Leaving Kota Kinabalu

We took a taxi to the airport from the hotel, driven by a man with a greying ponytail, every surface of his vehicle adorned with Manchester United logos: stickers, miniature football shirts, a foam silhouette of a boot. There were so many stickers on the windows that I worried he couldn't see out, but given the vague way everyone drives around Kota Kinabalu, that probably wouldn't have affected our safety much. Unlike our driver yesterday, he didn't treat us to any music, which is possibly unfortunate, as I still have "I'm in Miami Bitch" circling my brain like an overly-aggressive Buddhist koan. He did charge us thirty ringgit, which for a ten minute trip seems a bit steep, but I suppose I'm oversensitised to this after all the incredibly cheap taxis in Hong Kong.

Kinabalu National Park

When the driver gets frightened and says "oops", that is usually a bad sign. Unfortunately, when you're doing 90 km/h down the side of Mount Kinabalu, there's not much opportunity to modify your travel plans in favour of a more cautious chauffeur.

Things to do in Kota Kinabalu

Last night we were fairly shell-shocked after the return trip from the wetlands, so to relax I put on Shutter Island, not realising it would produce yelp after yelp of fear from my fiancee, and snort after snort of disgust from me at the sub-Angel Heart rubbish that was being spewed forth. Since it was 1 a.m. before the film concluded, we woke up this morning feeling a little groggy and stunned, and so ended up looking for something to do in Kota Kinabalu.

Apres le deluge

Yesterday we signed up for a trip to the Klias Wetlands to see some monkeys. I hadn't realised that this would require an interminable trip in a coach all the way there, surrounded by Chinese tourists who needed to be prodded into giving up any space on the coach for us to sit down. The scenery, to begin with quite interesting and a change from Hong Kong, gradually turned into just a whole lot of palm trees and rice paddies, until I passed out asleep from boredom, and awoke half an hour later to find we were still travelling through the endless greenness, only occasionally punctuated by a brown river.

Monkeys and fish and things

Today we got up later than yesterday, partly because we had no more damnfool ambitions to walk up a hill in the rain to look at the back of a shopping centre, and partly because I'd stayed up too late reading The Informant.  Another of the books brought over from Canada checked off my list.  After half an hour of unsuccessful meddling with my laptop's recalcitrant wi-fi connection at The Coffee Bean, Malaysia's Starbucks-a-like, we took a taxi out to the zoo at Lok Kawi.

Leaving again

Today we're flying to Kota Kinabalu for a week. This is the second time I've flown to Malaysia this year, but the first time to somewhere that isn't a ginormous city.

Seoul'd out

The day started horrendously; bright light was streaming into the room, harsh enough that I had to wear sunglasses to navigate the route between bed and writing desk, and my girlfriend was being sick in the toilet from the comedy wine that she'd drunk in 7-11 the night before. After I'd finished my account of the night's travails, we staggered out to a taxi and sped over to the Holiday Inn, to meet up with everyone from the night before for a bus tour of Seoul.

Our tour guide introduced herself with a string of syllables I had no ability to remember, 'but you can call me Jenny' – a name that bore no resemblance to the Korean that it abbreviated. That's different to Hong Kong, where people also have an English name that bears no relation to their Chinese one, but while the Koreans have names that are recognisably English ones, half the people in Hong Kong have English names like 'Banana' or 'Centipede' or 'Laboured Stereotype About Another Culture'.

Hungover in Seoul

I woke today at 7am, feeling rough as a dog. The flight to Seoul was uneventful, and we'd got a bus into town with the minimum of fuss; it dropped us straight outside the Koreana Hotel where we are staying. Then we had about half an hour of fumbling around before my girlfriend's friends arrived, and then we headed out to 'a happening club'.

I don't go to 'happening' clubs. As far as I'm aware, nobody has been to 'a happening club' since the mid-1970s. The taxi spilled us all out into the street next to a police station. I know it's been a few years since I was a serious carouser, but I was sure this was the wrong way round. You went and got drunk first, then ended up at the police station. Did Seoul reverse the natural order of things?