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.

Reasons to get out of bed in Kota Kinabalu

This morning we got up at 5:30 and left our hotel, walking up Signal Hill to the observatory in order to catch the sunrise. This was disappointing for a number of reasons.

Arriving in Kota Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu is one of those airports where they x-ray your luggage when you arrive, to catch you smuggling things in (or perhaps you've transported an enormous weapon of mass destruction along with your underpants).  However, they only x-ray large suitcases, not hand baggage, which makes me suspect they're only looking for objects of a certain size.  Have people been sneaking fairground midgets into Malaysia through Kota Kinabalu in the past?  I'm not sure why a fairground midget would be different to a small person in any other occupation, but then I'm not a smuggler.