Food from the Sea and the Air

It was nice meeting up with young and enterprising salespeople especially in an expensive birds nest outlet in Miri.

What really attracted me to them was the opportunity to speak with them about the benefits of eating all those wonderful legendary food from the sea and the air!!

Our young gentleman explained to my cousin and I (we were looking for health food for her 80+ mum) the benefits of eating medication with seahorse in it!! Well one never knows.....And that's the biggest seahorse I have ever seen (dead ones of course) in Miri.

This is a kind of sea kelp (sea weed) and is also known a poor man's bird's nest. We were each offered a small container of the delicious and cooling sea weed sweetened by rock sugar. Indeed it really tasted like birds nest.


This is the dried form. Apparently the shop cannot export these outside Miri because the harvest is very limited and the sea weed farmers cannot cope with the Miri demand . So we Mirians should really try our best to enjoy this delicacy. And it is also very difficult to harvest these in the deep sea.


This is the newly cleaned blood birds nest. Apparently the swiflets vomitted blood to build their nests....How wonderful these mother swiflets are!! These are therefore very costly .

If you calculate 8 hours of travelling to interior Sarawak by 4-wheel and then 8 hours by boat to the ulu again and then another 8 hours by foot and then many hours of climbing up the cave walls to the cave roof just to collect about 100 birds nest......It is already a headache calculating the capital cost of getting the nest down from the caves....And then finally it takes many hours of backbreaking handiwork to clean the birds nest and to get rid of the baby feathers...and finally they are packed and ready for the customers....I think those who can spend a lot of money buying these birds nest are really very very lucky people!! RM700 per 375 gm.a box is not too expensive???

And don't forget many birds nest hunters had already fallen to their death in the past. Perhaps their families also never found their bodies if they did not know where they went in the first place.



This is a very nice collection of various Chinese ginseng birds nest etc....this is a fortune on a plate.


After a very educational morning with a free sea weed concoction we were happy to go away from the shop thinking how lucky we are in Sarawak which is the main producer of such delicacies....

P/s...a good birthday present for my friend whose birthday is today --- I shall be sending you e-seahorse for vitality - e-birds' nest - for longevity - e-sea kelp for good bones --- and e- mussels for good eyesight...and Shalom - Shalom for always....