Adrift part 1 of 2

Whenever we have a chance to get out of Hong Kong for a few days, we always try to strike a balance between down time and activity, culture and nature, fun and educational. Sorry girls, but there’s always going to be some hiking involved.

On our recent trip to Borneo, Malaysia, one of our crowd-pleasing activities was to go white-water rafting for the day. I thought we could handle a level 3-4 section of the river, but my wife convinced me that since this was our girls’ first time, the level 2-3 excursion would be wiser.

A ninety-minute van ride, we were at the launch site at the edge of the Kiulu River. Life jackets, helmets, and three minutes worth of instruction and we were ready to go. It was just the four of us and Sham our Malaysian river guide on our inflatable rubber river raft.

Sham was a perfect guide. He was funny, informative, and gave a great ride down the river. The girls kept yelling at me because I wasn’t paddling enough and helping to control the raft. What they didn’t realize was that our paddling was superfluous and simply for show. Sham had complete control of the raft. Girls, do you think it was just chance that we gently bumped into that big rock on the right side of the river, spun ninety degrees clockwise, dipped into a swell, got hit by a big slash that doused us on the left side of the raft, felt like we were about to tip –but didn’t- and then popped back out? Sham was in complete control the whole time.

Amongst the Graffiti

Graffiti Park in Downtown KK

Tagged

It’s a little tricky with a family in tow, but its nice when traveling to not overplan the trip and to leave a little room for spontaneity.

We got into Kota Kinabula late on Friday. We had activities in mind for Sunday, but Saturday was wide open. We slept in, spent some time mapping out the rest of the trip, and then spent the day wandering the city and getting familiar with KK.

We had just left the HSBC bank when we turned the corner and found what could only be described a graffiti park. It was an abandoned building that years earlier had burned down. All that was left of it was a series of square support columns. They had all been painted white and various people had added graffiti over the years.

It was quite the unexpected find right in the heart of downtown KK. Without consulting each other we all started to silently mill about and explore. We spent the next half an hour checking out all the mini-murals and photographing our favorite ones. It was pretty obvious that the artwork had been down by a wide variety of artists because the styles were so different from each other.

It would have been fun even if we had read about the graffiti park in a guide book and planned our visit, but it was a whole lot more fun serendipitously discovering it for ourselves.

KK

It takes a few inducements to convince people to leave behind their lives in the States or Australian and relocate to an international school in Asia. In addition to a salary and a housing allowance, it is pretty standard for international schools here to offer decent professional development stipends.

The biggest educational conference in the region is hosted every year by EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools). The four-day conference rotates its location among Bangkok, Manila, and Kota Kinabula in Malaysia. Considering the tropical locations, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the annual EARCOS conferences are pretty popular. This year, the conference was in Kota Kinabalu.

We went several days early in order to do a few things as a family. We stayed in a low-budget hotel in town so that we could afford to switch over midweek to the more upscale hotel where the conference was being held. For the last four days of our trip, Julie and the girls sat by the pool while I attended the conference. This gave the second half of our trip a decidedly different feel than our usual backpacking treks through Asia. I told the girls to enjoy it while it lasted because this was the first and last frou-frou vacation I would be taking them on.