Kota Kinabalu

Saturday, April 01, 2017
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Apologies in advance for the detail, but this time round the blog is serving as my journal as well, so that's why it's so detailed!

Arrived safely in Kota Kinabalu this afternoon, after quite a long night . Luckily I was exhausted enough from staying up until 1am that I managed to sleep a fair bit on the plane from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur. I had a few hours wait in the domestic terminal at KL (definitely not as impressive as their international terminal) before the short flight to Kota Kinabalu. Once I'd been dropped off at my hotel I had a wander around the city. It's very South East Asian, lots of markets and street hawkers (and weird smells), and is quite a small city. I had a wander through some of the markets on the bayfront, but most stalls were closing up for the afternoon. I walked up to the Signal Hill Observatory, which looked out over the city and the bay, and had quite a nice view.

I came back to the hotel around 4:30 (I'd run out of places to walk around!) and met my room buddy, who I get along with really well, so that's good! Her name is Lauren, and she's about my age and from Newcastle. Our hotel backs on to the hills that border the city, so the view out the window is onto the jungle, which is very cool.
We headed down to our team meeting at 6 and met the whole group - there's 15 of us, but two hadn't arrived yet, so we did some admin and chatted about some logistics. The group is mostly Australian, with a few British people, and two Austrians (a dad and son). The dad doesn't seem to speak any English, so here's another chance to practise my German! Then we headed off to dinner. Our team leader took us to an Indian restaurant, where we ate the traditional way - eating with our fingers! I had a fantastic chicken biryani with some little vegetables and some roti bread. Very messy hands by the end, but it was very yum. Then we were all fairly exhausted so headed back to the hotel and went to bed! Ready to begin the trip proper tomorrow!

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