By Marlynda Meraw
KUCHING, Feb 27: The road home always feels different from the road out. Where once was the electric hum of anticipation; of not knowing what lays around the next bend, whose doorstep you might find yourself on, or what story might spill over a comfortable chat.
The D’Drift team turns homeward today, and with it comes that bittersweet ache of leaving places that had not yet finished speaking. Places that had more to stay, if only we had stayed a little longer.
But we were, by any measure, fortunate. Through cloudy skies, sudden downpours, and the heat that shimmers off coastal road in waves, we were warmly welcomed by the land and its people.
We were told stories that walk the fine line between myth and memory, between ancestral belief and the kind of thing that makes you pause and think: what if it really happened?
And perhaps that is the point. The truth of a story is not always in its facts. It is in what it preserves: the fear, the longing, the warning, the wonder, and in the fact that someone chose to keep telling it. People kept these stories going.
That, above else, is what this journey had taught us. Our hope, small but sincere, is that through these stories, we had held the beliefs steady and given them a place to rest so that time does not swallow them whole. For the variations we may have missed, we hope to find them someday, and come full circle.
Because tales, at their core, are the architecture of culture. They are how people know where they come from, and therefore, where they stand.
Names born from longing and war
As the team drifted along Sarawak’s coastal reaches and listened, patterns began to emerge: the logic beneath the naming of places.
Some names made immediate sense: a river bends here, a great tree fell there, a particular crop grew in abundance and so the place took its name from it. These are the names of observation, of people paying close attention to their surroundings and recording what they found in the most lasting way they knew.
But there were other names, and these were the ones that lingered with us long after the conversations ended. Names that were not descriptions of a place, but expressions of grief for another.
Places like Belawai, Melaban, and Temudok speak to communities that moved forward because they had to, that put down roots in unfamiliar soil, but could not bring themselves to leave the old home entirely behind—and so they carried it in the only way that was still possible. They named their new home after what they had left behind.
There is something subtly devastating in that impulse. To look at an unfamiliar landscape and choose to call it by the name of somewhere you can never return to. It is an act of love and mourning at once, a small defiance against forgetting.
And then there were the names born of bloodshed. Headhunting was not a distant abstraction for those who lived through those centuries; it was the texture of daily uncertainty, of raids and reprisals and the brutal arithmetic of war.
Bintulu carries this weight in its very name, bound up in the suffering of conflict. And in Miri, the tale of the headless permaisuri (queen) who rafted along the river, an apparition glimpsed by villagers that may unsettle the rational mind, but it explains with startling clarity why a road and a building still bear her name today.
Whether the story is taken as history or as legend matters less than this: it left an impression so deep that the community built it into their landscape permanently. These are not just names on a map. They are monuments to what was endured, and what was never forgotten.
Of beasts, birds, and belief
Drifting along Sarawak’s coastal road, we encountered animals in the way travellers often do: a flash of movement at the roadside, a shape in the water, wings against the sky. We photographed them with the mild delight of the curious, sensing that there were stories built around them that we had not yet been told.
What we came to learn exceeded our expectations. Kumang (princess in Iban) had her beloved cat; a creature of comfort and companionship even in the world of the divine. The village of Batu Niah stands today not merely as a geographical marker, but as a cautionary tale: a community that once laughed at a strangely-dressed cat paid for their mockery in stone, frozen in their ridicule for eternity.
It is the kind of story that makes you watch your words around animals.
The crocodile occupies a more complex place still. Deeply embedded into the spiritual lives of many communities across Sarawak, it is regarded not merely as a reptile but as something closer to kin, or adversary, depending on the transgression.
For many races, consuming its flesh is not simply forbidden; it is an invitation to generational consequence, a curse visited not only upon oneself but upon one’s children and their children after them. Few dietary prohibitions carry such weight.
And the rooster. Not only the centrepiece of the cockfighting tradition that has long been a pastime across communities, but, for the Melanau, something far more solemn. The motifs carved upon hanging coffins, roosters among them, are not decorative choices. They are communications: a vocabulary between the living and the dead, a language of identity and protection spoken in wood.
As for the D’Drift team: we were twice blessed by the sight of hornbills during our journey. Twice. For a bird that symbolises fortune for Sarawakians, we do not take this lightly. Whether it is coincidence or something more, it lifted our spirits each time—a reminder that the land, in its way, was watching over us too.
Until the road calls again
Everything comes to an end, and there is grace in accepting that, even when the end arrives before you are quite ready.
Today marks the final and tenth day of D’Drift 2026, and we step back from the road carrying more than we arrived with. Not luggage, but with stories, faces, moments of unexpected generosity, and the certainty that Sarawak is a place whose depths cannot be exhausted in a single journey, or ten.
The D’Drift 2026 team extends our deepest gratitude to Minister of Tourism, Creative Industry and Performing Arts (MTCP) Dato Sri Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah, and his ministry, for their steadfast support and sponsorship that made this journey possible year after year.
Our thanks too to Business Events Sarawak (BESarawak) acting chief executive officer Jason Tan, and Pertubuhan Wartawan Bebas Kuching (Pewarta) chairman Peter Sibon, for their generous contributions.
To the countless Sarawakians who opened their doors, offered a helping hand, and shared their homes, their tables, their stories, and their laughter: you are, in every true sense, the reason this journey exists. You are not background to our reporting. You are the story itself. The imprint you have left on us is not something we will wash off at journey’s end.
And to you, our readers. Thank you for travelling with us. For following these dispatches from the coastal roads and river towns, for caring about the names of places and the creatures in the trees and the tales that have been carried across generations in the mouths of those who remembered.
Every story we tell is only half-told until it finds a reader. You completed it.
The final page of D’Drift 2026 turns now. But stories, as we have learnt this past ten days, do not end when the telling stops. They continue in the people who heard them, in the names that remain on the map, in the places that still carry their history quietly and wait for someone to come and ask. The road we leave behind will keep its stories. And we will keep ours.
Until the next journey calls. See you in D’Drift 2027. – DayakDaily
