i am just back from kuching where christiane, hakim and i went to visit the rainforest world music festival last weekend. christiane and i had meant to visit that festival for years, but for some reasons we always missed it. it wasn't so bad as long as we had WOMAD in singapore, but for some reason this stopped last year, despite its increasing popularity. with the best music event missing in our own yard we made a huge effort to go this year, and remembered to book plane tickets early, which was easy since airasia is flying directly to kuching from singapore.

kuching was great, as always, and the setting for the RWMF in the cultural village about an hours drive from town, at the edge of the jungle is fantastic, but the choice of bands was lacking well behind the one we are used to from WOMAD. the bands were great, and most of them were really traditional, which i love, but the set up made it very difficult to enjoy the performances. there were two stages right next to each other on which the artists played alternately throughout the night. this left the audience in a limbo, because on the bigger stage large, often very energetic bands played, but as soon as the 45min performance was over the next act was due on the small stage. yet these bands were of the very traditional small and low key type, meaning that as soon as the audience was in the mood to party they were supposed to sit down and chill, which in turns was impossible to do, as the area in front of the stage was a mud field after the previous night's rain.

so we were all on a mood yoyo run, leaving us rather disappointed about the entire affair. to me the most memorable act was a workshop aka jamming session called from the north to the south of africa, in which a band from morocco and one from tanzania performed together. the energy that the dancers from both bands had was mesmerising and contagious, and nothing that we saw at night during the concerts was at a par with that.

the set up was doubly flabbergasting as the cultural village is huge, and there would have been ample opportunities to set up the two stages apart from each other, leaving one for big energetic shows and one for the people who prefer to chill. if they had set up the smaller stage at the lawn by the lake where people can listen, eat, drink and relax it would have been perfect, but sadly enough the organisers missed that point BIG TIME.

anyway, it was still a great trip and i am glad we went, as it meant we could go for all the yummy food in kuching... fern fern fern and more... jungle food gallore :P