We left the Philippines and flew to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, which is near the northern tip of the island of Borneo. I think we had some ideas about what we would find here and some of those those ideas have proven to be inaccurate.
When we arrived in KK (Kota Kinabalu) we were thirsty for some new cultural experiences and adventure after lounging around on beautiful beaches in the Philippines. The first thing we found was great food. Lively markets filled with all kinds of wonderful food. There is a very nice section of the market in KK where they mainly sell seafood. This is some of the nicest looking (and tasting) seafood I’ve seen. Piles of tropical fish, squid, enormous lobsters and prawns, crabs, stingrays, and clams. This stuff is as fresh as it gets and there are stalls set up ready to grill it for you Malaysian style, with sambal sauce, sides of seaweed, and other noodle and rice dishes. We had a whole grilled seabass one night and a grilled stingray steak another night and they were delicious.
Other parts of the market were filled with fruits and vegetables, various dried fish and other unidentifiable dried products, and sweets. I’m not a huge fan of sweets in general but it was just impossible to ignore these things. It was all home-made and there was a huge variety. Some were deep fried pastries, some were slightly custardy caky things made from rice flour and coconut sugar. The language barrier made it so that it was almost impossible to figure out what anything was. We just had to try them, so that’s what we did. Wow. Many of the things we tried were surprisingly not very sweet. Wonderful textures, rich and subtle flavors. Yummy. Overall, we’ve found the food here to be excellent.
It’s interesting to be in a place that is largely Muslim. Many of the women wear a traditional style of Muslim attire and there are mosques everywhere. I know there are lots of Muslims in the US but I’ve never really experienced this before. The mosques have very loud speakers around them which blast the sound of prayer singing or chanting several times a day around town. Its seems, at least on the surface, that the various religious and ethnic populations that live here coexist relatively peacefully, at least in eastern Malaysia. I was initially concerned that Fern and I would be treated poorly by the Muslims, especially Fern with her large tattoos and little sleeveless dresses but I have not found that to be the case. People stare a little bit and Fern gets lots of compliments on her tattoos but nobody has been unfriendly about it. We might need to cover up a bit more in some places but here it seems pretty relaxed.
There are a couple of things that we had hoped to find here but it hasn’t really worked out that way. One is a nice relaxed beach town. I know there are some nice beaches and snorkeling/diving areas in eastern Sabah but we were a little concerned about our safety over there, what with recent kidnappings and murders targeting tourists. Some locals told us that they’ve increased security measures but other people told us it was unsafe. As much as I really wanted to swim with sea turtles we decided to skip that area and head west instead. We did find one nice quiet beautiful beach spot at Sawangan Beach but it was really a trek to get to it. The lady who runs the place that we stayed at made our time there really special. Fern now refers to her as her Malaysian mommy.
And we headed toward Sarawak…
jim@snorkelbandits.com