Our
final stay in Malaysia was Kota Kinabalu (known as K.K. In the
traveller community), the largest city in Malaysia Borneo. Our
shared taxi dropped us off at the guesthouse we had reserved in
advance, and which turned out to be decent. There isn't a whole lot
to be said about KK as, in a similar way to Kuching it's a fairly indistinct, modestly sized city.
We
arrived late afternoon and made a bee-line for a highly recommended
restaurant which served great vegetarian food and pretty decent
home-made cakes. Unfortunately for Monique, apart from that
restaurant KK offered almost no veggie-friendly food, so it goes
without saying that we visited that restaurant again before leaving.
The
highlight of KK for me was the local market which spanned a
considerable length of the city's coastline. The market was roughly
split into two halves: one half sold a huge variety of great looking
fresh fruit and vegetables which made it all the more frustrating for
Monique that the local restaurants seemed unwilling to cook
vegetables; the other half featured hundreds of stalls selling
freshly barbequed meat and fish. I had some fantastic spicy and
sticky prawns and some chicken wings that were so good I had to go
back to spend our last few Malaysian ringgits to get some more
before we left. I also gave in to curiosity and tried some chicken
buttocks after declining the opportunity to try them in Kuala Lumpur;
the verdict – better than they sound, but I'll stick to the wings
in future.
While
we were at the market we bumped into an interesting guy whom we had
first met on the way to Gili Air in Indonesia and then subsequently
saw a couple of times while we were there. Small world! Even more
remarkably we encountered a local guy wearing an Aston Villa shirt!
Obviously I had to stop him and ask for a photo. To be honest I
don't think he really understood my excitement or my interest in his
shirt, or what his shirt even meant, but we need all the support we
can get these days.
Apart
from that the only things of note were a walk around a rather
depressing mall (not greatly dissimilar to Birmingham's Pallasades),
a trip to the decent Sagan State museum (despite the never-ending musak
version of Celine Dion's “My heart will go on” that nearly drove
us mad and prompted an angry comment card from Monique) and a
beautiful sunset from an area of bars and restaurants along the
coast.
Monique
also befriended yet another turtle.
For
many people KK is a stopping-off point for the sights and activities
further East on Sabah (which we had already done) or for the islands
just off that part of the Borneo coast. The islands which we could
see from KK (and which we had seen when we flew into KK first time
around) are apparently very quiet and offer decent snorkelling and
diving; however we didn't have time to visit them before we were due
to leave for the Philippines, and in any even we had done plenty of
top-quality snorkelling in Indonesia, and planned to do plenty more
in the Philippines, so didn't see the need to squeeze them into our
time in Sabah.
Our
flight out of KK was a late one, and our guesthouse weren't willing
to allow us a late check-out, so we were left with lots of time to
kill in a city without much in the way of activities. The solution
was a highly enjoyable film double-bill at the cinema atop the
depressing mall. On our previous travels through Southeast Asia we
had enjoyed a few trips to the cinema as the combination of
air-conditioning and an element of familiarity is often welcome when
travelling for an extended period of time. However we had not gone
to the cinema on this trip so far (with the exception of seeing Iron
Man 3 in Hyderabad which I have chosen not to count because
Monique's dengue fever was breaking and the experience was therefore
not a good one) so we were actually looking forward to this excuse to
watch films without feeling guilty for missing more cultural
activities/sights. Our chosen films – Elysium and
We're the Millers - were perfect for killing time in that they were
both light-hearted and pretty good. They left us with just enough
time to grab some food before taking a taxi to the airport.
We
had definitely enjoyed Borneo Malaysia more than Peninsular Malaysia,
despite it being a bit of a mixed bag. The nature we had seen was
nothing short of amazing, however we had been frustrated by the
prohibitively high prices and bad weather that prevented us from
seeing everything which we had wanted to see, and the cities were
unremarkable. We had arranged our plans to give us as much time on
the Sabah side of Borneo as time allowed, however in hindsight we had
both enjoyed the Sarawak side more and wished that we had spent some
more time there. That said, seeing orangutans in the wild was a big
tick off my “bucket list” and was as great as I had hoped so our
time in Borneo was more than justified.
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