I would like to spend more time exploring Kota Kinabalu, or KK as everyone refers to it. While in KK, we enjoyed great coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, there were many old markets to explore and a unique waterfront with lots of old fishing boats to keep things interesting.
I would not return to Sandakan. It just didn’t do it for me. Why? There was nothing special to see. There is no apparent local culture. The food is not that great (relative to the area). The waterfront smells like sewage. The streets smell like sewage. The rats in the streets look like they have been living in sewage… ok, you get the point.
The Sepilok area is a chilled out place that features a couple of nicer places to stay, and a variety of wildlife sanctuaries and rainforest discovery centers. I am not really into spending time at wildlife sanctuaries or discovery centers, but they did provide enough distraction to keep us entertained for about two days. If I did return, I would quickly book a standard chalet at Sepilok Forest Edge Resort. The chalet felt deluxe after the other places we’d been. The food was good, and the pool was a nice added bonus.
During our time, we visited the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary, the Orang Utan Sanctuary, and the Sandakan Rainforest Discovery Centre. None of them really grabbed me as being worth the trip, but they were OK.
Kinabatangan River was truly an amazing place. Seeing animals in the wild is a completely different experience than seeing them in a zoo. Honestly, I’m not the biggest fan of zoos, or seeing animals. One minute, and I’m ready to move on to the next thing. This was different kind of experience. Animals can be kind of cool!
We ended up getting connected with Osman’s homestay, which was right on the river. There are other nature lodges one can choose from in the area, but they are much more expensive. The deal with a homestay is that visitors experience what it’s like to hang out with a family, instead of just having a room somewhere. I’m glad we got the chance to meet Osman and his family. He is a passionate conservationist and educator, and knows the local environment as well as anyone.
We were happy that a herd of nearly sixty pygmy elephants was in the area. What surprised me the most about the elephants was the noises that they would make. One person commented, “now we know where the dinosaur noises used in Jurassic Park came from.”
Osman with a flower
At night, the herd of elephants moved through Osman’s yard. At times, the elephants would bump and rub against the house causing it to shake. Osman’s house is on stilts, which made it even more unstable and vulnerable. We prayed that an elephant would would not get itself under the house and knock the entire thing over trying to get out. Trying to sleep with wild elephants walking just a few feet from where we were sleeping proved to be impossible. We tried starting a chainsaw, started small fires and using a spot light to try to get them to move away. Nothing was successful.
Some friends and I kicked off a 10-day trip to Borneo by doing a 4-day dive course at Singamata Adventures Semporna. I didn’t have a lot of time to take pictures, because getting open water certification actually took most of my energy. We would start studying in the morning during breakfast, do practice dives throughout the day, and study and test during the evening until bedtime. Hard work, but definitely worth it.
Singamata, got mixed reviews from our group of 6. The food was average, the setting was great, rooms are sparse, training was good (we all loved our instructor Mark), but once we visited nearby Sipadan Island for one of our last dives, we all agreed it would have been much better to stay there. However, Singamata is about 1/3 the price of anything on Sipadan, so in the end you get what you pay for. What’s more, we paid a lot of money to get dive training, but Vicky at Singamata never processed our PADI certifications. Without a PADI card, I will not be able to dive anywhere else. WHAT A RIP OFF!
Positives: Learned to dive. Negatives: Did not get to see/meet any sea gypsies. This was the #1 reason I was drawn to Semporna. Maybe next time.
by P-Lo
no comments
add a comment link to this post email a friend