Day 1
Yesterday was the dedicated traveller day. From 8 in the morning until 1.30 at night (which was actually 3.30 if you took into account the time zones) we were either in flight, on the road or wandering around an airport. For 19.5 hours! The flight with Air Asia X was better than we expected. We had booked inflight entertainment which came in the form of a Samsung tablet preloaded with movies. A novel experience especially when the battery started running low just as the end of the movie was approaching. Did the butler do it? We'll never know for sure.
We landed in Kuala Lumpur ahead of schedule but when you're aiming for a connecting flight all this buys you is more time at the airport. Still better than missing a connecting flight. Around 7 hours, an outrageously quick trip through customs (ie there was no one there to check anything) and a taxi ride later we were airborne again to Kota Kinabalu. Before we had taken off though Kate realised we might have an accommodate challenge. She noted that we were booked in at our KK motel for Monday and Tuesday night and though we were arriving on the Monday morning (early at 1.30 am) were we actually covered for Sunday night? Turns out not, though at least the travel company we had booked through did have somebody waiting to collect us. Mind you, you do have to wonder why nobody noticed that though we were getting collected we didn't actually have a roof over our heads. Of course, we were just as guilty of this, though the final booking details hadn't been provided to us until 24 hours before we were flying out.
The good news is that the motel (Novotel) had a spare room so we didn't have to sleep in the foyer.
I guess I should say that a fairly likely source for the booking problem is the way the whole process was contracted and sub-contracted out. We booked through flightcentre, who used their Borneo Agent, Adventure World, to book through Malaysian Trails, who subcontracted that out to Exotic Borneo. Classic Chinese whispers material.
Still, a bed was found and everybody was very helpful. So ended our first night in KK. A handful of hours later, our first day awaited us.
Yesterday was the dedicated traveller day. From 8 in the morning until 1.30 at night (which was actually 3.30 if you took into account the time zones) we were either in flight, on the road or wandering around an airport. For 19.5 hours! The flight with Air Asia X was better than we expected. We had booked inflight entertainment which came in the form of a Samsung tablet preloaded with movies. A novel experience especially when the battery started running low just as the end of the movie was approaching. Did the butler do it? We'll never know for sure.
We landed in Kuala Lumpur ahead of schedule but when you're aiming for a connecting flight all this buys you is more time at the airport. Still better than missing a connecting flight. Around 7 hours, an outrageously quick trip through customs (ie there was no one there to check anything) and a taxi ride later we were airborne again to Kota Kinabalu. Before we had taken off though Kate realised we might have an accommodate challenge. She noted that we were booked in at our KK motel for Monday and Tuesday night and though we were arriving on the Monday morning (early at 1.30 am) were we actually covered for Sunday night? Turns out not, though at least the travel company we had booked through did have somebody waiting to collect us. Mind you, you do have to wonder why nobody noticed that though we were getting collected we didn't actually have a roof over our heads. Of course, we were just as guilty of this, though the final booking details hadn't been provided to us until 24 hours before we were flying out.
The good news is that the motel (Novotel) had a spare room so we didn't have to sleep in the foyer.
I guess I should say that a fairly likely source for the booking problem is the way the whole process was contracted and sub-contracted out. We booked through flightcentre, who used their Borneo Agent, Adventure World, to book through Malaysian Trails, who subcontracted that out to Exotic Borneo. Classic Chinese whispers material.
Still, a bed was found and everybody was very helpful. So ended our first night in KK. A handful of hours later, our first day awaited us.
Day 2
So now it looked like we may have booked too many nights in KK and I was on the cusp of trying to juggle flights, accommodation and transfers to sandakan because our itinerary indicated that somewhere along the way our visit to the sepilok orangutan sanctuary had dropped off the radar. This would be classic me. Change everything to try and squeeze something else in.
The good news is that when we did speak to our tour guides later it turned out the sepilok sanctuary was on our itinerary, though not actually written on the one from flightcentre. So now we could relax and enjoy KK, having even more time than we had thought we might.
Because we arrived so late at night we didn't know where we were and it felt like we were out in the boondocks. I asked at reception where the nearest shopping centre was and the the women who was serving me actually laughed. It turns out that our hotel is right at the front of the 1Borneo hypermall, presumably just about the biggest shopping centre on all of Borneo! We just hadn't happen to notice that in the dark and in the wee hours.
Anyway, we shopped there and then caught a free bus into the city and did even more shopping there. Well worth the experience and the bus trip was an eye opener too. The challenges of how some people live!
It can be quite entertaining reading business names that just don't come across well in English. My favourite so far was the Yung Fat Scrap Yard. At last a solution to childhood obesity - just stick it on the scrap heap.
This evening we booked into a cultural tour. It involved visiting a village that had preserved the traditions and bulildings of the 5 different people's that originally settled in Borneo. Though this had the potential to appear quite plastic and fake it was all done so well and at the staff involved seemed to simply enjoy participating so much that it totally delivered. We jumped on traditional trampolines (lol - I jumped highest, though I seemed to be the only one who listened to what they told us to do), wore traditional garb, blew blow darts (I even managed to hit the target first dart) and Kate got an awesome henna tattoo.
Just brilliant.
So now it looked like we may have booked too many nights in KK and I was on the cusp of trying to juggle flights, accommodation and transfers to sandakan because our itinerary indicated that somewhere along the way our visit to the sepilok orangutan sanctuary had dropped off the radar. This would be classic me. Change everything to try and squeeze something else in.
The good news is that when we did speak to our tour guides later it turned out the sepilok sanctuary was on our itinerary, though not actually written on the one from flightcentre. So now we could relax and enjoy KK, having even more time than we had thought we might.
Because we arrived so late at night we didn't know where we were and it felt like we were out in the boondocks. I asked at reception where the nearest shopping centre was and the the women who was serving me actually laughed. It turns out that our hotel is right at the front of the 1Borneo hypermall, presumably just about the biggest shopping centre on all of Borneo! We just hadn't happen to notice that in the dark and in the wee hours.
Anyway, we shopped there and then caught a free bus into the city and did even more shopping there. Well worth the experience and the bus trip was an eye opener too. The challenges of how some people live!
It can be quite entertaining reading business names that just don't come across well in English. My favourite so far was the Yung Fat Scrap Yard. At last a solution to childhood obesity - just stick it on the scrap heap.
This evening we booked into a cultural tour. It involved visiting a village that had preserved the traditions and bulildings of the 5 different people's that originally settled in Borneo. Though this had the potential to appear quite plastic and fake it was all done so well and at the staff involved seemed to simply enjoy participating so much that it totally delivered. We jumped on traditional trampolines (lol - I jumped highest, though I seemed to be the only one who listened to what they told us to do), wore traditional garb, blew blow darts (I even managed to hit the target first dart) and Kate got an awesome henna tattoo.
Just brilliant.
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