I'm 96% fine again. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Had our last breakfast at 2 different places on the same street.
Big steamed bun and buttermilk bun
All the steamed buns filled with pork are the same. Braised pork, 1/4 boiled egg and 1 shiitake.
On the way to where we had to catch a van to the next destination... Not a Vietnamese restaurant but they have "Phở" and coffee.
If you must vandalise, at least make it funny. (It's a character from a horror film)
We made it to Kota Belud, a small town half way to far north of Borneo. The presence of Chinese-Malays is drastically less than in the capital. We asked the (Malay) driver to drop us off at a Malay restaurant for lunch. It was full of Malays and employees were also Malays, but the food looked Chinese. It's a local restaurant and the food freshly cooked. Chicken is king. We had no iron-rich food since we got to Sabah (I'm anaemic).
Tofu
Stir-fried lettuce
After lunch we checked out the market. Noticed straight away dried fish/seafood stalls were more numerous than in the capital, and vendors were mostly non Chinese-Malays.
Betel leaves. There are stalls that sell only betel stuff. Some elderly people chew it.
Some dried fish come with sambal
I enjoyed eating this vegetable many times in Taiwan and am delighted to see it again at markets in Sabah.
Ginger flowers
Glutinous rice yeast balls hung on nylon strings
It's not fish sauce. I asked. It's local honey.
The fish section is small. The first thing I noticed was the fishmongers. Nearly all were women here whereas it's usually men elsewhere. Did not linger long, the smell was strong.
There are so many swallow nests inside that the solution is to hang big plastic sheet above the stalls.
After done checking out every row I went back to my favourite stall:
It's huge. Lots of water. I drank and drank. Took a while to finish drinking all the water.
I said I wanted to eat the flesh but had no spoon, "I'll make you a spoon". The "spoon" (a sharp piece of green otter shell) actually worked. But when a coconut has a lot of water there is very little meat. This one had no meat. You can see the inside of the coconut, the thicker the meat (endosperm) the whiter the interior. There's nothing here.
Apparently we were the town's latest attraction. Many people stared at us everywhere. Some grown people and children said "hello hello". When I bought something or asked about something and if they could speak any English at all they had questions for me. This small rural town doesn't see a lot of tourists. They only come for the big regional weekly Sunday market by the coach load (package tours) and go right back to the capital after browsing the market.
Sunset in rural Kota Belud seen from one of my room's windows.
