Ill-behaved whites in Kuching

I paid for a shuttle from Ariva Gateway Kuching to the Sarawak Cultural Village.  Along the way, the driver would stop and drop off or pick up other passengers. A white woman was already seated in the mini-bus when I board, and she kept muttering about how the driver was not going straight to her destination.  As the driver stopped at a hotel to pick up a family, she demanded to know why the driver was going back to the same place, and left the bus to pick up her things, declaring loudly that that was her seat and nobody should take it.  Throughout the ride, she kept shaking her head disapprovingly and looked at her watch.  When the mini-bus arrived at her destination, an expensive-looking high-rise apartment near Damai beach, she alighted in a huff, shaking her head vigourously and not bothering to close the door behind her.  The rest of the passengers were quite shocked at her outburst.

Perhaps she had waited a long time to get to her destination.  I presumed she was staying in Damai as a resident, with the groceries she was carrying.  Won't she have known that she had paid for a shuttle bus with multiple pick-up and drop-off points?  If her motivation was purely on saving taxi fare, maybe she could start getting to know a reliable taxi driver who won't rip her off.




I signed up for a trek at Bako National Park with a guide.  In the same group were two families with pre-teens from Australia that stayed at Ariva Gateway Kuching as well.  I saw them at the breakfast area where the families simply emptied the bread basket.  Thankfully they did not polish off all the chocolate cupcakes as well.  Or maybe they did, with the earlier batch.

During the break, one of the mothers fished a ziplock bag from her haversack, and there in the ziplock bag, I counted EIGHT chocolate cupcakes, exactly the ones I had during breakfast earlier!

Perhaps they were really tight with money and decided to save on buying their own snacks to take along the trek.  Perhaps they couldn't understand the sign at the breakfast area just right above the cupcakes that said "Please do not take away food from the breakfast area".

They might also be under their deluded assumption that other people did not pay for the guide's services, by not moving along and letting others have a chance to see or feel what the guide had just pointed out.  The pre-teens simply plonked themselves down playing with the fishes in a pond and not letting others through the tiny boardwalk.  And their parents simply didn't care that their precious offsprings were holding others up.