New information re Immigration when entering Kuching. Sarawak(Malaysia). Sarawak and Sabah (on the island of Borneo) are part of the Malaysian federation. However, Immigration has always required that when sailing from the Malay Peninsula to either Sarawak or Sabah, on entering your first port in Borneo Immigration must be visited in order that a new visa is issued.
In the past, the Immigration officials in Kuching have issued a new 90 days visa on arrival.
Recently two yacht crews have been caught out when they arrived from mainland Malaysia with only a few days left on their visas. They expected to receive a new 90-day visa. The new rule is that you will only be given the remainder of your current visa (in one crew’s case this was only 4 days). As leaving for a neighbouring country from Kuching can be time-consuming and/or costly, it is much better to ensure that you have enough visa days left to get to Brunei (about 300 miles away) and still have time to enjoy exploring Kuching and the Borneo rivers.
Luckily we did a day trip from Terrenganu across the border into Thailand before leaving mainland Malaysia and thus acquiring a new 90-day visa. If coming from Johor Bahru it is simple and cheap to do a day trip across to Singapore for the purposes of visa renewal.
The crew who had UK passports were able to visit the main Immigration office in Kuching and pay 100 RM each to extend their visas for 2 months. The crew who had Icelandic (ie non-Commonwealth country) passports were not allowed to extend their visas. They chose to sail to Singapore and thereby missed out on exploring a very interesting area.
Nick & Jan Wooller
mv YAWARRA II
Editor’s note: We have been advised by Chris Marchant and Laura Ahearn, that getting your Malaysian visa cancelled (red triangular stamp in your passport) when leaving the previous Malay State will enable you to be issued with a new 90-day visa when arriving in Sarawak.)
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We also entered Sarawak recently and were given a new 90-day visa. The important thing is to make sure that when you check out with customs in peninsula Malaysia eg at Terengganu that they cancel the existing visa with the red triangular stamp. The authorities in Kuching will then have to give you a new one. It worked for us anyway!