Tawau, Malaysia

02/24/2014

I have three hours to kill. I walked to the end of the parking lot and took some photos along the way.

This is like those bobbing dogs except it was a flower.

Then I had first lunch: a bowl of spicy chicken soup in the shade. It had noodles, fish cakes balls, noodles, a couple kaffir leafs, chicken, and some cabbage. Overall, Malaysian food is living up to what I've heard and seen on Facebook/ Instagram plus its cheap. Just had my second lunch which was a little more expensive and not as flavorful but at the same time it had canned mushrooms in the sauce and that brought be back to family dinners in university. 

While waiting at the arrival gate I ran into a guy from Uncle Chang's, our hostel, was waiting outside the arrivals just like me. As I approached him and asked who he was picking up the guy seemed to only have "Yes" in his English repertoire. My friends got out of baggage claim and I was so excited that I had contributed to the trip (Disclaimer: I planned literally nothing for this trip). The organizer looked me straight in the face, "We sleep there tomorrow." Damn. The guy still gave us a ride to Semporna, our final destination of the day. We listened to "different" club music the whole way there.

He dropped us off at our hostel and gave us his name and number so he can drive us back to Tawau for a discount. Our hostel was pretty small a twin and queen filled the main room. The bathroom was pretty rustic but cleaner than mine (we'd have a problem if it wasn't). After dropping off our bags we explored the small coastal city of Semporna. We found a really cool mosque.

That was the prettiest thing in the area. Besides that there was a fish-filled market that had some less than fresh smells, hecklers, and sweet-talkers. Of course there's also just a huge mound of garbage right beside the water too. We stopped at the Western Bar on the patio and had a bunch of drinks. It was a really solid place until you got a warm breeze from the garbage heap. I found it really hard to get wasted because it was so humid, I was perspiring like nobody's business. Our collective bar tab was $60 which is awesome for roughly 3 hours of drinking. We woke up reasonably early to get our boat to Mabul but it was easy with sun out.