Daily Archives: 26th January 2014

Malaysia, Travelinds

Marina Court Vacation Home – Kota Kinabalu

Leave a comment

26 January 2014

Wanting to spend a couple days in Kota Kinabalu, we found an amazing place to stay called Marina Courts.  It is a complex of high rise apartment buildings with a swimming pool, gym and a prime KK waterfront location.

The particular deal that we found was listed as the Marina Court Vacation Home (Kota Kinabalu).  It was a room for rent (not the whole apartment like some of the other options mentioned on TripAdvisor) and it was set up similar to a hostel where the guests shared the living area, kitchen, washing machine and dryer.  One of the rooms has an en-suite bathroom, the other three rooms share a common bathroom. You can book it on Agoda.com.

There are showers, air conditioners and basic kitchen facilities.There’s a big swimming pool downstairs for guests to use at their leisure and also a gym.

Marina Courts’ location is perfect for exploring Kota Kinabalu.  It is within walking distance of most major tourist points and has a local bus terminal right in front of the complex for catching buses to areas that are further away from the city center.

Walking distances from Marina Court:

  • 25 – 30 minutes: Jessleton point (the ferry and boat jetty), Museum, Signal Hill,
  • 15-20 minutes: Shangri-la Bus terminal, Express bus to Kudat,
  • 5-15 minutes: The Night market, Gaya street Sunday market
  • Right outside: Wawasan Bus Terminal (intracity busses), Centre Point shopping centre is across the road,
TIP: There is an Arabian restaurant across the road from Marina Courts (on Centre Point side) called ‘Al Andalus’ – visit it! It has delicious, well-priced food, excellent service and an authentic Arabian vibe to it.  The extra Arabic Set was enough for two of us and the Baba Ganoush was fantastic! We ate here for at least one meal every day, for eight days.
Malaysia, Travelinds

Kota Kinabalu

1 Comment

Kota Kinabalu,

Sabah, Malaysia Borneo

This vibrant city is the largest city in the eastern Malaysian province of Sabah, on Borneo.  As in most other parts of Malaysia, Kota Kinabalu is home to a wide variety of cultural groups, including some special people groups specific to Borneo, like the Rungus. This province includes 33 indigenous groups speaking 50 different languages and up to 80 different ethnic dialects. Talk about an administrative nightmare for local government!

The province of Sabah has a wide range of attractions that make it a very alluring spot for tourists from all over the world. Beaches, islands, reefs, mountains, parks, nature reserves, museums, temples, mosques, markets, hot springs and rainforests – and Kota Kinabalu is the doorway to it all!

Named for its proximity to Mount Kinabalu, the city of Kota Kinabalu lies on the north-western coast of Sabah and boasts the largest port and population in Sabah. Kinabalu means ‘Chinese/China’ (kina), ‘Widow’ (balu), which perhaps explains why the mountain itself is held in such awe by the local inhabitants. It soars above the rest of the landscape, often swathed in a thick layer of white clouds and stands a lofty 4,101 metres above sea level.

With so much to see and not enough time to see it in, Sabah offers tourists a jam-packed holiday filled with endless activities and interesting places. You will need to take some time out to help it all sink in!

Read more about the following attractions in Kota Kinabalu (NOTE: these are just a few of them that we managed to see):

Travelinds also saw these interesting places in Sabah, Malaysia:
Philippines, Travelinds

Bohol’s Tarsiers

Leave a comment

25 January 2014

Big round eyes, sticky little toes, ruffled brown fur and strange pointy ears was my first glimpse of the tarsier, a tiny creature that I have been dying to see since starting our travels in South East Asia. Nocturnal by nature, the tarsiers are sleepy during the day and these mostly insectivorous primates spend the daylight hours fast asleep.  At night, it is a completely different story with jumping, shrieking and feasting on whatever they can find.

The Philippine Tarsiers, like their cousins the Western Tarsiers, are the cutest, tiniest, weirdest-looking animals ever!  Tarsiers are only found in South East Asia and are critically endangered.

Bohol island in the Philippines is home to some of the only Philippine tarsiers left in the world and there are conservation efforts happening on the island to increase the dwindling numbers of this lovely little creature.  Many of those animals kept at the conservation centres have been rescued from illegal trade and can never survive again in the wild.  Others have been successfully bred through carefully guarded breeding programmes and then successfully released into their natural habitat.

Travelinds was forced to visit the Carmen Tarsier Sanctuary (in Loboc) instead of the Corella sanctuary which I’d read so much about, because the road had been severely damaged by the October 2013 earthquake and made it impossible to get to Corella from where we were staying in Panglao, Alona Beach.  It was great to finally meet these amazing little monkeys, but I felt guilty once again that captivity is no place for wild creatures.  Even though I so badly wanted to see one of these animals, I would still have preferred to see one at a far distance knowing it was free and wild!

Loboc Tarsiers