March 25 & 26 2012

We've now completed our time in Malaysian Borneo, but we were late back to our hotel on the 25th and had to check out by noon on the 26th before flying to Hong Kong (at 8pm). There was no time to write the blog on those two days, so here goes with a catch-up.

On the 25th we had a wander round Kota Kinabalu's Sunday morning flea market before being collected at the hotel and taken on a two-hour drive into the country to join a river cruise through rain forest, looking for more monkeys and whatever else we could find (actually, we only found monkeys). The flea market was hot, crowded, and pretty average, but at least the monkeys turned up in the afternoon!

Sunday morning flea market, Kota Kinabalu

We thought that one of the sad sights in the market was puppies being offered for sale. The stalls in question had "No photos/video" warnings on them, but I managed to sneak one.

I think these poor little fellows were labelled as "Chinese Terriers"

It was a long drive out to join the river cruise, but refreshments were laid on when we arrived at the jetty and we were out on the water for about two hours. The boats were fairly simple and pretty uncomfortable, as we were sitting on wooden benches, but they were fast and the drivers would speed from point to point (they seemed to know where the monkeys would be) and that created a very welcome breeze.

This was the type of boat used on the river cruise.

We saw loads of monkeys, although they were often only just visible in the undergrowth, so photo opportunities were hard to come by. This family group of long-tailed macaques obliged us, though, by perching high in a tree with very little foliage...

We returned to the jetty as the sun was setting, and our driver stopped in mid-stream to give us the chance of snapping the scene...

Dinner was laid on, although the smell of the food (which was not unpleasant) was almost masked by the smell of the mossie repellent which all us tourists were smothering ourselves with! After dinner, we got back in the boats and went a little way upstream to watch fireflies in the trees. It really is an astonishing sight - it looks rather like a Christmas tree looks when you set the lights to twinkle mode - but defies all efforts to be photographed. This didn't stop some of the half-wits amongst us repeatedly taking photographs of the trees using flash (I ask you....)

On Monday morning we had to get packed and check out, but then had several hours to kill before it was time to leave for the airport, so we wandered down to Jesselton point, where all the island-hopping boats gather, and just watched the world go by for a while. Eventually, we caught our Dragonair flight to Hong Kong, where we arrived on time at 10.50pm and took a taxi to our hotel, the Marco Polo Hong Kong Hotel. Good recommendation from Dave Sweet - it's really lovely here (although £54 for two breakfasts resulted in a sharp intake of breath!)

The view from our room in the Marco Polo

Will report on our first full day in Hong Kong in the next post!