Bus station blues

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We stayed in Sandakan before and after our Kinabatangan visit, in both cases because it was where our bus journeys departed from. The express bus station was a study in controlled mayhem. Unlike in countries such as, say, Thailand where competing bus companies tend to have different departure times and you will be directed to the bus with the next closest departure time, in Malaysia (or at least in Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan) your arrival at the bus station causes a frenzy of tout activity, with them all trying to sell you a ticket to your required destination even if their next departure is in 5 hours' time. Amidst the shouting and jostling you have to determine just who really is departing next, and whether their vehicle is a comfortable aircon offering with onboard toilet or a clapped-out sweatbox that can't top 30 km/h.

The info available is also not necessarily 100% true. The evening before our departure to Kinabatangan, we visited the bus station and were assured by one company that they had a bus to our pick-up point at 10AM. The next morning, at the same booth, the (different) staff denied all knowledge of such a bus and we were lucky to find any transport at all, ending up in an uncomfortable minivan that overcharged us.

Sandakan itself was a nondescript town, though we did find a bizarrely out-of-place hilltop English restaurant offering afternoon tea and free use of their croquet lawn. However getting from Sandakan to anywhere useful, taking into account journey times, costs, and valid visa-on-arrival entry points to Indonesia, did not turn out to be a simple exercise, and after much debate we decided on making our way west along the top of Borneo.

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