15-26 April Kota Kinabalu

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The flight to KK was fine. The only thing that held up proceeding was some traffic congestion causing our AA flight to delay arrival for about 10 minutes. Nothing spectacular there.

Kota Kinabalu - simply as KK - is famous for lots of things; the most noticeable is the few islands immediately opposite the coast of KK town itself. Promenade Hotel is the best in terms of location. I stayed there before. Apparently newer hotels are found in the same area / coastline but Promenade has a very good name. Further down the coast is Sutera Harbour Hotel, the very few 5-star hotel in Sabah. It has a very extensive estate and have been maintained very well over the years. The entrance lobby is in the size of a small town centre! It's huge! Some of the hotel rooms have their own balconies. There are just lots of facilities there. Further south of the coastline is the Sabah Beach Hotel although we didn't make it there this time.

KK is a huge town. The locals say that it's not always clear which township or estate ends and the next one starts. There are many recently finished buildings (houses, shopping complexes etc.) but it's uncertain what will happen to them; some appear to be generic arrangement hoping that some businesses will occupy the units.

Kompleks Karamunsing is one that has been around for a long time. The locals say that the building itself has some structural concerns, some people in the know have relocated their offices elsewhere for this reason. Despite this, or perhaps to disproof this findings, the Kompleks is undergoing some structural extension. It's one shopping mall in KK that the shops have outgrown the internal volume of the mall and taken over more and more car parking spaces. How the locals navigate in the multi-storey car parks is beyond me.

karamunsing is well known for its concentration of IT hardware stores. Looking at their products, they seem to be about 6 months behind Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; the price for the same product is probably lagging by 2-3 months. The range of laptops is amazing; though equally amazing is the number of very bored sales staff, the place lacking customers.

An interesting observation is that in one of the shops, they have for sale in a glass cabinet several stacks of CDs in their white sleeves. Something drew my attention to them. I went closer and confirmed my suspicion - they were OEM software CDs bundled with computer hardware, and their "not for resale" labels were still clearly visible on the CD itself. It's pretty amazing they made such CDs available at RM10. Does "Not for resale" give different connotations of the nature of such product compared to the same product in different countries? No prize for showing honesty in selling this product. I won't know if anyone did any "rebranding" though I noticed at least one shop selling illegal copies of expensive software products - I saw this shop elsewhere in KK but have not noticed such CDs in Karamunsing itself.

The amount of cars in KK also amazes me. Somehow you don't feel that the town is large, until you get in to a car and travel to somewhere "near", according to the locals, when they battle through traffic, and get there in 20 minutes. That's "near" to them; I think they mean distance in a straight line. They are not thinking in terms of traffic lights and some dangerous junctions where it's not clear who has priority - usually the bigger the cars the higher their priority. At tims, in busy traffic, KK feels like a huge car showroom. Cars are not moving, they are on display. A wide variety of cars, from bangers to the latest 4-wheel drive.

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