After returning to KK from the mountain, I had a few more days to spend relaxing (and letting my legs recover!). I spent Wednesday fairly quietly, doing a little walking, but mostly relaxing in coffee shops and malls and such.
Like Kuala Lumpur and perhaps other places in Malaysia, KK loves its malls, including the new and luxurious Imago. Every couple of hours Imago puts on a twenty minute traditional dance show, right in front of Michael Kors!
It is almost worth watching just for the ironic nature of it all, but in the end I was quite into it--the bamboo dancing is something else. You can get an idea of it in the video below--basically the dancers need to move their feet quickly to avoid having their feet pinched by the bamboo rods. The speed of the beat increases such that eventually they are dancing extremely quickly!
Here is a little description:
I went to a much lower-brow mall, too, and was tempted to have some tailoring done, because I found a pretty good tailor.
My brother was working most of today, but joined me for dinner. We did seafood again, but this time at an open air restaurant rather than the fish market. We picked out a grouper from the tank and the server caught it with a net and a BIG splash.
Fifteen minutes later or so, and grouper was on our plate!
Today we headed to the ferry terminal at Jesselton Point for a snorkeling trip out to one of the islands that make up the Tunku Abdul Rahman Park.
The islands are close to the city (easily visible from the shore), but most are preserved natural spaces. When we got to the ticket counter we thought we were going to Sapi Island, but the ticket seller persuaded us that for snorkeling we were better off at Mamutik. We were not particular, so went with her recommendation. We were able to rental snorkel gear and flippers for a very reasonable 20RM, or about $6 Canadian. This is the ferry terminal as we pulled away on our little boat.
These boats island hop between the islands--none of them are much more than a few minutes from each other or from the city.
We were dropped on the pier about ten minutes after leaving the ferry terminal.
There are lockers you can rent for 10 RM, so we stashed some of our things and went for a walk on the one trail that more or less goes around the island. It is quite short and not especially interesting, except we saw two LARGE monitor lizards which was pretty cool. Unfortunately I failed to get a photo of either of them. After we got back to the beach we jumped in the water. This is the beach we were snorkeling off.
I have no way to photograph underwater, so nothing to show, but we ended up spending a couple of hours and it was actually really good snorkeling. My brother is a big diver and says the snorkeling here was better than some dives he has been on.
Around 13:00 we were done and back on the pier waiting for a return boat home.
Back in the city, my brother and I showered and rested up, then ate lunch in Chinatown, dessert and coffee at a coffee shop, draft beer at a indoor bar (beer is relatively hard to find in restaurants in Kota Kinabalu), some durian at a durian stand . . .
. . . and finally another beer at the waterfront while the sun set.
Those are fishing boats in the water and some of the Tunku Abdul Rahman Park islands behind them.
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