Happy Chinese New Year from Borneo.
We've found so far that Malaysia loves it's abbreviations, which is quite handy when visiting Kota Kinabalu to be able to shorten it to KK. However, upon arrival at KK we couldn't find TBH, that is the bleedin' hotel. We'd used a previously reliable source to book our accommodation but, it has to be said that on their site there was no outside 'view' of the hotel. It all became a bit concerning when we got into the taxi at the airport and the driver said 'that must be a new one – I've never heard of it'. As we'd had a check on Google Maps beforehand so we were able to tell him some landmarks nearby and where it was SUPPOSED TO BE. Anyway, we arrived and he was saying 'I can't see it', but we were still confident (at that point). We got him to drop us off and then between us spent around 2 hours looking, trying to phone and asking locals for the flippin Yomi hotel. After several calls, the phone was eventually answered and when asked if that was the Yomi hotel, the person at the other end of the line said 'Yes'. When asked where they were because we were in KK looking for them, the line suddenly went dead and the phone wasn't answered again after that. That's a short summary of a frustrating and anxious couple of hours before we finally gave up and checked into the hotel where we had been dropped by the taxi driver.
The new hotel was good, and the staff exceedingly helpful – in fact they had tried to look up the 'virtual' Yomi hotel when we unloaded our cases from the taxi. During the night however, the air con unit must have realised that we were mug punters and also started (to coin an Aussie phrase) p1ss1ng all over us as the water started to reverse back into the room, so much so that they could now advertise it as having it's own pool. Thankfully, we'd already decided to check on other hotels in the area for the remainder of our stay and the rest of our time in KK was spent in an alternative, but real hotel. We explored the surrounding area and visited a complex that housed the local museum, art gallery and cultural village. Sadly, most of it was closed for renovations (and had probably been so for many years). We did wander around the dilapidated exhibitions though and whilst looking at some information about the carnival queen, we read a small newspaper article on the same page from 1961 about a couple of guys who were charged and fined for public spitting. What a shame that sort of legislation seems to have been given up on. If people were still fined for spitting it could help to end the current downturn in the economy – particularly with high-profile sports stars contributing back some of their earnings into the pot. Alternatively, how about a spitting tax instead of 20% VAT? Anyway, time to move on.
Our whole time in KK was really relaxing, in fact many a morning it was really difficult to drag ourselves out of the hotel after nights of very strange dreams no doubt courtesy of the renewed intake of malaria tablets.
One morning we did manage to get up early enough to make a wander to Jesselton Pier to catch a boat over to Manukan National Park and make a day of it. Whilst there we witnessed large monitor lizzards and mud skipper jumping fish and jumping crabs.
Back on the main land we hired a little red moped for a couple of days, which saw us travel out to a Wildlife Park (when did such places stop being called zoos?). Much like the museum, some of the park seemed to be closed off when we got there too. However we did manage to stay for a good part of the day and that meant we witnessed some of the feeding times. We were very surprised that the most 'entertaining' and noisy was the otters - boy those blighters can screech. Having the bike meant that we got around to different areas in KK, we tried to see a couple of sunsets on the west facing coast, but only one was really impressive and included a couple in some traditional dress on the shore-line as an added bonus.
Our final day with the bike took us off to find a bit of beach and what better than a private beach taken up by one of the Shangri-La hotels. As we arrived on our rented scooter, we waved at the security guards on the entry point and said hi to all the staff as we blagged our way to the beach front, where one of us ended up as red as the moped itself.
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