Hi everyone,

We've just left Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Sabah province of Malaysia. Having arrived late on Tuesday evening from Singapore we checked into the hostel, had a quick trip out for some roti bread and got a good night's kip. Yesterday we went for an explore of the city of Kota Kinabalu. Having heard Sabah is the poorest province in Malaysia, we were initially unsure what to expect but were pleasantly surprised to see a reasonably modern and actually quite a quiet city.

Kota Kinabalu and actually quite a lot of the rest of Borneo was nearly completely destroyed in WW2 after the invasion of the Japanese (the allies blasted the whole lot apart - apparently that was the easiest way of getting the Japs out!) Unfortunately for us that meant that there aren't a whole lot of sights to see and our city tour didn't last too long, however we did have a wander along the waterfront, which had beautiful views of the small islands in the marine park off-shore. There are quite a few temples to see further out of town, but after seeing so many over the past week we decided to give it a miss and chill out for the afternoon (a good decision it turned out as it tipped it down with rain for about 2 hours - suppose it had to happen at some point!)

Last night we walked down to a night market at the waterfront, where they had endless stalls of BBQ grilled fish, chicken etc - it all looked amazing! After our financial oversight in Singapore we've decided to tighten the purse strings for the next couple of days so we passed on the fish and had a combination of chicken satay, BBQ chicken wings, rice and grilled sweetcorn which was fab (and 2 quid each including a cheeky couple of Bacardi lime concoctions!)

Had a couple more drinks on the way back home and some deep fried bananas (8 for 20p - amazing!) then hit the sack to get ready for our early start this morning. We're off to Sandakan today, which is on the north-east of Sabah - not sure what to expect here; pre-war it had the largest population of millionaires in the world, then it got flattened - we shall report back! Looking forward to spending the royal wedding with the orang-utans tomorrow!

Love Katie and Martin