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Published: April 2nd 2014
QM2 at Kota Kinabalu
One of many small ships to meet usQueen Mary Day 12
The Ocean Liner moved gracefully in the early morning on its maiden visit to Kota Kinabalu and was greeted by several boats, mainly local water taxis. The water wasn’t the cleanest we have seen and we did see a school of large fish swimming near the boat as we prepared to drop anchor. The harbour had quite an array of smaller container ships, some laden and others empty. While we were anchoring a largish car ferry arrived “Straits Challenger”.
Another great breakfast and then we headed to the assembly area to board the QM2’s tenders for a short trip to the dock where Tour Guides that were taking us on a guided tour met us and guided us to our coach. There were several organised tours, each designated by a number (ours was 18), some went to a zoo, some had a trip around the “city” and ours was called “Colours of Borneo”.
Our guide spoke for almost the entire hour’s drive to a mangrove area at Kellybay. There we boarded a local bamboo covered boat with outboard motor that took us through some mangroves and the guide
QM2 at Kota Kinabalu
Another - but this is a water taxi, of which there were hundreds advised us and demonstrated how mangroves are formed.
We disembarked after about 20 minutes where we had a Malaysian lunch. It was Malay bread, very thin, and topped with local chicken curry. Was interesting to eat while a rooster was crowing. Some people went and did Batik painting, some wandered off to the ocean beach, some went and shot “poison” darts and some just lost their partners. Well at least one 80, or was he 100 years old, lost his wife.
He thought he was in our group (#18). By the way, each group also had a colour (ours was purple). This old man had his wife’s walking stick and handbag and insisted that they never parted and was in our group. Our guide tried to find the wife who he said was named Kathleen, and the guide asked an old lady if she was Kathleen and did not answer at first. She did eventually and while our guide was chatting to her, we determined that the old man was really in Group 1 yellow. He had changed his mind from 18 to 17 and then we asked to see his tag. All this
QM2 at Kota Kinabalu
Lowering a tender to take us ashore took about 20-30 minutes to resolve.
However to every bad event there is an upside. While the above was happening, some Malays were having a bit of fun on the mangrove lined river. There was a smallish motor boat towing an inflatable “rocket” with about 6-8 people on board. The boat would motor up and down the river with a few swerves and would return to base with a large swerve that upended the “rocket” tipping all of the passengers into the water. All had life jackets, even as we did.
On the way back we called into a pottery but only had 15 minutes because of the old man incident. Not much point visiting even if the pottery was good, because we could not carry it home anyway.
Back to the harbour dock to get the tender back to QM2 and what a line up. We were held up even more because an inter island ferry arrived with passengers who had luggage. The port authority decided that the gangway to the double sided dock was not wide enough to allow passengers to both disembark and embark. Another 20 minutes while
Qm2 at Kota Kinabalu
A Car freighter pulls into the harbour the 400 or so were offloaded and cleared through some sort of security.
Once we were safely back on board it was a quick trip to the showers and get ready for tea. The word safely was used as we heard later that a lady slipped and hurt her leg between the tender and docking point.
Dinner was superb again.
Jenny went to a show with a singer from UK singing songs such as Old Man River and she enjoyed it.
Goodnight 25 March 2014.
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