Dhahran British Grammar School Expedition 2006
23 March 2006
Limbang – Labuan – Kota Kinabalu.
As you might expect, the students all behaved well in the night. Breakfast in the Chinese restaurant was popular as it provided a taste of the familiar – toast, cereals and orange juice. Strangely perhaps, the multi-coloured and garish Malay cakes proved popular with the students too.
The port at Limbang is just in front of the hotel, so we walked there, struggling somewhat under the weight of our baggage – now rather heavier due to the souvenir shopping that had taken place. To leave Sarawak you have to have your passport stamped at immigration, even if you are heading for Sabah or the Peninsula. This took some time as people kept cutting the queue. Eventually we got the hang of the system and made a wall of students to prevent such behaviour.
The ferry from Limbang to Labuan makes its way down the Lim River past villages of houses built on stilts over the water. A sparse line of mangrove swamps mark the transition from fresh to salt water as you leave the river and enter the South China Sea. The bushes almost look as though they have been standardised. Each tree has a brush of twigs perched high on an almost bare stem and just a frill of secondary growth above the low tide level. They reminded me of lanky ballerinas wearing green tutus.
The ferry was enclosed and although comfortable, smelled strongly of diesel. Not wishing to be seasick several of us had taken anti-motion sickness tablets. The drowsiness that these induced made the time pass very quickly. Mrs Sheehan and I sneaked out of the cabin and sat at the front of the boat to get away from the fumes.
Labuan is a free port and obviously popular with visitors from Brunei who come for the duty free alcohol and imported chocolates. We had about two and a half hours free time here and so sent the kids off in groups of four to feed themselves in the local restaurants. Some of us went to a great Malaysian restaurant where four people could eat for fifteen Ringgit – about fifteen Riyals. Others went to KFC where junk food cost them over a hundred Ringgit. Malaysia is cheap if you eat in the right places.
Just before the ferry for Kota Kinabalu arrived, we said goodbye to Philip and Laing. We wrote them a thank you card and Sam made a short thank you speech.
The ferry to Kota Kinabalu (KK) was larger and more comfortable but some of us still went up onto the top deck for fresh air. There were some young Malay men there who we thought friendly at first, but as we talked to them we realised that they were drunk. They took photographs with us for a while before we decided that they were becoming a nuisance and so asked them to stop. By the time we arrived at KK one of them was asleep in the toilet, his head drooped over a pool of his own vomit. Charming.
KK is quite a large town and has quite a few modern buildings. A bus was waiting to take us to the very comfortable Beverley Hotel. After a wash and brush up we walked back into town to the Centre Point Shopping Centre where we spent an enjoyable hour shopping before heading out for dinner.
There were four open-air restaurants together, all very keen on attracting our custom. We decided on the busiest one and ordered a huge banquet of seafood and sate. We had divided into two large round tables. One group ate heartily, the other less so, so after a while we raided their table and removed the uneaten dishes, replacing them with our empty plates. We finished off a very pleasant evening by walking back to the hotel, taking great care to avoid falling into the holes in the pavement.
Several people bought DVDs from boys hawking in the restaurant, although this activity was cut short when the police arrived and chased the hawkers away, confiscating their DVDs if they found them. Most of the boys had cunningly hidden their stash of counterfeit discs under the table tops, so we were able to continue shopping later.
