Our return to Kota Kinabalu - how it's changed...

  Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Thursday, April 16, 2009

Wowee this city has exploded!  It's quite big all of a sudden and prices have been reflected in the increase.  With Richie here, he wanted to climb Mt Kinabalu and having done this before I said I'd 'pop' up there again for his support.  Sadly the whole climb has been taken over by a resort team and the price has gone up some 4-fold.  He's doing that one on his own!

Cheers

So we zipped here via Labuan on a largish speedboat and having selected the economy seats we were promptly entertained with the Venga Boys for the beginning of the journey followed by some poor quality DVD action.  We had spent the first portion of the journey with a Granny next to us hacking her lungs up into a bin every 5mins.  I didn't suffer sea sickness but I did feel a bit rank with the Granny there.  Grim.

View over the harbour

We were hunting down where we stayed before in KK, but sadly it was full.  This however, turned out to be the best thing.  We ended up at Rainforest Lodge Backpackers with a cracking big room and balcony.  All for a bargain.  The amiable boss Frank sorted us out.  He'll go far.  He's got hands on most things round here it appears.

Sunset in KK

Richie arranged his climb and me & Cath arranged a boat out to the islands here.  There's a small cluster of 5 islands all within a 15minute speedboat (emphasis on speed I may add) ride so we aimed to hit all of them!

Bumped into Rob/Sarah from previous stop and spent the evening as Brits do.  Drinking and talking at a bar, conveniently slap bang outside our room.  As they'd rented a car we collated our hangovers in the morning and hit the road to Monsopiad Cultural Village - a small heritage place near here. Although we did get lost.  We stopped at a mechanics on the way to ask for help and he disappeared for a few minutes, came back with a map he'd just printed out and gave us some better directions.  Jolly nice chap.

Skulls!

The Cultural Village is home to some of the headhunter stuff here.  Mainly skulls.  We were shown around the touristy bits like seeing how they make rice wine (and drinking it), firing a blow pipe, watching some dancing and a scary war dance by a 'warrior' who wears Levi's and raybans post dance.  Seriously though, this kid in the dancing, he carries a big blowpipe, dances around, pops a couple of balloons with a dart, puts one in the spout and then aims at you!  It was actually very very very intimidating.  So I snapped it in two.  Joke.  His handshake at the end took away the intimidation factor though.  Like a soggy chip.

Me post-rice wine drink

So as Rich prepared for his 2 day ascent we remind him of impact on knees, how we were after and secretly, dread he comes back saying 'it wasn't that bad really'.  Thankfully he didn't.  Far from it.  He completed it and I'll let him give you the info.  Well done Ricky.

Looking weird

We spend the day at the beach, do a bit of snorkelling and in Richie's absence (he doesn't do fish) head straight to the fish market to hoover up some fresh stuff.  Nice red snapper, some prawns (there were prawns the size of my forearm - no joke) and squid and we're stuffed.

Odd meal though - sit down next to two Brits.  Get the pleasantries out the way and find out there names, what do you do etc.  Bizarrely, this lass who Cath recognises, says she's here on business.  Not really an exciting job she says, but she works for a University in the UK.  Cutting a long story short, apart from having the same name they also worked in the same arena and sat at the same conference in KL last year.  She later confesses she told her hubby she recognised Cath.  Small world and all that.  We all agree to discuss this further over jugs of Long Island Iced Tea.  A 2am finish ensues and we have a slow start the next day.

Found a nice little pizza place here for Richie's celebratory meal the following evening and all knackered, crash after watching a bit of Prem action on our TV.  I remember last time we were here, the country is mad on the Prem.  Fine by me.  Sadly they all support a handful of teams.

So we bid farewell to KK for the next few days as we head along the coast to a little beach bungalow....

Cath stilt walking

Me blowpiping

And the boss aiming

They tried to make me eat one

Dude with the blowpipe

Dancing dude

Us at the end