Kota Kinabalu: the story

This is the story of my Malaysian vacation to Kota Kinabalu in Borneo, with my co-workers Angela and Susie and our friend Gina.

Saturday, July 24 - Day 1

Woke up to alarm, 5:45am, after packing late and very little sleep. Ran on adrenaline until crashing on the plane. Got to Malaysia in the late afternoon.

The first really exciting thing that happened on the first day was the impulse purchase I made in Incheon Airport - a Canon 1000D SLR camera! The fantastically clear pictures throughout this post are courtesy of this beautiful machine. Only $450 USD too, duty free!

The other exciting event was that myself and Angela were bumped up to business class! Hello champagne, good wine, and food served on real dishes!

Arriving in Malaysia, we surveyed the town of Kota Kinabalu (small and chock-full of tourists) and sized up our five star hotel (grand, modern and chock-full of tourists and nurses), grabbed some dinner and went to bed.


Sunday, July 25 - Day 2


Sunday we got up with determination and hit the Sunday market, being clever enough to figure out we only had this one chance to see it. It reminded me of Sunday markets in Victoria, though I admit these memories from my childhood are fuzzy. Some stalls had beautiful artisan's crafts, but unfortunately many were selling cheap western goods: shoes, belts, hats. More sold fabric, saris or jewlery and were quickly passed by.

After perusing the market, we hit the beach! It is slightly unfortunate that, despite being a sea-side town, there are no good beaches in Kota Kinabalu, but this does not deter the well-informed and intentioned traveller. To find the storied Malaysian beaches, we had to take a small boat to Tunku Abdul Rahman national park, which is comprised of five islands just off the coast of Kota Kinabalu.

The boats are a bit of a tourist racket since to ride one costs enough to feed a Malay family for a day, but the sand on the beaches and the warmth in the waves makes the ride worthwhile. We idled the afternoon away on the beach and in the surf with no cares except whether our mothers would think our (SPF 50) sunscreen was adequately dry to swim. (Confidential to mom: it was dry enough - I did not burn!)

That evening we ate market food. Quite apart from being delicious and fresh, this was quite a deal: a whole small tuna, four baby squid and three prawn skewers set us back only RM 31 (~ $12) and was more than enough for two people. This was the epitome of our culinary experience in Malaysia - perfectly grilled seafood, seasoned and sauced with unfamiliar but delicious tastes, and served with limes! oh limes! I am convinced that there were more limes at that table than in the whole of Korea.

I feel that I should comment here on the rest of our food experience. Unfortunately, we did not return to the fish stalls for delectable seafood - generally, after we returned from our day's activities we were wiped out and brought takeout noodles or rice up to our hotel room. And while we had a great Filipino dinner and I had a scrumptious burger (also something hard to find in Korea), the cuisine overall didn't live up to the high expectations I had for it. But getting a plate of mee goreng, or fried noodles, for RM 3 (about a Canadian dollar) was generally good enough; they didn't have to be haute cuisine, just warm and tasty.


Monday, July 26 - Day 3

Another beach day; not much to report. (The Korean in the sand above says "Gina hearts Steve.") We went to bed early to rest up for river rafting the next day.


Tuesday, July 27 - Day 4 - River rafting!

Up early, picked up at the hotel for the drive to the river. The guides were friendly and fun Malaysians about my age who were happy to be rafting for a living. It took a little while to get to the top of the river, but once there the experience began.

We shared a raft with our guide, Ito, and an Indian brother and sister both studying in Des Moines, Iowa. Of course, we asked, why Des Moines? and the answer was expectedly scholarship-related. They were great boating partners. We set off down the river.

Now, my little water experience comes from paddling outrigger canoes on the ocean, so I expected to paddle quite a bit, and this expectation was reinforced by our guide at the top. "If you do honeymoon paddle, we will reach end on next next next morning!" But the paddling was in fact minimal - a few strokes sufficed to keep us moving in between rapids, where the real fun was.

We faced no big rapids, which was probably for the best. Apparently there is a scale for rapids; ours were a 1 or 2 on this unknown scale, but not 3 or 4. However, we had some fun with them - at one point, our guide intentionally ran the boat into the side of the river, flipping it and dumping us all out, and on another bend he almost flipped it again, dumping only the Indian siblings out this time.

I didn't bring my camera to river rafting, but I hope my friend will post her pictures so I can put a few up on the blog.


Wednesday, July 28 - Day 5 - Kinabalu National Park

Susie and I split from the other girls on Wednesday to go to the national park at the foot of Kinabalu Mountain, which at 4095 m is well known in the area to be the highest in South East Asia. In other circumstances I would have loved to climb the mountain, but then I was happy doing a short hike in the park and toodling around the botanical gardens.

Admittedly, my hike promptly knocked the wind out of me with a steep uphill climb for the first kilometer, leaving me wondering whether to go the remaining three or take the shortcut back. I resolved to be tough and get my exercise, and hiked the rest of the way through the beautiful mist of the jungle.

Unfortunately, the park was 88km away from Kota Kinabalu, so to get there and back we had to hop in a mini bus which rented out seats for RM 15 (~ $6). The bus was crowded with strangers and near to gaining value as an antique, so it did not inspire safety, especially as it crawled up the many hills and screamed down the other side. In addition, there was a small but niggling feeling that we were driving on the wrong side of the road. But all things considered, it was a convenient and cheap mode of travel well suited for budget vacationers such as ourselves.


Thursday, July 29 - Day 6 - Scuba Diving!



Thursday was the big day, the day before we left, the day we would be scuba diving. The dive company we signed up with had a "Discover Scuba" program where you could get beginners' lessons in the morning, then make two dives in the afternoon with a teacher - at no point during or after were we qualified to dive alone.

As with the river rafting, our teachers, Calvin and Joe, were great, and made everything including the pre-dive safety briefing amusing and fun. Learning to use the equipment was actually quite satisfying, but it was diving itself that was tremendous. We dove to 10-12 metres (6 times my height in depth!) and slowly swam along colorful coral reefs with even more colorful fish darting about. Nemo! Nemo! we would have screamed but for the salt water that would have filled our mouth.

Now the previous paragraph makes scuba seem like a cakewalk. It was in fact complicated by a few factors.

The first complication was that Susie and I were the only real swimmers in the group. Angela could swim to save her life, if necessary, and Gina, being raised in a small country with plenty of lakes and rivers and surrounded by three oceans, had no swimming experience (guesses, anyone? - it starts with a K and ends with orea). As a result, those two clung to the guides for the dives, laboriously making it down to 10m deep with many ups and downs, and leaving Susie and myself to swim around.

The second was me. Apparently my lungs are no exception to my great size, and, having no experience with sports where conserving one's breath is an asset, I seem to breathe great quantities of air. I quickly gulped up my pressurized tank and found myself at the point where I had been instructed to point out to the instructors that we had better surface or risk a premature stoppage of breathing.

Despite these complications, however, our dives were successful and we had a fantastic time with no harmful side-effects on our health, if you don't count the desire to do it all over again. It was tremendous.


Friday, July 30 - Day 7


Friday was our departure day, though we were leaving at quarter after midnight on the red-eye. I had caught a cold, likely from being silly and shirtless on the scuba boat in the chilly (!) rain after diving, so I stayed around town and in the hotel. I bought books at the English bookstore, again a rarity in Korea, had a salad for lunch, mailed some postcards, and read. It was glorious in a relaxing kind of way.

That evening, we caught a taxi to the airport and, after more security checkpoints than the House of Commons and a wait in the terminal, we were on our way. As Angela observed, we were going back from warm, humid Malaysia to hot, humid Korea, which had been experiencing major sweat-inducing, AC-inspiring heat before we left.

I slept for most of the flight, waking up at about 5 for breakfast (juk, Korean porridge) and a glorious sunrise over the clouds. Touched down at Incheon, waited an hour or so at immigration, picked up bags and caught the express bus home, crashing into bed at 10am Saturday...

... to be woken up at noon by my friend calling with plans to go to a birthday party that I had agreed to before going to Malaysia. I woke up and headed out to the pension (European style, a guesthouse) for the party. But that's a story for another post.