Sabah Part 2.5: It was worth missing the 4th of July for this.

I'm sitting at a human rights discussion being conducted in Indonesian, and tomorrow is my last day of work, so it seemed like a good opportunity to wrap up Sabah.

There isn't a ton to say. Kari and I wanted to take it easy, so for July 4th, we decided to do a beach day. Turns out there is only one beach in Kota Kinabalu, it isn't close to where we were staying, and it isn't great either. So, we decided to try out the small islands off the coast and their beaches; they are part of a national park and apparently well-preserved.

First, though, we had to check out the infamous Sunday Market. They pretty sold everything there--souvenir vases, keychains, magnets, pets, purses, sunglasses, flowers, food, and freshly roasted and ground coffee. We bought so much stuff that we had to go back to the hotel and drop it off before heading to the beach.

The market was also the place to see and be seen. We ran into the owners of our hotel and three people from our tour the day before! We also ran into a creepy man who seemed to be following us and who we had to hide from to lose.

Once we dropped off our stuff, we walked to the wharf, Jesselton Point (no, sir, we can walk, we don not need a cab!). Once there, we were confronted with about ten counters in a row all selling the same thing: boat trips to one,two,or all three islands, with the option of adding lunch or snorkeling to our trips. We picked an island and sat down to wait, then were (poorly) directed, a few feet at a time, to where the boat was docked that would take us to our destination. We shared our boat with a family of Australian-Malays (the mother and aunt were Malay and had grown up in Sabah before moving to Australia to raise their daughters, who did not have Australian accents).


The first island we stopped at was so-so; fortunately, that was not our destination--we picked well when confronted with the choice of three islands! We settled down on the beach after walking around the island a little and finding some weird things, such as:

Scuba Diving for the invalid (aka Scuba-Doo):


World War II artifacts from the Japanese occupation:


A weird way to warn about jellyfish:


I tried snorkeling, though there wasn't much to see. There also wasn't much to eat. When Kari and I went to a restaurant with a huge buffet displayed to ask about eating there, they said they were closed. But we can see food. But we are closed. Try there. "There" had very unappetizing-looking food, so we survived on the remains of the huge bunch of mini-bananas Kari has bought the previous day for one ringgit (um, 30 cents). It was pretty beautiful:


After a few hours, we returned to the mainland by the same boat, gobbled some sub-par laksa (perhaps because it wasn't assam laksa, but a different kind???), and headed to the airport. I believe that is where I picked up in part 3!