Sunday 29th April

The smooth as silk taxi ride to the Hilton hotel, where The Old Man and I would be based for the next five nights, simply couldn’t have been more in contrast to the cramped and bumpy four-hour nonsense we’d just endured. Spring Air, my friends – avoid it like you would a murder of ‘chuggers’ (charity muggers) on any given UK high-street.

My first impressions of Malaysia were good: They drove on the left, spoke the Queen’s, and boasted UK-style plug sockets. These three things are all I ask of foreign climes. Malaysians also seem a notably friendly bunch, happy to converse even when the hour’s passing late. The lass working the hotel reception, zum Beispiel, even offered to upgrade our room to ‘premium’ following our first night, which seemed damned good of her.

We reached our assumedly ‘non-premium’ room just in time to switch on the over-sized television and watch the Arsenal ‘Arsenal it up’ against Atletico before bed – resulting in The Old Man punctuating his regular snores with muffled sobs and somnolent curses about ‘that plank Welbeck’.

 

Monday 30th April

To say Monday began with a ‘big breakfast’ really does no justice to the sheer amount consumed this fine day. Heaped combinations of global breakfast offerings were recruited and dispatched with great prejudice, and I left the table twice the man, in metric terms, that I was when I’d first sat down.

It was then time to show off my newly bloated ‘rig’ at the hotel’s rooftop pool, which was as fine a sun-trap as ever could be hoped for, and which ended up being a regular haunt of mine during our stay here in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of the Sabah (the northernmost part of Malaysian Borneo, don’t yer know?)

The ‘KK’ weather dances between endless blue skies and celestial bath-time rainstorms, so all told a nicely epic climate to accompany our retreat. This day, for its part, saw nary a cloud sunder the virgin sky.

Pool time done and dusted for now, we went to change rooms and ‘get our premium on’, though found that the room we left behind and the room we later gained were practically identical in every possible way, save that the view was ever-so-slightly upgraded from ‘a dual-carriageway’ to ‘a convention centre’. It is, one assumes dear readers, the thought that counts here.

The Old Man’s lust for the hunt meant that the afternoon began with a walk along the beach in search of various small, nondescript birds – almost all of which had decided it was far too hot to fraternise with Englishmen, so had ‘done one’ for the shade. I took this opportunity to lobby successfully for some sort of alcohol-based fixture, and the pair of us stumbled into the Shangri-La seaside resort – most likely the swankiest spot in all of KK.

Beneath the high roof of the resort’s celebrated ‘Sunset Bar’ we, along with perhaps two thousand Chinese tourists – the Chinese, as a people, clearly of the opinion that Borneo is very much ‘the goods’ – watched a bashful yet beautiful sun knock it on the head for the day, all the while sinking G&Ts with admirable gusto. We then, again with innumerable Chinese hordes, hot-footed it over to the heaving seafood restaurants near our hotel, picking out ‘Welcome Seafood Restaurant’ – a humble spot, yet akin to the Beatles’ in the mid-1960s in terms of raw popularity – which had been suggested to us back en Chine by Portlandia.

Welcome SF, like many of its peers, is notable due to the way one goes to point out the fish/crustacean which you would most like to consume from amongst his/her tank buddies. This ill-fated fellow/lassie is then whipped out of the milling waters of the tank, ushered backstage for their last rites, and then appears on your plate with a pleasant ginger garnish not five/ten minutes later. That is, my friends, ‘as fresh as it gets’, and the process does give one the pleasant feeling of being ‘Judge Judy and executioner’, as big Nicky Frost might say.

Back at the hotel, now very much filled with the fruits of the South-China Sea, we found a rather odd ‘Full Moon Party’ knocking along by the pool, replete with dodgy DJs and somewhat incongruous Malaysian fire-eaters. We imbibed a couple of ‘Full Moon Beers’ and wandered among a real mishmash of the KK great and good, before deciding that this wasn’t really ‘the Mansfield scene’ and calling it a night at a reasonably respectable hour.

 

Tuesday 1st May

I made the executive decision this morning to skip breakfast for a little extra slumber – The Old Man having kept the whole hotel awake the previous night, snoring like a chainsawed bear. Once I’d managed to bag a couple more hours of necessary shut-eye, we wandered into town and down to the waterfront. The whole place has the air of a city which is almost, almost about to take off, but hasn’t quite made the leap yet. Buildings remain unfinished in the baking sun, billboards advertise future hotels and fabulous, non-existent facilities – all dormant, all waiting for southbound Chinese dollar to reach critical mass.

We eventually make it to Jetterson Point, the key tourist ferry port, to check out the available boats for a mooted Friday trip to one or two of the picturesque little islands – Sapi, Manukan, Sulug, Mamutik and Gaya – which lie just off the coast to the west-by-northwest. After a cooling, restorative beer, we braved the fierce sun again, heading over to the leafy eastern corner of the city and to KK’s Wetlands Centre, where we had a very warm wander around the mangroves, again spotting very few birds of note.

Heading back to the hotel, more sweat now than men, we wondered whether a pattern was emerging here, and that the feathered denizens of Borneo were making an especial effort to avoid our company entirely. However, having cooled a little by the pool, restoring our collective humours, we decided this unlikely, and heaving ourselves out of our funk and our heatstroke, we popped off to Sri Melaka restaurant for some splendidly fiery local fare. Be warned – Malaysian curries are fine things, but they seldom ‘mess around’.

We then went looking for what KK could offer a couple of lads about town of a Tuesday evening. Answer: not a great deal. We were, at one point, press-ganged into ‘Cowboy Bar’, as sketchy a ‘sketchy-ass dive’ as ever a true Christian found himself in, and we downed our beverages and fled the place apace, without a single backward glance. In its stead, being, one regrets to relay, ‘those kind of blokes’, we hastened back to HQ for a glass of very nice red and a frankly unnecessarily fancy pudding.

 

Wednesday 2nd May

Continuing the theme developed late on the Tuesday, we spent much of the day by the hotel pool and in the hotel restaurant, enjoying a notably western-style lunch and various western-style drinks. Then come the afternoon, it was time to go ‘full tourist’. We were picked up by a big bus full of sightseers from all four corners of the globe and were driven away for some manner of ‘boat safari thingy’, far from the city, amongst the jungles and the trees.

It was, one must say, very, very wet. The rain, when it came, was so apocalyptic that it delayed the start of the river voyage, our guide having no great desire for his prized ‘tour boat’ to be transformed by the heavens into a prized ‘tour submarine’. Instead, we had a bit of a feed and waited impatiently until precipitation-levels fell from ‘It’s the End of the World as we Know it’ to ‘Why Does it Always Rain on Me?’ Once aboard and motoring, we immediately clapped eyes on some exceptionally damp proboscis monkeys, who, huge, pendulous noses aside, looked much like I felt.

This augured well, I felt, for these PMs were the major natural history draw of the area, and spotting them so swiftly suggested that it might still, despite it all, be ‘our day’. Low and behold, the rain promptly buggered off completely and the sun followed suit, giving us boatmen an uninterrupted and spectacular firefly show, the palms which lined the riverbank transformed into wonderful, vine-clad Christmas trees, sparkling away merrily in the dusk. All on-board, one is pleased to relay, had plenty of happy memories to mull over, during the subsequent long and damp drive back to Kota Kinabalu town.

 

Thursday 3rd May

Thursday saw a prohibitively early start – The Old Man wasn’t taking his lack of Borneo birding success lying down, and had booked us both on a pre-dawn tour up Mount Kinabalu (reportedly the highest mountain in Southeast Asia, and the peak from which KK takes its name). ‘Twas a good way uphill, even at the ridiculous pace set by the bastard-mad driver, but the views, once sunrise had gotten its act together, were pretty darn magnificent, one must say.

Once at sufficient altitude we commenced a lengthy bird watching tour on foot, and finally, finally, The Old Man had some success: Two out of the area’s three ‘Whiteheads’ were spotted before lunch – Whitehead’s Trogan (a sizable red beauty with a long black tail) and Whitehead’s Broadbill (a particularly rare, iridescent green jobbie). Whitehead’s Spiderhunter would have to wait for another trip, as would Whitehead himself, conspicuous by his absence.

The proffered lunch was middling at best, however, and I found the afternoon’s jaunt, after the happy successes of the morning’s stroll, a bit of a drag. For the younger Mansfield, a wee bit of twitching goes a long way, but The Old Man showed no sign of fatigue whatsoever. So on I trudged, heroic in my stoicism, thinking deeply of beer.

Finally, some hours later, I sat alone by rainy hotel pool, clutching my lager to me like a child saved from the labyrinth. The Old Man was in the room, happily adding dozens of new birds to his list, and I didn’t wish to disturb him: troubled, addled souls when in such frenzies should be given time and space, I’ve always felt.

Once his revels at last were ended, we headed back to Welcome Seafood Restaurant for an overdue encore. The food was just as good as before, though this time cruel fate (that is to say, the cruel, unthinking waitress) had seated us between two over-sized familial units, replete with snarling infants. Such torment could weary even the stoutest of hearts, and I subsequently turned in for a relatively early night, once another fine bout of fish and prawns had begun to work their magic on the Mansfield tissues and spirit.

 

Friday 4th May

Time to pack up the old room and then stash the big bag, as the final days of Borneo had arrived. Once checked-out we hailed a lightning quick taxi to Jetterson Point, before, more by luck than judgement, boarding a chaotic water-taxi to Gaya Island via a number of other smaller, more tourist-dense islets. The craft’s pilot obviously had a pressing engagement of some kind to attend later, as he clicked the engine-dial past ‘fast’ and ‘unnecessarily rapid’ right over to ‘light speed’, and threw us across the chopped waves at roughly one million knots, at points achieving Michael Jordan-levels of perilous airtime.

Once at Gaya, legs still shaking slightly, we embarked (perhaps unwisely) on an unaccompanied jungle trek, right across the tall spine of island, in theory in the direction of a settlement on the far south-eastern edge of the island. There were birds aplenty here, along with a number of troops of sizable, muscular monkeys and the odd startled bush pig, and soon one felt that we had found a proper wilderness, much like those forests which welcomed the first British explorers, back before the days of colonial Borneo.

This feeling didn’t last: We stumbled out of the stifling forest onto very much the wrong beach, straight into the middle of the exceptionally swish Bungaraya Island Resort – our brief illusion of adventure ushered away by a heady mixture of snorkeling, expensive drinks and general high-livin’. This was, in all seriousness, probably for the best, as the going had been exceptionally hot and tricky during parts of the climb, and a second wander back to catch our return boat may well have slain The Old Man dead. Rather, we pretended, quite successfully, to be Bungaraya residents and, after the snorkeling and suchlike was done, managed to get ourselves on the much more sedate Island Resort Boat back to KK.

After celebrating our famous escape from the jungles of Gaya with some sunset drinks at the top of the (not particularly grand) Grandis Hotel, we returned to HQ Hilton for one last time to pick up our bags and grab a final Borneo dinner. It was then time to stiffen the old sinews and summon up the old red stuff, for Kota Kinabalu Airport and a second abysmal overnight(ish) Spring Air flight beckoned us like Charon on his fateful ferry.

As I folded myself into my Shanghai-bound seat, however – blocking out the anguished screams of myriad Chinese infants stationed all around my berth – I reflected that this present hell was, undoubtedly, a price well-worth paying for an excellent, action-packed quintet of fabulous Borneo days. My time remaining in Asia – and the third and final blog post – was not destined to be lengthy, so I was determined, no matter what was thrown at me, to enjoy every moment I was afforded completely.