Day 10: Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu

Sleeping with bears

Today we reluctantly said goodbye to Sandakan.  We really enjoyed our stay there, great apartment, lovely smiley people and great wildlife.  What more can you need for a holiday.  Wish we had stayed longer.

Oh well, one of Jocelyn's staff came by to take us to the Express bus terminal - funny thing about express coaches in Malaysia - the terminals seem to be in the middle of industrial estates way out of the city centre.  Not sure how that is convenient for anyone other than teksi drivers?!

Anyway we got our Tung Ma Express Coach to Kota Kinabalu with no trouble.  It wasn't brand new, but comfortable enough, we were at the front which meant we had the best view and Matt was sat next to a Primary School teacher who had good English so they were nattering away for a while.  He showed interest in Tom's diary and actually read it from cover to cover and then said that his standard of writing is better than his students (I'm sure he was being nice).  Malaysians use the Roman alphabet, so he can directly compare how the letters etc are formed, Tom's writing isn't the best though, a little bit on the messy side...

Waiting for the off

Tom and I settled down to watch the Palm Oil plantations whizz past.  We stopped a way out of Sandakan where a whole load of women came on board to sell us nuts, crisps and dried fruit and then 2.5 hours in we stopped for a lunch break.  We had brought nibbles with us, so we just had an ice-cream as it was quite hot (nicely air conditioned on the coach though).

We were treated to entertainment on the coach, two videos were put on for our enjoyment.  The first, called Kong: Skull Island, was a little on the ridiculous side (even though it stared John Goodman and Samuel L Jackson, who both should have known better), the second called Logan was a Wolverine film and massively violent and full of the F word, and it had English subtitles on it.  Not great with an 8 year old on the front row.  He had his iPad on and I was happy for him to use it as much as he wanted.  This he did until he got snoozy and instantly fell asleep on me.  A good way for him to spend the journey as he hasn't been going to sleep until quite late this holiday and must be behind.

Being on the front row we got to see the driving of the Malaysians on the road.  Now, Matt quite happily drove around Sandakan with no incidents, the Malaysians are pretty law abiding and chilled when it comes to driving.  They also drive on the same side as us which makes it easy for us.  He said that he felt more at ease driving here than in Spain or Italy for example.  However, there is only one road to Kota Kinabalu from Sandakan and it is only a small road, which is full of palm oil tankers going slowly, meaning the coach has to overtake them - not always at the most sensible places!  There were a few hairy moments believe me.  However, the driver did his job and got us to KK in one piece.  The first half of the trip was quite dull, but the second half of the trip was spent going up, up, up twisty roads to the Mt Kinabalu Reserve, at one point we were at 5,000 ft and still the mountain rose up above us.  We then drove through the clouds down to KK.  It rained on us at this point and when I say rain, I mean poured, the coach almost became a boat as the road disappeared under storm water.

The Labuk River

As I said we arrived into KK with no incident.  We then had to get a taxi to our Air B&B apartment as the coach terminal was so far out from the town centre.  The taxi driver was so efficient that he drove off with the door still open and without Matt!  The crowd and us had to stop him - he laughed.  Matt was unimpressed, so then he said sorry!  We got to the apartment block and were greeted at once by Mark our host who took us to our apartment.  It is the biggest to date, but much older and tireder than the others.  Oh well, I think we have been spoilt until now, so can't really complain, especially as we are off to a posh hotel after here.  Tom wanted to go to the pool, so we all headed down for a refresh and snorkel.  We then headed back to the apartment to find that we couldn't get back through the door to the apartment block.  The key didn't work and there was no-where to scan the access card!  We tried other doors, all the same.  We asked some girls in an office, once again they couldn't help.  Hum, how do we get out of the pool?  We saw a security guard but he was busy talking in a walkie talkie.  We asked a teenager, who tried to help us by asking the security guard but got abuse from him for interrupting - oops!  Finally we found a way out and then walked all the way around the apartment block again to get in.  It seemed very wrong, but at least we got back to our flat.  How strange!

All too much

We had quick showers and then headed out to the mall opposite us for tea. We were expecting a busy, thriving mall as the adverts on the outside displayed Sports Direct, Starbucks, Nando's, Pla-Rail (someone was very excited), Hard Rock Cafe etc etc.  When we got in, it was like K village, empty!  the Pla-Rail shop is closing down, there was no Starbucks, no Sports Direct, Nando's had about 2 customers and Hard Rock Cafe was too expensive!  Humm, every other unit was closed.  How disappointing. However, it did have a Japanese restaurant which we decided to patronise, and were very glad we did as it was amazing, the best Japanese food we have had this trip.  We all cheered up.

We then went on the search for a convince store to buy some breakfast, although we found some convenience stores, we didn't find anything for breakfast, so we bought some drinks and came back to the flat.  We will explore in the morning, much easier in the day light.