Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia 馬來西亞沙巴 (Jan-2009)

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We went to Kota Kinabalu during the Chinese New Year holiday. We took the DragonAir Holiday package and would like to stay a few more days longer. But the travel agents told us there was no flight before or after the package.

And then on the way back, we found out that the flights to/fro were special additional/charactered flight, and not only we got to sit in the same seats, the people around us were ALL the same people!

I suspect that the travel agent (Lotus Travel) had incentive to keep us on that same flight and lied about availability of later flights.

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Initially we were booked to stay at the Shangri-la Rasa Ria. But about a day or two before the payment day, we were told that not only we would not get the seaview room as booked, we would have to paid addional 20% for the peak season. To me this reads "rip off" so we changed to Neuxs Resort.

The hotel has a very good setting - one side is a gold course, the opposite side the sea and beach. Lots of trees and birds and even monitor lizards.

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The design and layout is very typical of hotels in the Phuket, Bali & Hainan. The room amenities need more attention.

The only major disappointment was their upscale Mediterranean restaurant Olives. The food quality and preparation were very good but the services were terrible. The table was not prepared properly, and the waitress did not know about the food and the preparation, and they did not paid attention or anticipate the customers’ needs. On the next day I found out that Olives’ waiting staff is the same as the breakfast buffet staff, whose job was sole taking the finished plates.

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The 2nd day in Sabah. We visited the Sunday market.

Just by chance we first visited the food market. It looks like a 天光墟 - market that only opens in the morning and closes by mid-day.

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The food market we visited was right next to the pier or a fishmen's port.

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Sunday entertainment?

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What are they selling? Seaweed?

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Then the dried food. I bought a pack of the dried seahorses.

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Very young shop keeper.

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Back to the hotel in the afternoon. Inside the hotel is a serious of ponds with many lotus, birds and minitor lizards! At one point I saw about three of them hanging out in one pond. The hotel has a warning sign telling people not to feed the lizards.

This lizard was about 1.5m long.