Just arrived in Kota Kinabalu

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all of your messages, missing you all!

Well we've just arrived in Kota Kinabalu, the main city in Sabah, Borneo. For the past few days we were staying in a small village called Kundasang situated at the foot of Mt. Kinabalu, at a resort called the Kinabalu Pine Resort. Wow! As you can see from the pictures this is an absolutely stunning location. We had views of the mountain from every window of our Pine Lodge, unfortunately this also meant we were constantly reminded of the daunting task we have ahead of us - climbing the damn thing! Its massive!
Our accomodation was lovely (take a look at our movie), exceptionally clean and incredibly cheap (roughly 30 quid a night including breakfast and dinner - bargain!). The staff at the resort were the friendliest people we've met, particularly the chef who we made special friends with! He kindly cooked us english food everyday for breakfast and dinner, even though the menu was entirely Malaysian - after Mia's chinese food trauma we were taking no chances! We also became quite friendly with another local resident by the name of Lenny - Lenny the LIZARD!!! He spent quite a few nights with us in our cabin to Mia's dismay. It scared the hell out of her the first night we were there...dread to think how she's gonna cope in the jungle. There's some very weird creatures here though, some even scared me half to death and i like wildlife...take a look at some of our pics!
We spent four nights at the Pine Resort, then today we took a taxi to Kota Kinabalu (KK). We're updating this blog from our hostel in KK. Our hostel is what you call basic...very basic, but clean. The staff are very helpful and friendly. We can't grumble though coz it's only costing us 4 quid a night. We had a stroll through the town earlier but we keep getting locals whistling at us...quite disconcerting...but i think they're just trying to be friendly. Tomorrow we're gonna visit a local handicraft market and explore the town a little more and for the rest of the week we've booked lots of tours. We're gonna spend Wednesday on a river cruise searching for Probiscus Monkeys (the ones with the very big noses), watching the sunset and the fireflies light up the mangrove trees...should be awesome! Thursday we're white water rafting...god help us! Then for the rest of the week we're gonna laze around on the many islands surrounding KK and hopefully do a bit of snorkelling.
As we have easy access to the internet here we should be able to update this blog fairly regularly, so keep checking back. Hope you're all ok.

Still missing you all lots, M and T xxx