast to Tanjung Datu at the western tip, alongside stories about the culture, food and wildlife that make Sarawak unlike anywhere else in Malaysia.

Who runs this

Muhammad Kashif writes and runs I Love Sarawak from Kuching — an independent guide to the state he lives in, written to cover Sarawak the way it is actually travelled rather than the way it is advertised.

You can read more on the Muhammad Kashif's page, and get in touch through the contact page.

Why it exists

Most of what is written about Sarawak online is written for it — by tour operators, by resorts, by agencies with a booking to close. That material is often accurate and almost always incomplete, because the parts that would put a reader off are the parts that get left out. There is no boat after 3pm at Bako. Orangutans do not turn up at Semenggoh during fruiting season. The Pinnacles trek is genuinely hard. Those facts belong in a guide, and they are the reason this one exists.

It began as a Facebook page and grew into this site so the stories would live on past the feed, somewhere searchable, with the practical details attached.

How places are researched

Practical details — entrance fees, opening hours, transport, boat times, permit rules — come from the parks, the operators and the agencies that set them, and the date they were checked is recorded in the source data alongside them. They change, sometimes without notice, which is why every page says so.

Where a figure cannot be confirmed, it is left out rather than estimated. An article here will tell you that a fee exists and that you should check it before travelling, in preference to printing a number that might be two years old. Anything still awaiting confirmation is marked on the page itself, in the style of the note in the section above, rather than quietly guessed at.

Photographs are either our own or Creative Commons work from Wikimedia Commons. Every reused photograph is credited by author and licence wherever it appears, in the visible caption and in the page’s structured data. Where a photograph is our own, we say so.

Editorial standards

  • No paid placements. Nothing on this site has been paid for by a hotel, operator, park or agency, and no page is ranked or included because someone asked.
  • No affiliate links. There are no booking links that pay a commission. When we point at an operator it is because it is the operator, not because there is a cut in it.
  • Corrections are welcome and get made. If a price, a schedule or a fact here is wrong, tell us on the contact page and it will be fixed and the change dated.
  • You can always tell who wrote it. Guides, features and anything first-hand are written by the editor and carry his name. The daily news is reported and written by our newsroom system from primary sources — government releases, department statements, official statistics — and those articles are bylined I Love Sarawak Newsroom, carry a note saying so, and list every source they used. Nothing touching race, religion, royalty, the courts, deaths, elections or health is published that way without an editor reading it first.
  • First-hand where we can be. Where an article is based on a visit we made ourselves, it says so and the photographs are ours — as with the Sarawak Science Centre, which we visited in its opening week.
  • The unglamorous parts stay in. Last boats, closed Mondays, capped visitor slots, cash-only jetties, and the fact that wildlife sightings are never guaranteed.

How it is funded

This is a non-commercial project. It sells nothing, books nothing and takes no commission. If advertising is ever carried it will be clearly marked as advertising and will not affect what is written.