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Asia » Malaysia » Sabah » Kota Kinabalu
September 7th 2011
Published: September 7th 2011
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We arrived into Kota Kinabalu, the capital city, and spent a couple of days checking out the area and planning our stay. One day was spent sunbathing on the beautiful island of Manukan, part of a national park, and another at Mount Kinabalu Park where we walked a few trails through the forest at the bottom of the humungous mountain, unfortuantely it was cloudy and we couldn't see the peak! In order to avoid the screechy, ridiculously loud woman that sang in the bar opposite every single night, we headed down to a little Italian restaurant and discovered their amazingly tasty bread basket with garlic dip, mmmm! Definitely beats the frog porridge of Singapore.

We next headed to the east coast of Sabah, to Sandakan. We soon realised their wasn't a great deal to do there so about a short exploration we settled down for an evening of Nicolas Cage and Jurassic Park, before swiftly moving down the road to Sepilok. Sepilok was a great improvement on Sandakan and we stayed in an awesome tropical resort overlooking the depths of the Borneo jungle. The huts were on stilts and we had outdoor bathroom facilities, nice to get back to nature! Our first trip was to the infamous Orang-utan Sanctuary (as we learnt orang-utans are only found in Borneo and Sumatra so we were in for a treat!) We saw lots of them at feeding time, picking up bananas in their hands, feet and mouths before manouvering away trying not to drop any. But we got lucky as we were walking to the exit as 4 orang-utans came right on to the boardwalk, literally 2 metres from us, which was fine until one bared his teeth in a stand off with Jarman. It wasn't until afterwards that we learnt an orang-utan can snap a human in half. Probably for the best we didn't know at the time! After our first night's sleep in the jungle we went to the Rainforest Discovery Centre, learnt some jungle facts and wandered along the canopy walk which had very high, pretty breathtaking views of the jungle. Being the unprepared people that we are, we realised we were short of money and for some reason the jungle isn't kitted out with ATM's yet. So we embarked in over an hour's round trip to get some cash (and stocked up on chocolate while we were there)!

Our next adventure involved travelling deeper into the jungle to the Kinabatangan River. We went on a late afternoon river safari where we saw plenty of long-tailed macaque monkeys, probiscis monkeys (native to Borneo only), huge monitor lizards, as well as eagles and hornbills, all at very close range on the bank of the river. Very cool experience seeing them all in the wild. We also went on a forest walk at night which was a little creepy, but we manned up, grabbed a torch and saw scorpions and a range of exotic birds. The following day we went on a morning river safari to see some more animals, and watched the owner's dogs playing with the macaque monkeys causing havok at our camp. We were just saying farewell to the really sweet woman looking after us, when we noticed she was donning a caricature of Hitler on her T-shirt. Some American girls who were teaching in Malaysia soon explained to us that Jews aren't welcome in the country - anyone with an Israeli passport is refused entry. We also learnt that homosexuality is illegal... If you're a gay Jew it's probably not for you.

After deciding to next head to Semporna further down the coast, we had a pre-bus lunch of cream tea! Proper English tea with scones and jam was much appreciated. The bus was a mere 6 hours (now short by our standards) but it was worsened by the fact that a woman kept puking behind us while her child screamed down the bus the whole way. The only reason anyone goes to Semporna is for diving and snorkelling, as the islands off of the harbour are teeming with marine life, one of the best dive sites in the world. So we went snorkelling to the northern island of Mantabuan. This was definitely the best snorkel trip we've done - we saw several sea turtles, an eagle ray (apparently quite rare), sea snakes, moray eels, a porcelain crab and a bump-headed parrotfish, as well as an abudence of other beautiful tropical fish. The snorkelling was a real highlight, unfortunately we didn't realise how hot it was and the entire back half of our bodies got burnt. This made the 10 hour journey back to KK pretty uncomfortable as sitting down physically hurt!

Nevertheless we made it and got our flight to Singapore for another week. The Borneo photos are now uploading to Vicky's Facebook.

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