Day 51: A Familiar Face

A good day today - the first time since leaving Sydney that we've met up with someone we know! Our old friend Anthony Yong was in town, as some of his family live here in Kota Kinabalu (though they're originally from Sandakan on the eastern coast). Yong was here to visit family with his wife and 2 year old son, but unfortunately they weren't able to meet us.

After a quick breakfast of bread rolls, we met Yong downstairs at 10am. Without planning a whole lot, we decided the best option was a food tour of the area although we'd already done some exploring ourselves. He took us firstly to a Chinese noodle house where I had a fish ball soup while Shandos and Yong both had laksa. I had to buy a second coffee because a bee was picking at the condensed milk and then fell in to its death!

We wandered south through the markets and bought a couple of small things before heading further down to the Imago Mall, not too far from where Yong's family live. We went to a couple of different food places, one specialising in egg tarts (delicious!), and another with kaya-filled pastry. Kaya is a local spread made from palm sugar and pandan and it's incredibly sweet - but very tasty of course, especially for an unreformed sweet tooth like myself.

We stayed down here drinking coffee and munching for a while before we headed out for another wander, Also managed to catch a brief cultural show put on by the shopping centre, which Shandos and I both got dragged into! It seems to be a very new mall and they're trying a lot of different things to attract new business. While we'd been inside a tropical downpour had started, so we hopped in an Uber back to the main part of town rather than walking in the rain.

Since we hadn't eaten for 20 minutes or so we agreed it was time for lunch. We were hoping to have bak kuh teh, a Malaysian herbal pork soup (looking at the pictures I'm fairly sure it was one of the dishes we had in Malacca), but neither of the Chinese places we went to were serving it! Bummer. We consoled ourselves with a third Chinese joint serving Hainanese chicken rice, though mine was quite bony and I wasn't super impressed.

Yong had to leave us around 2pm due to family commitments, so we said our goodbyes and agreed that we'd meet up again before we left Sabah. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to planning, sitting in a small cafe because our hotel wifi was quite poor. After a couple of hours research and discussion, we decided that we'd do a day-trip to Mount Kinabalu and the nearby hot springs tomorrow, come back to Kota Kinabalu and skip entirely on visiting the eastern coastline of Sabah.

There were a couple of reasons for this decision:
- it's apparently not particularly safe there. Apparently they have an ongoing problem with Filipino pirates coming ashore in small boats to kidnap and ransom people. The lawless southern Philippines is very close to the coast, and the Australian government advises against travelling to the area (the UK and US travel warnings are less severe)
- there isn't really that much to see that we haven't already seen. There's an orang-utan sanctuary, a jungle river cruise, proboscis monkeys and some beaches.

Ultimately it looked annoying to get to, risky, and not very rewarding considering we'd already done most of those things in Sarawak. It also didn't help that neither of us are particularly taken with Kota Kinabalu! Unlike Kuching which was basically unscathed, KK was completely destroyed during the war so there's basically no still-standing history here.

With that decided, we booked our tickets to Thailand for Monday instead, so it's only a difference of a couple of days. I managed to fit in a haircut before we popped out late in the evening for a meal at one of the best Chinese places in the city. A giant pork knuckle in Chinese herb sauce plus a pile of noodles, steamed rice and two drinks. 41 RMY or about $13.50 AUD. Nice.Read more