After spending the night cradled in luxury at the Hotel Shangrila, I had a quick breakfast and the headed off to see the sights of Kota Kinabalu. Or at least my version of ‘the sights’, which means . . . shopping!

First up: Jalan Goya for the Sunday market. (Yep, I schedule trips to take in street markets where ever I go). This market is more for the locals than it is for tourists, more of a flea market than anything else. A bit more colorful than normal as I was visiting during Chinese New Years and a lion dance was in progress, stopping at each stall to ‘eat’ the money proffered, an offering which ensures good luck and prosperity for the coming year.

Interesting display of goods, and very few of us white folk browsing - like 5 counting myself out of the close to a thousand Malaysians. Some local handcrafts, fish for your aquarium as well as catfish for dinner (laid out on a blanket and still gulping in their last breath). Fortune tellers, curios, sunglasses, and the Malay version of a vegomatic salesman, only he was selling laundry soap. Couldn’t understand his spiel, but he had the crowd transfixed as he demo’ed his packets of soap by washing out small torn and stained rags in a bucked of water and his amazing product. I opted for a T shirt, instead.

Headed toward the ocean next, for ‘The Big Market’. The first section I came to consisted of stalls of dead, plucked chickens festering in the hot tropical sun with additional stalls of more fresh(?) meat peaking out of the thatch covered buildings. I took the prudent, and less smelly, course of bypassing this part of the market and heading to the Filipino market adjacent to it. Touted as a place to stock up on handicrafts from the Philippines (some of the islands of which are just across the Sulu Sea) this open air market comprises a few hundred small shops, all offering the exact same trinkets for sale. KK isn’t a hugely visited tourist destination, but this market acted as though it was . . . the wares were the type of crap only a tourist from Idaho would even think of buying.

With only 1 day in KK, my next and last shopping excursion was set for that evening. Kota Kinabalu’s night market had been billed somewhere on the net as ‘one of the most extensive night markets you will see anywhere in Asia’. I was salivating in expectation. Replace ‘extensive’ with smallest, and the previous statement would be more accurate. Maybe a dozen stalls, all selling goods that were available at lower prices at the Jalan Goya Sunday Market. I did, however, by a new T shirt . . . gotta remember Asian sizes, the XL I’d bought earlier in the day was closer to a small Medium in American size.

Kota Kinabalu is picturesque, and if your reason for visiting is to scale the highest peak in SE Asia, it probably is a worthwhile visit. Otherwise, to sum up, got the T shirt, been there, done that . . .

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