Day 50: Island Hopping

Figured that today we'd check out one of Kota Kinabalu's biggest tourist attractions, the Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park. It's a group of small islands in a protected marine reserve a couple of kilometres off the city coastline. No hotel breakfast so we grabbed a couple of pastries on our way over to the nearby jetty, though we'd slept in a little and didn't get there until after 10am.

Originally we were hoping to do Gaya Island since it's apparently the quietest and least developed, but most of the boats weren't running there today so we picked Sapi Island instead basically at random. We grabbed our tickets, snorkel masks and fins and waited in the departure area. We waited for nearly 20 minutes before someone came back very apologetic - apparently because we'd put the ticket away they didn't notice us! Not off to a great start.

The speedboat was only small, about a 15 seater, and took us first to Mamukan Island which looked postcard perfect. Bright white sand, clear waters, gently swaying palm trees and not too many people on the beach. And most of the people on our boat hopped out, while we were the only ones who stayed on for Sapi. Beautiful, we thought. If this one's so sparsely populated, ours should be even less so!

Famous last words. As we rounded the point of Sapi Island we could see that it had much the same features: clear water, beautiful white sands, coral formations under the water, and several thousand Chinese tourists sporting lifejackets. Oh dear. We hopped out and explored a little bit, but I was absolutely gutted. The beach here was much smaller than the earlier island and as densely packed as Bondi Beach on Boxing Day. We walked a hundred metres in one direction to see if it got any better or there was another beach, but no dice. About the only highlight was another proboscis monkey sitting in the trees near the park entrance!

Although it was now about 11:20 we decided to see if we could get back to the other island, as neither of us wanted to spend a minute longer than we had to on Sapi. Nothing against Chinese in particular, and they're very polite and respectful in small groups, but in a large crowd like that they all tend to yell at each other and it becomes intolerable very quickly.

After some effort we managed to find the guy in charge of our boat company, and explained our situation. He was fine with us going back to Manukan, but we'd have to wait for the scheduled 12pm boat (by now it was about 11:40). Write-off of a morning, but at least it was hopefully going to have a happy ending.

And it did, thankfully! The boat left on time with a few other people, and although Manukan island was more populated than we realised (a lot of people were sitting in the shade of trees a bit back from the beach where we couldn't see them earlier), it was infinitely preferable to Sapi. We walked a couple of hundred metres down the beach from the jetty, found a good spot and hopped in the water.

It was very warm, probably close to 30 degrees! Visibility wasn't brilliant, maybe 4-5 metres, but not too many people about so we relaxed in the water for a bit. It had been a long morning so we were both just glad to finally have a swim. After a bit we wandered back to the pier and bought a cheap lunch from a stall (Shandos had an okay fish burger and I had a godawful microwaved pizza). Wandered a little more while our suncream soaked in, then hopped back in the water and did some snorkelling at our previous spot.

Quite a few fish around in the water, including trumpetfish, moorish idols, angelfish, and much more besides. The visibility would come and go though, annoyingly, sometimes it would be clear out to 7-8 metres and then it would drop back to only 2-3 metres. No coral to speak of either that I could see, I guess by now it's been completely trampled. Mid afternoon we decided to switch ends of the beach and see what the other side held. After a short walk of 5-10 minutes, we discovered the reason that hardly anyone went to the other end of the beach - the water was full of rubbish!

Lots of large floating debris like plastic water bottles, shopping bags, chip packets, cigarette butts etc. At least we didn't see any condoms! Still had a quick dip in the water but the constant flotsam made staying in fairly unappealing. Retreated to the beach where we lazed around and read for a while, and indulged in a bit of people watching. Probably the funniest thing we saw was a not-young-enough-to-get-away-with-it Chinese boy of about 7 swimming around completely naked but for a lifejacket. And he was using the waist strap of the lifejacket as a make-shift G-string that covered his butt crack and modesty. Gross.

Our boat showed up at 4pm and we were back at the hotel by 4:30pm, we relaxed and had showers before heading downstairs for dinner a bit after 6:30. Apparently the Italian restaurant on the ground floor of our hotel is one of the best rated places in KK so we gave it a shot. Not disappointed - Shandos's squid ink pasta was great and my pollo e funghi pizza was a million times better than the "pizza" I'd had earlier in the day. We paid for it though - 2 wines, 2 beers, a starter, a pizza and a pasta came to 160 RMY all up, or just over $50.

Back upstairs to the hotel around 8pm from the packed restaurant and time to relax and turn in. It's tiring doing nothing but relax in the sun all day!Read more