Date: 11th July 2011

Place: Kinabalu National Park

Weather: sunny

I woke up at 8ish and my legs were killing me! I couldn't bring myself to get up. When I finally did I went to have a nice warm shower which I thought would soothe them. It turned out the water wasn't on because of a water shortage. I was gutted so we left the hostel in a bad mood with them.

We were going to go to the Poring Hot Springs but it felt like too much of an effort so we decided to get an earlier bus to Sandakan. First we would get breakfast though. In the end it was just coffee because all the breakfast was was either noodles, bread or eggs which is all we had had for such a long time I just didn't fancy it.

The bus was at 11.30 so we went to sit where we were told it would stop at 11.20. Well we saw it drive past but nobody told us we would have to flag it down. We were so annoyed because we were then told that it could be another 4 hours until the next one! Carm then got talking to a guy from the Phillipines who was giving her tips on what to see and said that his son lives in a place she is going to so he could give her lifts to places if she wanted.

Thankfully another bus came 45 minutes after the last one and it actually stopped because people were getting off for the mountain. We ran to it to make sure we could get on even though it was painful. Halfway through the journey they stopped at a rest place where we got ice cream for 1RM (about 20p).

When we finally got to Sandakan we got a taxi to the hostel we were staying at and checked in. It turned out because it was so empty we got a whole dorm to ourselves. She even said she was going to make us dinner for free as well.

Well we finally got a shower after stinking for a while! The plan that night was to go out to celebrate completing the mountain climb. We still had the rum left that we had bought at the airport so we decided to have that and then head out. Whilst we were drinking that we had dinner which was a typical Malaysian meal apparently. It was really nice some sort of curry but the novelty was that we had to eat in the Malaysian way and just use our hands!! Seriously, I have only just got used to chopsticks!!

It turned out to be not too difficult to eat like it just a bit messy but the food was really tasty. Once we had finished dinner we were given a lift by Geoff to the main nightlife street which was pretty dead when we got there. We went into one club that was completely empty so we went to have a look for another one.

Whilst on our search we came across a couple of men who Carm asked if she could pinch a cigarette. We sat down with them and it turned out the one of them was the club owner, so we were offered free beer and chips for a while J It was great! There were two girls that were working for him and had been pouring us beer. We decided to get them to join us and they came and had drinks with us and we ended up going to the dance floor as a big group. Carm and I were obviously the only westerners in this club so we felt pretty famous all night it was amazing.