On September 18 we took a bus at 10:30am from Bangar to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia. Kota Kinabalu is the capital of the Sabah province is Borneo Malaysia. The bus has a long lay over in Lawas, where we arrived at 11:20am and did not leave until 1:00pm. We finally arrived in Kota Kinabalu at 4:30pm. One thing to note in the immigration process… we left Brunei without major delays; we then entered Malaysia to the province of Sarawak where we got a stamp in our passports acknowledging that we had entered Malaysia. After driving another 20 minutes or so, we hit another border control; this time it was the province of Sabah, which has an independent immigration process within Malaysia. This stop was the longest and we got another stamp on our passport… keep them coming! I am glad we have a 36 pages passport this time!
Upon arriving in Kota Kinabalu, also know as KK, we headed to the hotel and went for a walk. This is a full on city, with lots of malls, a waterfront with sophisticated restaurants, high end hotels and condominiums, very impressive and completely unexpected.
On September 19 we went to a travel agency to inquire about the trips offered in Sabah. Marilyn from Marudu Express travel Services gave us some bad news… there is a Chinese holiday coming up and almost everything is fully booked for the first week of October, so we are going to plan this part of the trip a bit more (we hate planning!). We went to a café and evaluated all the options so we will be back tomorrow to talk to Marilyn as it is now too late.
On September 20 we went back to the travel agency and talked to Marilyn who was extremely helpful. She helped us arrange the rest of the trip. It looks like we will have to take a bus to Semporna to go to Mabul Island to go diving before doing the rest of the trips. Mabul Island is also fully booked for the first week of October. We headed to Scuba Junkies and booked our diving trip and then went back to Marilyn to book the rest.
It looks like the next week or so is fully booked and set in stone, something we do not like but do not want to miss some of the activities we want to do in this area.
