Tawau, Malaysia

I had to wait 24 hours after diving before we could fly, so we spent the extra day in Tawau rather than Semporna.

Tawau is a 90 minute drive along the coast from Semporna. We arrived just before noon, and checked into the My Inn Hotel. I had prepaid $30 on agoda.com and thought it was the deposit, and then realized that that was the full cost. It was a pretty good mid-range hotel.

There's a chocolate factory in Tawau that runs tours, and so we hopped in a taxi for Teck Guan Cocoa.

Unfortunately you need to book the tour in advance, as they then arrange for the staff who run the museum and tour. There was a manager on duty and she was nice enough to give a quick tour, show us the cocoa bean, split to see the inside. I don't the the factory was running because it's Friday (Malaysia is largely Muslim). What we saw was pretty cool, although too bad we didn't know to book ahead.

There's not much else to do in Tawau so we just relaxed and read away the rest of the afternoon.

Had dinner at a place that served mostly pasta, although we had local dishes. (None of the other places looked particularly appetizing to us). Had a couple Tiger beers too.

The next day was a long travel day. We had an early morning flight from Tawau back to Kota Kinabalu and then a six hour layover before flying to Brunei.

We've become addicted to the automated massage chairs that are everywhere in the airports. We took care to save up our $1 ringgit notes, it's 3 MYR for 9 minutes, about $1 CAD.

Finally our flight time arrived, and it was a short 40 minute flight to Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. Unfortunately the gate got stuck and so we taxied to another gate, which took longer than the flight.

The airport's undergoing construction and they don't have the ATM's hooked up yet. So we grabbed a taxi to the Brunei Hotel, and had the driver stop at an ATM so we could get Brunei dollars.

It was already 8pm by the time we arrived at the hotel, it was pouring rain and I was feeling a bit under the weather so we just ate at the hotel restaurant. It wasn't too bad, actually better than what we'd had over the last few days.

We've been somewhat disappointed by the food on Borneo after hearing lots of good things about food here. We're hoping things will be different back on the peninsula. It could also be that we do get pretty decent Thai, Chinese and Indian restaurants in Toronto, and so we're not blown away by the food here. It's okay, but about average compared to what we can get back home. Or maybe we just don't know how to choose a restaurant here :)