Kota Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu (KK) is the provincial capital of Sabah, the other half of Malaysian Borneo and is where we've been hiding out since we left Brunei. KK is a long sprawl of a city resting besides the South China Sea and to be honest its not the best place we've been to. In its favour it does sell alcohol and after a 3 day drought in Brunei, we were eager to start beering it up again. We toured KK's restaurants and bars, managing to avoid a limpet stringer by the name of Greg who'd clamped himself to us one night in Miri and who I'd spotted here in KK, luckily before he spotted us! Reminiscing about Japan, we ended up in a Karaoke bar which had the worst selection of songs ever, Michael Bolton and Sea-lion Dion having the 'lions' share of the menu. The only interesting thing about KK is its Marlin statue on the sea front and its cracking sunsets. Other than that, it's a bit of a nothing place, not a lot to do here except use it as a base for our adventures.
First up was a spot of Scuba diving around some small islands 15 minutes off the coast. Sam hasn't dived since Vietnam and unfortunately has developed a fear of diving. We thought that she might try a dive here and see how it went. The night before our dive however, we could here it raining heavily all night and rain tends to mess up the visibility underwater, so when the alarm clock went off, Sam decided that she definitely wasn't going to do it. I walked down to the dive shop and a small group of us jumped into a speed boat and headed out to the dive site. As the sea got choppier, the clouds grew blacker and the rain / hail started to hammer down on me I was sooooooo relieved that Sam had decided to stay at the hotel. The weather was terrible and even I was fairly nervous, wondering what my fellow divers thought about the conditions. When we arrived at the dive site, just next to a little island, the rain was so hard that I could see only about 100 meters around the boat. As I was wondering how bad it was, a girl next to me said 'what's that grey thing in the water', turning we all looked and there was a turtle popping its head up to get some air, at the same time I looked up and saw an eagle flying overhead, even in crap conditions, that's what's good about Borneo!
After agreeing that the boat would give 3 big revs of the engine if the weather deteriorated further and also before I vomited over everyone we got our kit on and jumped over the side. The visibility below that surface was 8-12 meters, surprisingly not to bad, but what a boring dive. Loads of dead coral everywhere and we also came across a massive net with lots of dead fish in it....great. I saw a few Nemo's and a decent sized batfish, but that was it, my worst dive ever. Luckily the second dive of the day was loads better. By the time we'd had lunch, the weather had brightened up no end and we relocated to a different dive site. The visibility was about the same, but the coral was in a much better state and there were plenty of fish about. After diving down to 20 meters, we swam along and came across a pile of tyres on the sea bed. These had been colonised by all manner of critters, a nice stonefish sat in the middles looking all stoney, I saw my first crayfish and some really cool looking shrimps that I later discovered were called Durban Hinge-beaked Shrimps. After the tyres, we swam over the reef and saw some nice lionfish, cuttlefish, angelfish, nemo's and always a winner, a turtle.
Our hotel in KK is called Borneo Backpackers and is ok, nice decor etc, but at times populated by annoying English lads and unhelpful staff. Before we encountered KK induced depression, we took ourselves off once again into the hinterland and this time we thought we'd test our fitness to the limits by walking up a mountain, stupid? Yes we certainly are, I ain't never climbin' no mountain again!

Next time on the Andy and Sam blog: Hamble Climbs the Mountain