Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia

 In Sabah our main excursions were a jungle stay by the Kinabatangan River, a few days at the base of Mt Kinabalu, and snorkeling at Tunku Abdul Rahman marine park.  Of all the places we revisited, Borneo was lacking compared to our last trip.  Part of it is likely that we were priced out of most excursions.  For instance, one of Dave’s regrets from our last trip was that he didn’t get to climb Mt. Kinabalu as he was reconvening from illness.  When we looked into another try but it was $900 CAD per person.  There’s no way we would have spent that much last time around to climb a mountain.  Turtle Island was another memorable outing that we chose to forego at $350 pp.  Finally, the snorkeling at Tunku Abdul Rahman marine park was difficult to navigate re: buying tickets, poorly communicated (one island we bought a ticket for was actually closed for maintenance, another that we were supposed to visit in the afternoon was actually closed for snorkeling after 1 pm) and the actual coral had suffered since the last time.  

At the jungle stay one of the highlights was seeing a group of wild elephants hanging out by the river, and seeing a spider on a giant net catch a huge bug and wrap it up during one of our night walks.  Our river cruises and night walks also gave us a glimpse of small crocodiles, orangutans, silver leaf monkeys, hornbills and more.

A highlight was this random Japanese Airbnb we booked in the mountains. It was a bit crazy to get to (we were warned about the steep one way roads in the reviews), but once we arrived they mentioned that we could use the traditional clothes during our stay.  There was a kimono as a wall decoration in our apt, but it was nailed to the wall so we weren’t sure what they were referring to.  The next day we found there was an actual costume shop and people come to the hotel just to dress up in Japanese outfits and take pictures.  They had many cute Japanese backdrops to choose from around the property and we ended up having a really fun 2-hour photoshoot.