Great Escape - Kota Kinabalu

18-21 February 2011

Mt. Kinabalu

My college friends and I love to escape from the fast paced life in the city every once in a while. A few years back, we went to Boracay and Ilocos provinces and spent a fortune on those trips, but more on that later. So, we went for another trip, but this time it is out of the country. We wanted to go to Bali or Phuket for the summer but there are no direct flights to Bali (from Manila) and Phuket is, well, a bit pricey with the airfares and hotels and whatnot. Thus, we end up booking a flight to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.

Pacific Sutera

Kota Kinabalu or KK as me and my friends call it, is not really a top tourist destination, in my opinion. For starters, it's not very famous, at least not to us, I mean we haven't heard of it until we decided to go there. We just thought, we need to have a getaway, since the last one was our Batangas trip, and that was a year before this one. So we booked the on-sale flight and started planning the trip. I booked the hotels and organized our itinerary. Because we want this great escape from our busy worklife, we all agreed to check-in into this very fancy hotel, The Pacific Sutera, and man this hotel is fancy - it got it's own shuttle bus to lift it's guests to the city and back to the hotel, we have daily buffet breakfast which is pretty good, and our room is overlooking the hotel's own golf course and its bathroom has a sliding window that you can open so you can watch the TV while enjoying hot bath in the tub..pretty cool huh!

Rafflesia

Aside from our posh hotel accommodations, there's really not much to see in KK that you haven't seen here in the Philippines, and our white sand beaches are way better than theirs, we have white water rafting in CDO (Cagayan de Oro), and we also have the Rafflesia, the largest flower in the world. There are also lots of Filipinos down there, they sorta live and work there already, after all, the island of Borneo is one boat away from the province of Zamboanga, so they come home here just to visit their family for vacation, and most of them doesn't know how to speak Tagalog anymore. But if you are into the wilderness, there is the Mt. Kinabalu, the highest peak in all Southeast Asia. You can climb that tall mountain up to its peak and back to the foot for no less than three days. Well, that's it for KK, nothing really exciting for us, I mean as a group, my friends aren't really the outdoorsy type of people, so climbing to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu would be the last on our itinerary. But if you would ask me, I would love to climb that old mountain and watch the sunrise on either of it's summits...maybe I will, one day.

After all the island hopping and the tours at the foot of Mt. Kinabalu, we just enjoyed hanging out at the pool and in our room, sleeping. KK is really just a small city in the big island of Borneo, so there's not much to explore, specially downtown. I mean we enjoyed authentic Malaysian dishes on our first night and had a few drinks at a local bar, but that's about it. There is one thing I admire the most in KK - the island hopping; not because of it's white sand beaches or the wild animals like giant lizards mingling among tourists, but because of the boat docks on their islands. They have docks on each island where the speedboats can take turns into loading/unloading the tourists on/off the island and long boardwalks that leads to the entrance where you will pay for the entrance ticket, which is good for all the islands already, there are six of them. Unlike here where boats dock on the shoreline, where people are swimming and snorkeling..it's pathetic. I wish the local tourism departments of our famous beaches here in the country could implement the same.

In totality, KK is a destination for sun, sands, beaches, mountains, and flora and fauna, and everything about nature; basically a tourist spot where you can both enjoy the relaxing backdrop of the sea and the wildlife of the mountains. In KK, there's always something that you can do!