Blogs from Sabah, Malaysia, Asia - page 123

It's official. We are now licensed practioners in the art of SCUBA. We started an open water course a few days ago here in Kota Kinabalu and passed with flying colors. We were a bit apprehensive about doing it because Jamie was pretty scared. A few days earlier, it took me close to an hour to get her in the deep end of the swimming pool. But we paid our money (1120MYR...extremely cheap....about C$360) for our course and started training. Lo and behold, Jamie took to it like a fish to water. She loved it and I am very proud of her for doing so well. Our deepest dive was 18 meters and everything went smoothly. It was, to say the least, amazing. We saw so many fish and marine life. The whole time I was ... read more

After settling in back in KK we decided that we wanted to do the fishing we didn't manage to do on our python hunting trip. We hadn't had the supplies we needed and the fishing platform was out of order. This time we were prepared. Unfortunatly after 15 minutes drive the minivan broke down, the breaks stopped working. So we got towed away to Vincents mothers place where we borrowed a Toyota Corolla of his nephew. Vincent felt bad that we didn't manage to go fishing for the second time so he was decided that we did something. As we thought the birdpark was a bit dull we went to the crocodile farm. The crocodile farm is basicly it's name, they farm crocodiles. They must have had a few hundreds in 30 or so pools. Apart ... read more

We spent the second day at Sipadan snorkelling. It was great, tons of wildlife, the best moments were when I touched a turtle (which means good fortune and long life) and followed a shark for 5 minutes. Sipadan is apparently number two divesite in the world after Galapagos Island. Early next morning we took a bus to Sepilok, famous for it's Orang Utan sanctuary. We got a room 10 minutes walk away from the sanctuary itself. It was a nice place with plenty of animals, turkeys, ducks, water buffalos, sheep, goats, dogs and a deer. We relaxed the rest of the day and decided to go and see the monkeys the next day. At 10 it was feeding time and we shared the place with quite a lot of tourists. I managed to get quite a ... read more

Mat: We are in Kuta Kinabalu. Its muggy. Muggy muggy. As you would expect it to be in the tropics. Probably exaggerated for us because the last couple of weeks in New Plymouth and Wellington were so cold, wet and windy. Our plans at the moment are to book the hut halfway up Mt Kinabalu for the 29th, so we can hit the top on the 30th for my 30th. We are waiting for Air Asia to open so we can check out the flights to Sandakan. They only cost $30 or something which means we do not need to take the bus (8 - 12 hours depending on stops according to our hostel host). We are over sitting in one spot for long periods after the flights and hanging about from New Plymouth - Auckland ... read more

Via AirAsia (Aisa's version of EasyJet), Ally and I flew from Kuta to Kualur Lumpur, which is the capital city in Peninsular Malaysia. We had arrived at the height of the monsoon season, and it was safe to say that most passengers where apprehensive when a violent lightning storm surrounded the plane as we approuched 'KL'. The clouds surrounding the plane where amazing, eg, huge white fluffy clouds reaching up in to the atmosphere, surrounded by dark thunder clouds. It were proper nice, but proper scary too!...Anyway, we landed safely, then made our way into KL city, which conveniently was 70km away! I'm not going to blabber on about KL, as it was a hot, dirty, sweaty dive! We walked to the Petronas Towers - which used to be the tallest towers in the world...but apart ... read more