I’ve been taking it easy in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah. A friendly and sunny town with a few islands off the coast to simply relax, soak the sun and waste time away. After to being to many of the best dive sites in the world, I realised it was probably time to buckle down, lay out the cash and start an open water dive course here in KK – it’s rather cheap too!
But of course, I can’t simply just stay in one city for so long without getting a tad bored. Then again, moving around costs money, and since I’m trying to conserve the bills I tried to do some totally shoestring maneuvers yesterday and still have some fun. And fun I had. Got up ridiculously early (before the sun had risen) and caught a cheap bus to the Kinabalu national park. Somehow, sneakily, I managed to skip the entrance fee and went for a 6 km hike up Mount Kinabalu. I’d heard getting to the summit was quite expensive and I wasn’t prepared to fork it out, but this turned out to be some tourist propaganda spread by the tout army. Regardless, I didn’t have enough on me to pay the guide.
It was barely 12 noon by the time I had returned down to the park entrance and was starting to feel the aches in my muscles from the walk. I’d heard stories of some hot springs about 40km (read 2 hours) away which sounded relaxing. This tale needed some spice, so instead of waiting for a bus I stuck my thumb out onto the highway and hitched my way to the next town. That was awesome. Met some locals who worked at the national park, and went through some teensie towns and maybe even picked up some avian influenza in the live chicken market. I was forced to catch an expensive bus from my drop point to the springs, and did so only because I had made the effort to get there. The hot springs in the town of Poring should have been called “the hot springs of Boring”. What a waste of time. No big pools of steaming hot sulphurous water, but tubs which had to be filled with from a tap for maybe an hour. Needless to say disappointment and annoyance got the better of me and I left. By now it was 3pm, and I had money to either make it to the small town (Ranau) or from Ranau to Kota Kinabalu. I took the plunge again and hitched to Ranau from the springs after walking down the highway for half an hour. I hadn’t realised how far away the town was and came out lucky.
In the end, not such a bad day. Exhausting, but not a failure. Ultimately I really just discovered what I already knew deep inside. Travel isn’t just about the destination, but the journey. How do you get somewhere? How long did it take? What adventures did you have and who did you meet. I did all of that yesterday, and it was fun and fulfilling.