A week in Kota Kinabalu and Sepilok: Sabah, Malaysia

[KennethT]

2 hours ago, Kerala said:

Wonderful. I really do want to get to Malaysia some day.

I'm glad about that.  We fell in love with this region (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia) years ago and keep coming back.  It's such a great mix of cultures.  As of now, we have much less Malaysia experience than Singapore or Indonesia - even though I feel like we've just scratched the surface with those too.

[KennethT]

45 minutes ago, weinoo said:

 

I love a good wet one!

Ha! They're absolutely necessary in countries where you could be washing your hands with water that potentially has typhoid or who knows what in it.  The wipes are better than normal hand sanitizer since it will also clean dirt off, not just kill most things in the dirt.  However, beware, hand sanitizers are not very effective against norovirus.

[KennethT]

Breakfast the next morning - just before checking out to go to our next stop.

 

Prata, savory donut, fried chicken, sambal and gigantic pile of ikan bilis for my wife

 

Prata, donut and chicken curry

 

teh tarik

 

last of the great pineapple

 

A dish full of a different chicken curry (lot of curry leaves)

 

A dish full of lamb curry (no coconut milk)

 

chicken

 

Lamb

 

The airport in KK is modern and quite nice for a small city.  And since we were traveling within Sabah, we had to go to the "domestic" security area.  If we were going to peninsular Malaysia (like to Kuala Lumpur), we'd have to go to the International one as Malaysian Borneo is still somewhat separate.  Of course, no one told us this until we were leaving the International security area and we had to turn around go back through the whole security area and back to the front of the airport.  To be fair, it wasn't labeled as such but it was the security area that was directly ahead...  turns out that the domestic one is downstairs and kind of out of the way.

 

Once we got through security, we had a small snack:

 

Nasi lemak for my wife

 

I was still a bit full from breakfast, but when in Rome....

 

Roti canai with chicken curry

 

You can tell how humid it was outside from the photo below.  I've seen the fog come out of the A/C vents in a plane before, but this was ridiculous!

 

Edited yesterday at 02:09 AM by KennethT (log)

[weinoo]

11 hours ago, KennethT said:

Prata, savory donut, fried chicken, sambal and gigantic pile of ikan bilis for my wife

 

Do you not eat ikan billis? (and yes, I carry the wet ones too!)

[KennethT]

26 minutes ago, weinoo said:

 

Do you not eat ikan billis? (and yes, I carry the wet ones too!)

Yes, I eat them, but a more normal sized pile - they're typically an accoutrement, not the main dish!

 

My nasi lemak plate typically looks like this:

[KennethT]

The airport in Sandakan (the city near Sepilok) is small but modern.  Our checked bags came through super fast and then we hired a Grab taxi to take us to our hotel which is a lodge located on the edge of the Sepilok-Kabili forest reserve.  It's set up like a bunch of cabins in the jungle.

 

Our home on the range

 

Since we got there in the afternoon, we spent the time just walking around the hotel grounds.

 

 

We had dinner at the hotel - there aren't really any places around in this area to eat other than in the hotels - it's pretty remote.

 

My wife had the nasi goreng (fried rice)

 

Lamb curry

 

served with

 

The vast majority of our hotel's menu was western and not inexpensive.  They also had a selection of pizzas.  Even though we didn't eat every meal here, I think our total restaurant bill for 3 nights (added to the room bill) was as much as one night's stay!  But this is all relative, the hotel is RM500 per night (about US$100)

 

We also had their specialty tea:

 

Breakfast in the morning:

 

No explanation necessary.  She also had

 

 

I wasn't particular thrilled with the breakfast menu so I just had something light - I normally don't eat breakfast at all

 

Not a bad croissant and Sabah tea

 

But the real reason people come to Sepilok is this:

 

 

Founded in 1964, it was opened with the purpose of rehabilitating orphaned or confiscated orangutans.  Orangutans are mostly solitary animals, primarily due to food pressure.  So if a mother has twins, she will typically abandon one of them as there may not be enough food around for her to support two youngsters for the 8 or so years that the young will stay with its mother.

 

The orangutans wander around the center on their own - the visitors are confined to various walkways and platforms.  This sign greets you almost immediately:

 

The first area you come to is the area for adolescent orangutans who are being more actively taken care of by the center.  These youngsters are developing the skills to be able to survive in the wild.  They have a building (air conditioned!!!!) where you can watch them playing and feeding.

 

 

We were told that we were quite fortunate as it is rare to see the old alpha male make an appearance.  They usually see him only a few times a year.

 

 

 

Adolescent mother with infant

 

The ropes lead off into the forest and they can come and go whenever they want.

 

Another area is a feeding platform in a different spot in the jungle.  Sometimes no one visits the platform when the food is put out - especially if there's already plenty of food in the forest.  Sometimes they want to walk down the path near us:

 

 

There are staff around to make sure you don't follow the orangutans or they don't get too close to you.  Not only are they wild animals, but since they are so close to humans, genetically, they are capable of catching human viruses.  Any time you see staff near them (like at the feeding platform) they wear latex (nitrile?) gloves and wear N95 masks.

Edited 17 hours ago by KennethT (log)

[KennethT]

The center closes for a few hours in the middle of the day so we left and went to a different hotel in the area to have lunch.

 

 

 

The view from our table:

 

 

Hokkien noodles

 

Chicken curry and lime juice

 

They didn't have kitchai ping, but they did have:

Sabah chai

[KennethT]

After lunch, we went back to the orangutan center since the entry ticket is valid for the full day.  In the afternoon, the pigtail macaques decended on the area... which the orangutan largely ignored...

 

 

Dinner back at our hotel:

 

Grilled chicken

 

lime juice

 

nasi goreng

 

Breakfast the next morning:

 

 

This time I got a danish... although afterwards, I wished I got the croissant again

 

Another popular thing in Sepilok is right next door to the orangutan sanctuary and share the forest (sometimes you seen an errant orangutan there but we didn't):

 

 

As the sign says, the Bornean sun bear is the world's smallest bear - it gets to be around the size of a labrador.  As they look so cute and cuddle, they are commonly poached to be sold as pets (very illegal) and if they are recovered, they are sent here.  About half of the sun bears who come here will never be released into the wild completely as they don't have the skills to survive on their own.

 

As you can see in this sign:

sunbears are named because of the gold markings on their chest.  No two bears have the same markings - they are individual like a fingerprint is.

 

As you can see, the bears live partially enclosed, unlike the orangutans who can roam as they like.

 

 

and climbing back down again - you can really see his markings in this one:

 

 

After watching the bears, we walked to a different hotel for lunch.

 

Views from our table (we were the only ones there):

 

 

 

Lime juice

 

Chicken wrapped up in a roti prata with curry sauce

 

this was interesting - like a Sicilian rice ball made with nasi kunyit (turmeric rice) and topped with sambal

 

fried chicken and potato with curry sauce

 

Then, dinner back at the hotel:

 

Char kway teow

 

nasi goreng (again)

[KennethT]

The next day we had to leave early (before they opened for breakfast) to start our long journey home.

 

A quick snack in the Sandakan airport, waiting to go to Kuala Lumpur:

 

pandan and chocolate cake.  The cake was not particularly light or dense and was a bit oily but tasty at the time.  Not many options in that airport.

 

Kuala Lumpur Int Airport T2 doesn't have many decent food options - there's a main food court in the security area that mostly had American fast food - McD, Burger King and A&W!  There was an Indian place and this Malaysian place:

 

The name of the place is a play on words as the word for chicken is "ayam".  Before I get to the food, the guy at the register seemed like he hated us patrons just for being there.  Maybe he was just frustrated because half of the menu that they had by the register was out of stock (at 1 in the afternoon).  You order at the register and they give you a placard to put on your table for the server to identify you - but they forgot to give us like half our order so I had to go back and bug the guy to send the rest.

 

Cucur bawang - onion fritter with peanut sauce - somewhat soggy.

 

Tofu ayam - fried tofu stuffed with chicken and potato - quite soggy, served with the sambal hitam (black sambal) in the photo below which was incredibly spicy once it crept up on you!

 

Chicken samosa - about as good as the other stuff we got!

 

teh tarik

 

As we were leaving the food court, we saw this store, almost completely devoted to durian...

 

 

After lunch we were leisurely making our way to our gate.  As we were almost there, we noticed that Air Asia or the airport changed our gate, which happened to be on the total other side of the terminal, which is HUGE!  About halfway to the new gate, we started running as it was about to start boarding!  All thoughts of not being all sweaty for our 18 hour flight home were dashed during our run!

[KennethT]

Our flight from KL to Singapore landed just after 4PM and our flight home didn't leave until around 11:30, so we had plenty of time to go through immigration (their automated gates took about 2 minutes), get our bags from Air Asia in Terminal 4, then transfer to Terminal 3 to check our bags into Singapore Airlines and then lounge around the Jewel.

 

Changi Terminal 4 baggage claim:

 

I was hoping to spend some time wandering around the trails through the forest of the Jewel, but it was closed for maintenance...

 

 

Since we were finally here and had time AND weren't sick(!), I made a reservation for Violet Oon.  In my opinion, she is like the Peranakan equivalent of Lydia Bastianich as she has several restaurants, a line of take home packaged foods, TV cooking shows, etc.  We had been looking to try her restaurant for YEARS and finally made it - spoiler alert, it was totally worth the wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So many choices, such limited stomach space.... Nyonya food is not known for being particularly light!

 

 

Singapore Island Iced Tea - like drinking liquid kaffir lime leaves.

 

Homemade ginger beer

 

Kuay pie tee - so savory - strips of turnip and bamboo shoot poached in prawn stock, put into the fried cups, topped with a perfectly poached shrimp, with chilli paste and fruit syrup. So delicious.

 

One of the reasons why I wanted to come here - Ayam buah keluak.  This version was much more thick than the one we had years ago in a family Peranakan restaurant in the city.  This one was such a great mix of savory (from shrimp paste) and sour from tamarind.  There was a lot of chicken buried in there, plus 3 keluak nuts, which the interior looks like this:

 

They provided a small spoon to dig out the keluak meat, the flavor of which is completely unique, complex and utterly delicous.  Hints of chocolate, a bit of a tang of alcoholic fermentation - so hard to describe.  The texture was silky smooth.

 

Chicken and potato curry.  The curry sauce was thick and luxurious with lots of coconut cream.  One of the reasons I wanted to try this is because it is similar to one of the curries I make - curry powder and coconut milk. So good.

 

By this point, we were almost bursting at the seams, but I felt that I needed to try this:

 

Pandan and gula Melaka cake.  The cake was super light and the butter cream had great gula melaka (a special palm sugar from Melaka) flavor.  Totally worth all the sugar and calories.

 

Since we still had a couple hours before we were to board our flight and it was already past our bedtime, we got some of the Darjeeling tea:

 

 

Afterwards, we waddled out of the restaurant and took our time wandering around before getting to Terminal 3 and our gate.

 

Food on the Singapore Airlines flight home:

and

 

So that's it... thanks for reading along!

[rotuts]

@KennethT

 

thank you for taking the time to provide so much detail.

 

that last meal was spectacular.

[Shelby]

The orangutans!  The little bears!  LOVED seeing them.  

 

Yeah, I agree with rotuts, this last meal looks AMAZING--not that the others didn't look good but I'd love to try every dish that you guys had.  

 

As per usual, I don't know how you guys do it--the humidity would KILL me.  I will never travel to the places you do so I really love that you take us along.  

 

HUGE thanks for taking time to do this and for taking so many descriptive pictures along the way.  

 

I'm sad it's over  

[KennethT]

@rotuts@Shelby Yes, that last meal was by far and away the best meal of the trip - I still dream of it.  It also makes me think that we need a trip back to Singapore sometime in the not so far future as we haven't been there for real in years and there's so much more we haven't eaten/done/seen.  Kota Kinabalu is not nearly a food city like Penang is - but as much as we enjoyed it a couple years ago, getting sick puts quite a damper on it.  Hopefully that's in the past from now on! Fingers, toes and whatever else crossed....

 

The heat and humidity here was not easy.  One day, the weather app said that it was 100% humidity, and it wasn't raining! How is that possible?  So that's how it was 90 degrees but the heat index said 110.  Then again, that's gardening weather for you Shelby!

 

But we also had some great dives - I'm considering getting an underwater camera for the next trip, and seeing the orangutans and sun bears up close was amazing.  A couple years ago when we were in North Sulawesi (Indonesia), we saw a sun bear but it was so high up in the trees, you needed binoculars to see him.  Unfortunately, most of the sun bears in Sepilok will never go back into the wild - they've been conditioned too much to be around humans so they're more open to poachers, or they have other behaviors, like pacing, caused by being in captivity (as a house pet) for a long time.  The sun bear sanctuary just got a new bear in (not ready for the public yet) who was a pet for a famous Malaysian singer (famous to Malaysians, I never heard of her).  A month or two ago, one of her people called in and said they "found it on the side of the road" (it's technically illegal to keep them as pets and there are severe fines/jail penalties if caught) but it was obvious that it had been kept indoors as a pet for a long time.

 

They call this bear the actress since she likes to pose when there are people at the viewing platform:

 

[C. sapidus]

Thank you so much for taking us along on a spectacular trip, @KennethT! You have inspired me to cook some food that I love. 
 

Your last meal looked scrumptious. I would have had a hard time not ordering rendang. 😃

[KennethT]

13 minutes ago, C. sapidus said:

Your last meal looked scrumptious. I would have had a hard time not ordering rendang. 😃

I understand that - and it's funny because a friend of mine who's also been there, upon learning we were going there, was like "RENDANG!!!!!"

 

But, to be honest, when I think of rendang, I think of the original North Sumatran (Padang) version, which is quite different from the Malaysian or Peranakan versions.  All of them are delicious, and over the years, we've had quite a bit of rendang all over, but we've had very little opportunity to have Peranakan classics - especially the buah keluak.  And after having it, I would make a trip to go there just to have it again. 

[liamsaunt]

Thanks for this report! It sounds like an exciting trip. I am glad you made it through without getting sick too! 

[Kerala]

Wow, superb trip!

The food looks amazing. I felt sad for you having to eat the breakfast croissants, even though I quite like croissants!

Can I ask, what was the mosquito situation? I don't react much to bites, but my wife really suffers.

[KennethT]

7 hours ago, Kerala said:

Wow, superb trip!

The food looks amazing. I felt sad for you having to eat the breakfast croissants, even though I quite like croissants!

Can I ask, what was the mosquito situation? I don't react much to bites, but my wife really suffers.

I like croissants also, but I prefer to have whatever is local since I can get croissants very easily at home (even though I don't! ha!)

 

In the city of KK, mosquitos are not an issue, however, in the jungle area, they are around, although not as bad as I thought it would be.  When we were in that area, we used a bug repellent that was 25% DEET as mosquitos can carry lots of diseases.  I don't think malaria is a huge problem anymore there, but there's always dengue, zika and other viruses that are mosquito borne.  So it's important to protect yourself from being bitten - especially after sunrise and around sunset when they are most active.

[rotuts]

I was finally able to watch the videos

 

' watch on YTube '  duh

 

loved the watermelon video.

 

thanks for sharing them.