Back to reality

What a day! My colleague and I finally checked out of the air-conditioned bubble that is the Hyatt Regency Kinabalu. We were the last two from our induction group left, and our placements are in the same area, so we left together in one of our lease cars, with drivers from the car company. 

As we left Kota Kinabalu, Borneo slowly started to creep into being. The leaves got bigger, so did the flowers. Palm trees sprang into fan-tailed splendour and the glass-fronted, 30-storey apartment blocks crumbled away. The trees sprouted butterflies and tender ferns and little, wooden, stilted cottages crowded over streams. The land started to rise and fall and the rises got bigger until suddenly I looked out the window and realised I was looking at Mount Kinabalu. It is a truly staggeringly big mountain, even when viewed from the side of another mountain, as I did. It's half the size of Everest, but going from sea level to 4000m in such a short distance does wonders for the perception. It loomed. I started to rethink my desire to climb it.

When we arrived at our "hotel" we'd been driving for nearly three hours, and this probably had something to do with my reaction. Or not. I don't know. I do feel I was a little justified in reacting in horror. Faced with a long, partially-painted, partially-peeling bungalow, we walked into what appeared to be a reception area - an enormous room with chairs arranged around the edge and a sort of wood-panelled servery - Zimbabweans should bring to mind any official building from the 1970s they like. Three men and women lay in a state of torpor on the chairs and barely looked up as we entered. The rooms looked as if someone had taken a row of concreted public toilets and tacked on a wooden row of bedrooms behind. Literally, you had to walk through a dark, tiled, and very smelly bathroom to get to the dark, carpeted, very smelly bedroom. A ceiling fan pretended to do its job, while an unidentified scuttling occurred in the vicinity of the cupboard, to which one sad door held on for dear life. Fiona gingerly pulled aside a filthy curtain to look outside. The curtain very un-gingerly fell off, letting a completely unwanted stream of light in. We walked out, got in our car, and drove off in search of something, anything, else.

We found it in a little, out-of-the-way village. As I sit on the long balcony outside my room, fat fruit bats are being clichéd and flitting about in the gathering dusk. The call to prayer has just rung out over the valley (and I can't recall hearing the beautiful and haunting sound once in Kota Kinabalu), and the birds are noisily settling down to sleep. We were greeted by the family who owns the homestay with big smiles, and basic but clean rooms. Okay, so a single en-suite room is £20 rather than £10, but you know, sometimes a smile is worth the premium... :)