Jesselton Hotel Kota Kinabalu

... The Malaysian couple told another taxi driver fishing for business that he, too was a rip off and they waited with us.

As luck would have it, a guy driving a minivan taxi had to be back in KK by 3pm and he offered us rides for $5 a person...definitely I am game for that. That single extra dollar bought us legroom and some air conditioned comfort in a vehicle with shocks and struts. And sitting on cloth sure does beat sticking to vinyl after hours of hiking. Amazing how ...

... see some rare animals along the banks of the river, such as the Pigmy Elephant and the extremely rare Clouded Leopard. The first trip was amazing: We saw a couple wild boars, a huge water monitor dragging a frog away for dinner, about 100 Proboscis Monkeys jumping all over the trees, and a handful of colorful Kingfisher birds. I could never say that I was disappointed because we saw so much wildlife, but I would have liked to see some elephants and crocs. I returned ...

... descent for one day, and by the time we reached the bottom our knees, thighs and calves were seriously feeling the strain, and we had the distinct feeling we might be paying for this for some time to come…

Back in the civilisation of park HQ we rested, lunched, ice-creamed, and waited for a bus to take us on to Sepilok. What we hadn’t foreseen was that this weekend was the Malaysian New Year festival, which meant a mass ...

... better do something about it.

Cait and I decide that as much as we were looking forward to tackling Sabah, the Kinabatangan, Sipadan, Sepilok and so on, all these require anti-malarials and this seems to be the cause of Erin's discomfort so we have to leave Borneo and go to a place where taking anti-malarials is not necessary and the health care is good. That place is Singapore. We book the flights that night, pretty good value thank goodness, and we ...

... buffalo along the way. When the cruise was over, we had a nice dinner back at the deck area. Then we went back out on the boats to see the fireflies. We came across one tree that looked like someone had turned on Christmas lights. It was amazing! After the fireflies, we headed back to the bus for the ride back to Kota Kinabalu. I was pretty sure the lady I had been organizing things with told me that someone on the cruise ...

... friends. It wasn't too bad either. The Dad we sat with was quite entertaining. From there we headed back to the mall. We found a crazy movie theater at the top floor. The whole mall was quite modern, but the theater was like something out of a sci-fi movie. It was a maze. Theaters were all over the place, not really organized in any sort of rational way. In between theaters were bowling alleys, pool halls and video game rooms. It was definitely amusing and ...

... Air Asia flight (Asia's version of Ryan air). I had a bit of a shock at first, regarding how up and coming the city was and not like a first imagined remote haven. I had to remember i was still in Malaysia, the land of modern necessity and prosperity. One thing was for sure, it was ******* humid!! Woooh!! Being so sweaty in the heat, I didn't feel the need to be hanging around Kota Kinabalu city for long, so i made haste and went straight to the ...

... by a different country, everywhere there was people singing carols and wearing Christmas hats - slightly strange to be in such a warm climate yet celebrating Christmas, but nice to have some kind of celebration. That night we slept in a grotty old backpackers hostel as our nice hostel was full for the night, the next day we moved to a different hostel but it didn't have WiFi so the following night we moved back to our original hostel again! Hostelhoppers ...

... t). The whole next day was horrendous - 3 hour ferry, the bus ride was cramped and sweaty for about 5 hours, then an overnight bus that arrived in KL at about 4 in the morning, so we were only on our ***** for 22 hours or so. We arrived at a little backpackers in Chinatown, which at first looked like a crack den, but moving up a level it did have an aquarium where the fish jumped out at you from their tanks - pretty desperate to get away, we should have ...