Food Poisioning

Not a fun two-days in Kota Kinabalu.

The family had an enjoyable day out on Friday visiting the Kinabalu Park and the Poring Hot Sprints. Only hitches in the day was sore bums and a nauseaus two-and-a-half hour winding return trip down hill. And the kid threw up from motion sickness. But that really isn't too bad. Being too tired to leave the hotel for dinner, we had a redeeming seafood buffet dinner at the hotel's Five Sails restaurant, which the missus and kid thoroughly enjoyed. ;)

On Saturday, we did the touristy thing and took a 4-hour return journey in the authentic steam-engine train from Tanjung Aru to Papar, complete with attendants dressed in colonial attire. The trip was marginally interesting, with stopovers at a small Chinese temple and the little township of Papar. One thing that you should note however, should you decide to attempt the train journey is to obtain the walk-in rate (RM240 for 2 adults), instead of booking in advance with the various tour agencies (RM195 or more per adult). You may run the risk of missing a seat though, as the train was fully occupied.

The later part of the evening was spent in visiting the markets at the waterfront. I must say that the market is a photographer's dream and you probably can spend a couple of hours in the crowded, colourful market shooting photos.

But that's when things sort of turned for the worse. Being street-food connosieurs that we are, we decided to postpone our original plan of having dinner at the fairly new Port View seafood restaurant, and instead, attempt the barbeque seafood stalls in the market, where you can probably eat all you want for RM50 for the entire family. One gigantic barbequed tiger prawn costs RM7, while the same live prawn cooked in a seafood restaurant will cost RM18-RM28.

I woke up at 3 am with severe tummy ache followed by multiple bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. Wow, I've never ever had it so bad. The hotel's resident doctor visited by about 6am while I was shivering cold from head to toe. And the doctor left with a bill presumably more painful than the two injections I had.

Fantasies about receiving TLC from the missus soon evaporated when she too, succumbed to food poisoning. Sigh. Thankfully for the entire day yesterday, the kid was nice enough to spend most of her time playing on her own instead of being overly fussy, leaving the bed-stricken parents to sleep most of the day. What was disappointing was the fact that we missed the weekly Sunday morning market in Jalan Gaya, which I was so looking forward to.

Most of today was spent recuperating as both parents are devoid of energy to travel beyond the hotel grounds. We'd be back home this evening, and we'd be mightily pleased with the absence of any further misadventures for the rest of the trip.

We'll definitely be back to Kota Kinabalu again, despite having all three family members purging at one point or another. The little we have experienced definitely whetted the appetite for more. There's still plenty left to do out here. ;) In the meantime, it's back to regular blogging schedule. ;p