KOTA KINABALU – 20-22 September 2024
There have been some ups and downs (cancelled flights, possible cyclones) but Jim (my travelling buddy) and I finally made it to Kota Kinabalu in East Malaysia on Saturday. Our Big Adventure was to start on the morning of 23 September, so we had a couple of days to do some sightseeing.
Our first adventure was to be a trip down-river looking for Probiscis Monkeys. We were driven out of Kota Kinabalu for about an hour (along with 12 others on the tour), and ended up at a jetty with a somewhat seaworthy “boat”.
The river and the jungle on the other side, actually looks really nice in this photo, and in the main it was.
This is actually a Macaques monkey – one of about 20 of them galivanting in the trees, they were about 20m away so you couldn’t see them that well.
It was at this point that my iPhone decided to take all my photos in HEIC format and it’s a pain in the arse to covert back to JPG that I can use so, I’ve basically lost all the photos that I took with my phone. Having said that, we did see some Probiscis monkeys and another species, but frankly they were so far away that you could barely see them and taking a photo would have been a waste of time. After looking around for monkeys (that you could barely see), we went back to the jetty and were given a nice dinner, then back to the boats to go looking for fireflies which we did find, but again, you can’t really photograph them. They were actually pretty cool, they lit up the jungle trees like Christmas Trees. So, basically, we went for a lovely cruise downstream.
We were picked up the next morning at 6.30am (a God awful time to have to meet your transport) and driven by River Junkies (the tour group that I used for our Kinabalu Adventure), the two hours that it takes to get from Kota Kinabalu to the Mount Kinabalu National Parks HQ. We were dropped there to wait until our accommodation opened at 3pm, so, we decided to do a walk around the Botanical Gardens.
I’d intentionally scheduled us to arrive at this time so I could see the Botanical Gardens, particularly their range of orchids, so off we went on a discovery walk.
The entrance to the garden walk, pretty cool sculpture.
These are the photos that I was able to convert from HEIC to JPG (the free program that I used only lets you do 12 photos – and as a bonus I probably downloaded a virus but that hasn’t shown up yet lol).
Turns out that we were about 2 weeks late for the brilliant display of orchids (saw a lot of dead flowers), but there were still some interesting plants and flowers around.
These are the flowers of a particular ginger plant and they come up straight from the roots of the ginger. At the time that I saw this plant had a chat with some other tourists and they told me that the new fronds of a birds next fern (or which I have many) can be boiled up and eaten. Now, that’s worth knowing in case there’s an apocalypse.
This was a weird ground dwelling plant and flowers.
These are pitcher plants – well dead pitcher plant flowers – they would have looked good a few weeks ago.
Very small orchid about size of a 1 dollar coin.
More orchids.
This is my favourite its called the Medinilla or Pink Maiden.
And this is a pitcher plant flower (in the nursery in a pot, it’s about 6″ long.
And finally this root of something which would have wound itself around a tree, then the tree deteriorated and what you are left with is a twisted root.
And more orchids, albeit small and not very brightly coloured.
After the botanical gardens we took one of the tracks through the park area which meandered along a river (very pretty), and then made our way to the Museum which has recently opened. It had a load of information on the UNESCO status of Mount Kinabalu (more about that in the next post). There was also a lot of information about the local Malay villages which was very interesting. We spent about an hour there reading all the information about the Mountain which we’d start climbing the next day.
At 3.30pm we were able to check into our room which was really lovely, it had a loft bedroom upstairs and another bed that they’d set up for us downstairs. At 6pm we fronted up for dinner (our accommodation and dinner and breakfast were included in our tour with River Junkies) and then next morning got a quick breakfast before being picked up by a shuttle bus to go back to the Park HQ to meet our guide. This was now getting pretty exciting – I was anxious about the climb up the mountain, so didn’t sleep all that well. A bad night’s sleep didn’t bode well for the future.
Watch this space … we’re on our next adventure climbing Mount Kinabalu (whose idea was this?).