Before it became the gateway to Mulu and Niah, Miri was an oil town — and it still is, in its bones. In 1910, the Sarawak Shell Company sank the country's first commercial oil well on a ridge overlooking the coast, and the wooden derrick that resulted, nicknamed the Grand Old Lady, produced oil for decades before being retired.
That derrick still stands today on Canada Hill, preserved as a monument, with the nearby Petroleum Museum telling the story of how a single well turned a fishing settlement into what would eventually become one of Sarawak's largest cities. The view from Canada Hill over Miri and the coastline is worth the trip up on its own, oil history aside.
These days Miri is better known to travellers as the jumping-off point for Gunung Mulu and Niah National Park, with flights heading inland daily — but the Grand Old Lady is a reminder that long before the caves and parks made Miri a tourism name, it was oil that put it on the map at all.