Sabah Trip 1: Sibu to Tawau

We set off from Sibu in the early hours of 10^th December 2012 via taxi. It cost about RM35 to get to the airport from where I live since the introduction of taxi coupons not so long ago. I suppose this is a lot better than the greedy scheming bastards of taxi drivers in Sibu trying to rip you off whenever possible before they renovated the airport.

They way the Maswing's promotions work somehow made it cheaper to infact get a ticket from Sibu to Bintulu first and then to Kota Kinabalu instead of a direct flight. So we decided to take that route as it also offers an opportunity to visit Bintulu (again) in the process.

 

 The brand spanking new Sibu Airport. The people are still shit though...

 

Interior of an ATR 72. I love this plane!

We arrived in Bintulu after a bout 40 minutes of flight and took a taxi to the Tamu. There was a supposed ‘Malaysian Food Fair’ there but as with all such ‘events’ in Sarawak it was nothing more than just an extended pasar malam (or siang, as is the case).

 

The taxis in Malaysian airports generally operate via a coupon system. one goes to the coupon counter and purchase a taxi coupon that one then hands over to the taxi driver. It's a good system as a lot of Malaysian taxi drivers are dishonest schemers (such bitterness there...)

I didn’t get my passport checked in Bintulu because it was still well within Sarawak. However when we arrived in Kota Kinabalu at around 3pm, I had to produce either an entry slip, or my passport with a stamp that said ‘Akta Immigresen 1959/63’ which made me felt like a foreigner in my own country. 1Malaysia my ass...

 I had no idea what these are for but since I've never seen these before, I decided to take a snap

 I've been to Bintulu's tamu before. However, I decided that it was probably worth taking a second look

Apparently, Bintulu is famous for it's belacan. The more traditional way of packaging them are as shown above. The cheaper versions come in plastic wraps

 

KK International Airpport was nice. It had that same generic look as many smaller major airports in Malaysia but that is not necessarily a bad thing. We had lunch at Mary Brown. I’ve never had lunch at Mary Brown before and I thought that the Mary Browns here in Borneo was of a somewhat better quality than the ones in the Peninsular.

 

 Kota Kinabalu International Airport is located by the sea side! How cool is that! I know Changi is also by the seaside but this place has it's runway parallel to the beach. and the water looked so nice!

 

Airports in Malaysia tend to look the same. This is KKIA

We then took another flight to Tawau where there is the closest airport to Semporna. The whole idea of this trip was to make our way to Sipadan Island in Sabah and Semporna is the embarkation point to get there. The plane from KK to Tawau actually made a stopover at Sandakan for 20 minutes so all in all it took a total of four take offs and landings on Maswing’s ATR 72 to reach Tawau from Sibu.

 Sabah has a lot of these water villages as a lot of it's major towns are located by the sea. This one is in Sandakan, which I thought looked the best from air

 

Finally arriving in Tawau. These propeller driven planes are actually quite smooth. By the time we reached there it was already getting dark at 6 pm.

 I guess I should add here that this whole trip was planned pretty badly as I had absolutey no idea as to where I was going and how to go abouts getting there. However, as with all of my trips, I put value in the journey as much as the destination (sounds quite the bullshit doesn’t it? Hahaha). I’ll continue the story in my next post.