Asia 2023

Second day in Kuala Lumpur. Walking around the city, visiting an Iraqi restaurant and that's pretty much it.

Reached Kuala Lumpur after an easy flight from Kota Kinabalu. Huge city is maybe even a welcome change after the jungle. :)

Walked around a bit, visited a seventh highest tower in the world and so on. The second highest building in the world is close to our hotel, but unfortunately it's still slightly in progress and an observation deck will only be opened later this year. It's high... Some 700 meters.

The hot springs plan failed a bit. Once again we have been happily eating from the most suspicious streetfood restaurants during the entire trip and then had one lunch in a civilized, tourist-oriented restaurant at the tea garden and it was a mistake, resulting in spending a night with head in the toilet. Well, later during the day I'm already feeling fine so it was a minor food poisoning this time.

Had to skip the hot springs as in the morning was not still feeling completely healthy, and maybe the sunburns and other small wounds would have gotten extra bacteria from there so it was better to skip this time. We drove the rest of the way to Kota Kinabalu city, returned the rental car and spent the rest of the day seeing around the city. The night food market was a nice one, tasty and probably safer food than the stupid tea garden..

Today was a bit more relaxed driving day, slowly making our way towards Kota Kinabalu and arriving in the evening to a midway town with hot springs. That will be in the program tomorrow morning.

On the way we stopped to have a strange experience, a fish spa but with wild fish in natural river. The fish were also big, the biggest ones being maybe 1-2 kilos. It's a strange feeling to be surrounded by dozens of large fish biting your legs. :)

Early in the morning before the sunrise we departed to a river cruise for a couple of hours. Monkeys, birds and jungle. :)

Driving day. We decided to go see a bit of jungle, so in the evening we arrived to a jungle lodge in totally middle of nowhere next to a river passing through the rainforest. Tomorrow morning to a river cruise to see crocodiles. :)

One more diving day, this time the famous Sipadan island. Actually the visibility there was not that great, so it was not as impressive as it could be but.. Still saw a huge school/tornado of barracudas, which unfortunately have no photo of as the camera had some technical problems. Also some sharks and the usual turtles.

We are still suffering our sunburns from the first day, so the dives were relatively painful.. Or not really diving, but getting the wetsuit and gear on and off. Now in the evening we finally read some treatment instructions and picked up hydrocortisone from a pharmacy. Should get better..

Also staying a bit longer in Borneo. The original plan was to drop the car off tomorrow and continue to Brunei or to Kuala Lumpur, but that would have required too much driving at night as it's surprisingly long way to Kota Kinabalu. So, we choose the safer and more relaxing option, extended the car rental until Wednesday and will see around the island a bit more on the way. Then a flight to Kuala Lumpur, I guess.

Second diving day, Mabul and Kapalai islands. Some more turtles and stuff, a bit worse visibility and nothing extremely special. Still healing our sunburns from yesterday..

First diving day done. The first dive site was not particularly interesting, but the second ones were.. a turtle soup. Dozens of turtles, and that's exactly what we wanted. :)

In the morning we woke up in the noisy jungle, had a quick breakfast and visited the orangutang and Borneo sun bear rehabilitation and conservation centers in Sepilok.

Saw some orangutangs who are otherwise living in the wild but come randomly to the center for food and a couple of bears. The bears were actually cute, it's the smallest bear of the world so they were about a size of a midsize dog. Orangutangs too, of course. :)

The rest of the day was spent on the road again, first fixing the broken tire and then driving to Semporna, an ugly town that is located close to the best diving waters of Malaysia. Tomorrow should be some diving in the program.