"3 Nights at the Rasa Ria " a Kota Kinabalu Travel Page by SurfaceTravel

We started this trip in Brunei, took a ferry to Labuan for the day, and flew to Kota Kinabalu.

We stayed at the Shangri-La Rasa Ria Resort (see tip), 40 minutes' drive out of Kota Kinabalu. We enjoyed the large beach, the pool, and the excellent "night market" restaurant. Our daughter played at the playground and trampoline, and made a batik painting. I went for a jungle tour on an all-terrain-cycle.

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Mengkabong Water Village, Mt Kinabalu background

We visited the on-site nature reserve and saw the baby orang-utans. It was a bit of a tourist trap; you could see that they're not exactly getting trained to survive on their own.

We booked a taxi (see tip) for the afternoon and the driver first took us to the Mengkabong Water Village (see tip) nearby. This is a dumpy "floating village" with home-made houses built on stilts over the water. Unlike Brunei, it didn't look like they had modern plumbing or cable TV. You walk through the centre of it on this raised wooden walkway, which looked like it had been rebuilt lately and was pretty solid. There were no handrails. Individual walkways to the houses were pretty rickety affairs. The people there are obviously very poor. You can see Mount Kinabalu rising in the background.

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Skulls at the Monsopiad Cultural Village

The taxi then took us to a tourist village / outdoor museum, the Monsopiad Cultural Village (see tip). Monsopiad was a legendary warrior of the Kadazandusun people. The village is run by his descendants and show the traditional Kadaz way of life. We had a thorough tour that explained all aspects, we saw some human skulls that used to belong to enemies, and tried out a few of the games and musical instruments. We also saw a traditional dance.

On the way back we stopped at a Chinese temple.