Time for some culture

Day 19 - Kota Kinabalu 

After breakfast we took a Grab to the KDCA Cultural Village at Hongkod Koissan, not sure of what we'd find. It was a 20 minute drive and when we arrived the Harvest Festival was well underway. It was busy so we followed the crowd to the main hall where people were standing outside the doors manned by police. We managed to bluff our way in, K tagged onto the tail of a group, then M followed a few minutes later telling the guard "my wife is in there". We took a seat where we watched some song and dance performances followed by a parade of women representing their town/region in a beauty contest, all of them dressed and made up identically.

After the parade it was lunch so we followed everyone outside and wandered around various stalls selling traditional Sabah clothes, accessories and souvenirs. The crowd was predominantly local, there were very few people like us. We wandered through the buildings and tents, may people were dressed in traditional clothing and performing dances, while others sat around eating their lunch. Some of the stalls had indigenous music, instruments and produce, often with their beauty contest representative posing for photos with the public. The food area had a lot of stalls, cooking all sorts of meats, like black pepper lamb, satay, and pigs on a spit. It was starting to get really hot and it was becoming quite overwhelming so we decided we'd seen enough and grabbed a car back to the air conditioning of our hotel.

In the evening we walked across the road to the waterside restaurants, with a view of the islands and the planes coming in to land flying quite low directly overhead. We started at one bar where the happy hour drinks were mostly ice, so we moved on to a much better and more popular cocktail bar where we could order our dinner from the Malaysian restaurant next door. There was a cover band playing and it was quite amusing watching the young couples enjoying the boomer music, singing along with every word while swaying their arms in the air, they knew the songs better than we did!