In the couple of days Pat & I spent in the city we explored it quite thoroughly. We visited a number of markets and covered a lot of ground.
It is a very nice place to be. I found it to be surprisingly modern and westernised, especially when compared to the most recent big city I had been in: Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. I had half expected that since this was Borneo that we would be landing in the middle of a jungle and need to stay in bamboo huts and barter with the tribal locals for bowls of rice or something. Not so. The roads and pavements were clean and well maintained; the traffic was ordered and sedate; the buildings were all new; and the meals we had were typically in modern, relatively fancy places.
For a little while my inner geek had been a little restless, because I knew that “the hobbit” had just come out. KK looked equipped to meet my western needs, so I decided to try and watch it here. With a little research I managed to find a cinema that was showing it: inside a large mall not too far from Lucy’s.
We tracked this mall down and went in. The place twisted and wound around like a maze. I couldn’t quite make sense of where anything was, and there were no signs so this made finding the cinema quite difficult. After some time, and worrying that we would miss the start of the film we got to the floor where we thought the screens were. Unfortunately we still couldn’t see where to go. We ended up hurrying through lengthy corridors lined with crowded karaoke booths, eventually finding the entrance to the cinema just in the nick of time.
I enjoyed the film, despite the dismal picture quality (it almost looked like a stolen camera copy) and everyone in the audience chatting and messing about with their phones.
I remember thinking to myself during the film: What a jump the things I was doing in KK were from the rustic isolation of Otres beach. It oddly made me feel a little ashamed that I wasn’t doing travelling properly, since I was doing something that I would just do normally back home.
I needn’t have worried too much, we were soon to be launched into a something entirely different and unexpected.
It is a very nice place to be. I found it to be surprisingly modern and westernised, especially when compared to the most recent big city I had been in: Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. I had half expected that since this was Borneo that we would be landing in the middle of a jungle and need to stay in bamboo huts and barter with the tribal locals for bowls of rice or something. Not so. The roads and pavements were clean and well maintained; the traffic was ordered and sedate; the buildings were all new; and the meals we had were typically in modern, relatively fancy places.
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| We must have visited in "market season" |
For a little while my inner geek had been a little restless, because I knew that “the hobbit” had just come out. KK looked equipped to meet my western needs, so I decided to try and watch it here. With a little research I managed to find a cinema that was showing it: inside a large mall not too far from Lucy’s.
We tracked this mall down and went in. The place twisted and wound around like a maze. I couldn’t quite make sense of where anything was, and there were no signs so this made finding the cinema quite difficult. After some time, and worrying that we would miss the start of the film we got to the floor where we thought the screens were. Unfortunately we still couldn’t see where to go. We ended up hurrying through lengthy corridors lined with crowded karaoke booths, eventually finding the entrance to the cinema just in the nick of time.
I enjoyed the film, despite the dismal picture quality (it almost looked like a stolen camera copy) and everyone in the audience chatting and messing about with their phones.
I remember thinking to myself during the film: What a jump the things I was doing in KK were from the rustic isolation of Otres beach. It oddly made me feel a little ashamed that I wasn’t doing travelling properly, since I was doing something that I would just do normally back home.
I needn’t have worried too much, we were soon to be launched into a something entirely different and unexpected.
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