The virtues of idleness

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

"Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
- Aldous Huxley

After leaving our jungle camp and returning once more to civilisation, we were waiting at the offices of the trekking company on the dusty main road of Gum Gum, a small town just outside Sepilok, for a bus to take us to Kota Kinabalu (just KK from this point on). We had a few hours to kill, and I passed the time merrily counting the flies circling my head. I hadn't showered in three days, and can only assume the flies had mistaken me for a large pile of dung. I had counted thirty six flies, six mosquitoes and a wasp when the office phone rang. After answering it, the young man in charge asked if there was anybody called Mik in the office. I thought it was a bit of a coincidence and assumed there was somebody else there of the same name, and so went back to fly counting. The name was shouted out again. Cara poked me in the ribs and said maybe the call was for me. Of course it wouldn't be, I haven't had a phone call in nearly a year, and nobody could possibly know I would be sat in a pokey office twenty seven miles from the back of beyond, at lunch time on a Friday afternoon. I figured anything for a laugh and grabbed the phone. I though better of saying hello, Gum Gum G.U.M. Clinic* and opened with a simple hello. Unexpectedly, the call was for me and it was Chad, our Texan companion from Sandakan and the jungle, who had travelled the same route to KK the previous day. He was calling to let us know they had experienced some difficulty securing a room in KK as all the hotels and hostels were full to the rafters with students and their parents, in town to celebrate graduation week. They had finally managed to grab a room in a hostel in the city centre, and they were holding off their last room for us that night if we wanted it. We most definitely did. Both Cara and I were already knackered before we even started the six hour bus journey to KK, and neither of us particularly relished the thought of trawling the streets for a room long into the night. I thanked Chad for taking the time to contact us and for sorting the room. We agreed to meet up with him and his wife, Kori, later that night, although it would take three bars of soap and an industrial sander before I was clean enough to hygienically re-enter society.

The bus journey passed without incident, and on our approach to KK we were lucky enough to see the impressive granite rock face of Mount Kinabalu, rising up into the darkening sky, 4100 metres above the dense jungle. We had at one stage considered trying to climb the mountain, which seems to be a very popular activity with visitors to Sabah, but Cara delicately pointed out that climbing a mountain would require some considerable exertion and no small amount of willpower. At that point I went right off the idea.

We arrived in KK shortly after nightfall, and a short taxi ride later we were at our hostel. I say short taxi ride, but only in terms of distance, not time. Our taxi driver has assured us he knew exactly where Summer Lodge Hostel was, but after fifteen minutes driving in circles around the same two city blocks, even he conceded defeat and stopped at a taxi rank to ask a colleague where the hell he was supposed to be going. The other driver set him on the right road, and we spent another ten minutes driving around two different blocks. He stopped the car once more and asked a passing pedestrian if he knew any better. The man immediately pointed up at a nearby building where, in letters five feet high, was written the name of our destination. We had only driven past it twelve times and all three of us had missed it on each occasion.

Our room was another small, windowless affair with no furniture save for three pairs of bunk beds and a shiny new air conditioning unit on the wall, but it was all ours and after sleeping on the floor for two nights, listening to small animals being eaten by large animals, it was a welcome sight. The aircon was cranked down to it's coldest setting and we dived into the showers to scrape off the loosest of the accumulated grime. We were both fairly exhausted by this point, so we called in at Chad and Kori's room to bail out on that night's festivities and to thank them again for arranging our accommodation. We then quickly munched down a couple of burgers at the nearby Burger King, and went home to sleep like a couple of hibernating bears for twelve hours.

Before going on our jungle trek, we had pre-booked a couple of flights out of KK up to Bangkok the following week, so we had six days to spend in the city. Our original plans were to fly back to Kuala Lumpur, but AirAsia's wacky pricing policy meant that it was much cheaper to fly to Thailand instead. So with time on our hands, we mooched around the city day after day in the lazy way that has come to epitomize our travels. A few times we went for dinner with Chad and Kori, although I let the side down by foolishly choosing restaurants recommended by our guidebook. I really should know better by now. On two separate occasions we force marched them across the city to eateries that no longer existed, only to slog all the way back to where we had started for our dinner. I'm convinced they thought I was making it up as I went along, and for a few days we didn't see them as Kori "was feeling too unwell". I suspect they were politely putting us off to save shoe leather on more of my wild goose chases.

Chad and Kori are from Austin, Texas, and run their own business, working on the inside of the American political campaigning machine. Their lives are consumed entirely for months at a time working on various campaigns. However, in between these bi-annual events, business slows down and essentially gives them nine months or so of free time. During these periods, they travel the world on a backpackers budget and actually save money by not living at home. Let me repeat that for clarity. They travel to all the exotic locations of the world for nine months at a time to save money! If they weren't such affable, intelligent and good humoured individuals I would probably feel the need to jab them with a very sharp stick, borne out of envious resentment. I should point out, for tax reasons, that I have utilised the word "travel" in this paragraph in place of "business research trip to study the socio-political framework of Southeast Asian countries". Despite my, and Cara's, runaway envy, we all got along just fine and many evenings in KK were spent drinking beer and chatting about everything from British and American politics to how best to pee in the jungle without getting bitten on the arse. And apparently, Americans find the excessive use of the word "Brilliant!" by the Limeys almost as grating as we find the ubiquitous use of the word "Awesome!" by the Septics**. Who knew?

Most of our time in KK, however, was spent earnestly doing nothing. We plodded around a few shopping malls in the hope of finding a new camera, but most days passed without excitement. One morning, we managed to summon the energy to take a speedboat out to a nearby island, where we sat on the white, sandy beach and snorkelled in the clear, turquoise water for a few hours before dashing back to our comfy, air-conditioned hotel room. We had, by this time, found a vacant hotel room with real windows and a hot shower, and for most of our stay we treated it like a little cocoon, seldom leaving it in the hottest part of the tropical afternoon. Our only excitement came on our walk back to town with the Texans after one of our failed restaurant escapades, when I was chased down the street by an overly friendly rat. This gave everybody a laugh, on top of the fact they had already been whooping it up over my complete failure to successfully stamp on the many passing cockroaches.

One evening, I was standing outside an internet café having a quick cigarette and waiting for Cara to finish her emailing, when a couple of glum faced Australians walked up and lit up beside me.
"Are you Australian?" one of them asked me.
"No, English." I replied.
"Oh, but you know Steve Irwin? The crocodile hunter?" his companion asked.
"Yes," I said "Why?"
"We've just heard he died today."
"No shit? How?"
"I don't know. Our girlfriends are in there checking the internet to find out." he told me.
We spent the next few minutes chatting outside and I told them how sorry I was to hear about the loss of their greatest cultural icon. Just then the girls came out of the internet café.
"He was stabbed through the heart by a stingray!" they both shouted jubilantly.
"Yeeeesssss!" the men cried, and punched the air with their fists.
"It's what he would've wanted." one of them told me, after seeing the bemused expression on my face.
"We're just glad he wasn't run over by a truck." his friend added. "That would've been a shitty way to go."
And off they all went, to have a beer and celebrate the life of their country's most famous madman.

Our flight out of KK was in the early evening, and I decided against getting something to eat prior to driving to the airport. In the customary Do-The-Opposite-Of-What-Mik-Says-And-You'll-Be-Fine way that life seems to take these days, it turned out to be a poor choice. All AirAsia's flights out of KK now fly out of the new terminal 2 building. Unfortunately, the new terminal 2 building has not been built yet. We pulled up in our taxi to discover that check-in was in a small, open, concrete shed in the midst of an enormous building site. There were no other facilities, save for a small cafeteria that serves up food that not only resembles, but actually tastes like, something that has been excreted out of the back end of a flatulent water buffalo. To compound matters, our flight was delayed for three hours. This in itself would not have been a problem had they told us so up front. We would simply have jumped into a taxi and gone back to the city centre for a few hours to find something edible. Instead, they informed us that the flight had been "retimed" to one hour later. When this hour was up, they retimed it back another hour, and then another. We spent the time swatting aimlessly at the large cloud of mosquitoes that whined incessantly about our heads for the whole duration. By the time we finally took off, I was so hungry I was contemplating eating the headrest cover off the seat in front of me. I might have tried it too if the occupants bald, flaky scalp hadn't put me off.

Mik

*G.U.M. = Genito Urinary Medicine, or Clap Doctors as they are politely referred to back home.

**Septic = abbreviated rhyming slang, Septic Tank = Yank
Trust the cockneys