In a few days, we’re headed to Sipadan, purported to be one of the top dive sites in the world. I can imagine why, because only 120 divers can visit the island per day. Since we hadn’t been diving in almost 2 years, we decided to get in a few dives at the TARP right off the coast of Kota Kinabalu.
Side note to divers reading this: We used Sabah Divers, which was cheaper than Dive Down Under and included equipment ($200RM for 3 dives), but it’s budget. Don’t expect a lot of hand holding from the divemaster if you’re not comfortable with your gear, and you better know how to put it all together and know when something isn’t right.
We can’t say we’d recommend diving here unless you’re really in to small critters and low visibility types of diving – we had only 10 feet visibility and the sensor on our camera is starting to go bad, but here are some photos we captured:
Nemo!More Nemos!Nasty looking eel in the sandLionfish
Total Miles Traveled: 30,130 (we passed the 30k mark!)
Kota Kinabalu is the largest city on the Borneo side of Malaysia. While it’s located on the coast, it’s not a city you go to for the sights – it’s a bit of a concrete jungle that happens to be next to the water. It is, however, a great jumping off point for a lot of different activities: some of the best diving in the world, wildlife spotting in the jungle, orangutans… AND the best part of all, it has great food.
So let’s start off with some food and drink, shall we? The most fun we had was at Ocean Seafood Restaurant, where the menu is a bunch of aquariums from which you choose your prey and then the waiters tell you how you can have it prepared. Here’s what we picked to eat, prior to it being cooked:
And, here they are cooked:
Spanner Crab with Chili Sauce… mmm. Large chunks of slightly sweet, delicate meat (worth the effort!). Delicious.
Deep-fried Mantis Prawn with Roe. Sweet meat much like a lobster.
Steamed Red Grouper. The most expensive dish, steamed with green onion, ginger, and a bit of soy sauce. Super delicate and mild… awesome.
Kedai Kopi Fatt Kee
This open-air Chinese restaurant is always packed, even when we showed up at 9pm one night for a late dinner. We got winter melon soup (with mushrooms, chicken feet), sauteed sayur manis with garlic (a.k.a. sabah veggie, which is a jungle weed kind of like a cross between broccoli and spinach), and sauteed fish with ginger and onion. Total cost? $8. Love it.
Sri Melaka
This restaurant featured nyongyan or Straits Chinese food. Here’s a dish called Watan Ho, which is flat noodles with whitefish, squid, prawn, egg, bok choy, and a bunch of goo.
A close up of sayur manis, this time with dried shrimps:
And Mee Hai Law – a noodle dish with seafood:
The Kota Kinabalu Night Market is a happening place, featuring fresh groceries, seafood, and tons of hawker stalls with a variety of grilled seafood, satay, and other stuff. Here are some photos:
So, you’ve seen all the food photos – what about drinks? Well, they don’t make for very interesting photos, but the one interesting thing we’ve noticed is that all the drinks are super sugary and there are no diet sodas to be found anywhere. However, Malaysia has some wonderful fruits (it’s a hot, humid tropical climate). Nearly every restaurant or cafe will offer fresh juices – watermelon, mango, pineapple and really fresh coconut water straight from the source!
Kota Kinabalu – the city
For those who are interested in how Kota Kinabalu actually looks, here are some photos:
Fishing wharfTypical city street in Kota KinabaluDried goods (lots of seafood) at the marketCentral market, Kota KinabaluBuy your chicken by the pound
Finally for the fun photos:
What this is supposed to mean, we don’t know…
And, finally, you just might know the next Supermodel and Man Hunk of Sabah… 😉
For all of our photos in Kota Kinabalu, check out the Flickr slideshow:
Next up, some photos from our scuba diving in Kota Kinabalu and a visit to the Mari Mari cultural village where we did things like blow darts out of a blow gun, jump on a wooden trampoline, and get mud tattooes.
