Day 1 Kota Kinabalu, Hidden Gem of Sabah

I was a fan of the reality show Survivor. That was the first time I heard about Kota Kinabalu. This city is the capital of Malaysia's Sabah in the Northern part of the island of Borneo. The city is surrounded with coastal areas, waterfronts, rainforests, mountains and different beautiful islands. You can see different kind of tourists from around the world but most of them are chinese and koreans.

We travelled from Manila to Kota Kinabalu for only 1 hour and 40 minutes via Airasia. It was a sunny day with 32°C compared to Philippine's 40°C. This is the first time we've travelled without the help of a travel agency. It is really a DIY with the help of google and youtube. We followed different travel bloggers and get some travel tips from them. Travel sims are located everywhere,so I bought one which costs 26RM, it includes 17GB of data for 7 days. It is a must because you'll gonna need to book grab car which is much cheaper than riding a cab.

The Atkinson Clock Tower is one of the oldest building in Kota Kinabalu. They said it was built to commemorate Francis George Atkinson (first district official of Kota Kinabalu) who died at age of 28 with Borneo's fever. It is all woods, no nails structure. Amazing, right?

http://sabahtourism.com/destination/atkinson-clock-tower

As a coffee lover, I got curious with the name cheese coffee. So we decided to try their cappuccino with cheese. The taste is really great, the combination of coffee's bitterness plus the cheese' dairy taste and saltiness gave it's unique taste. This is must try if you're going to visit the city. Green Mug Coffee is located in front of the Atkinson Tower.

It was late in the afternoon when we decided to find some food to eat.We heard about the Filipino Market from one of the blogs we are following. It is located just near the waterfront area of the city. We are suprised to see Filipinos selling different kinds of dried fish, RTWs and handcrafted souvenirs. On the other side of the market, you will see different grilling stations. They are selling chickens and different kinds of seafoods.

The market is surrounded by a coast so you can see seafoods everywhere. You need to buy a fish from the market and they will grill it for you. It is easier to communicate because most of them can speak english and tagalog.

We decided to go home early because the pick up time for our tour is early in the morning. There are Bars in the district if you want to stay up at night. We will be exploring the other side of Borneo on my next Blog.

Credits to my friend @hazelgrace25 for taking the pictures using my huawei p9 lite and Lazytech action cam.