Welcome to Kota Kinabalu International Airport, Sabah.

Gateway to Sabah, the land below the wind.

The Kota Kinabalu International Airport is the main gateway to Sabah from the outside world. Kota Kinabalu International Airport is located 10 Km from the town centre. It is the second busiest airport in Malaysia. For those of you traveling from Europe, you have to go through Kuala Lumpur International Airport to get to Sabah. From Kuala Lumpur International Airport there are a lot of flights to Kota Kinabalu International Airport. Mostly the flights are by Malaysia Airlines System and Air Asia. Air Asia offer cheap airlines ticket but my advise go for Malaysia Airlines System. Air Asia tends to delay their flight sometimes up to 24 hours. You will end up paying for food, hotels etc.. more than what you save in the first place.

Due to its central location, the Kota Kinabalu International Airport is less than three hours flight from most of the ASEAN capitals. There are direct flights to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Kaohsiung, Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Cebu, Davao, Brunei and Labuan linking Kota Kinabalu with the outside world, especially the BIMP-EAGA and the Asia-Pacific rim. The Kota Kinabalu International Airport is well equipped to take the B747, A330, MD11, etc. Airlines.

The airline operating within the major towns in Sabah is the national carrier, the Malaysia Airlines System or Malaysia Airlines. Other airlines which operate in and out of Kota Kinabalu are Air Asia, Australian Airlines, Dragonair, FAT, Malaysia Airlines, Northern Airlines Sanya, Royal Brunei, Transasia, Transmile Air Services, UNI Airways, Vision Air, Xiamen Airlines.Once you are in Kota Kinabalu International Airport, you have to go through the normal procedure of luggage, custom, passport etc you know the drill. Once you step out of the building, you are in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. For me the first time I step out of Kota Kinabalu International Airport I feel the airport is too small compared to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport that I step in. Kota Kinabalu International Airport is not very far from the Kota Kinabalu city, infact if you feel like it you can actually walk to the nearest hotel. The nearest hotel is Airport View Hotel. Very near to the airport (about 2 km J).
If you don’t feel like walking, then there is airport taxi service. The fares depend on your destination roughly about RM10++. Just tell the girls at the counter where you want to go and she will tell you how much then you just pay. If you don€™t know where to go then ask her for what ever information you need. Generally people in Sabah are very friendly. If u got the time ask her name and phone number, if you are lucky you got a partner for dinner that is if you are traveling alone or with male friends. If you don’t want to take airport taxi you can always take mini bus which is actually a van. Take a short walk to the main road and raise your hand when you see these mini buses. From airport to Kota Kinabalu town only RM1 last I check. My advice is, when you are in Kota Kinabalu find a local person to show you around. The taxi/bus driver would be a good start. Make a deal with him if he wants it or he can recommend you to another driver. There are a lot of freelance drivers, just hope you find a good one. I can even recommend you to some good drivers.

The reason why you need local tour guide is that people here tends to overcharge when they see foreigner / tourist. Don’t get offended, I go through the same thing when I was here the 1st time and my hair and skin is the same color as they are just that my dialect a bit different. Nowadays even the local people think I am local. If you don’t have local people to help you then everything will be more expensive. I mean everything such as the food, market item, local souvenir, shirt etc. The only place where you can get fair price is the hotels and supermarkets. No fun in shopping at supermarkets when you travel so far away. I got supermarket just across the street where I am from btw I’m from Kuala Lumpur.

Next time I will give you info about hotels. Lots of hotels here from high price with lots of stars to those cheap hotels. My style I prefer cheap hotels coz even though it’s a cheap hotels some of them have good clean room, good room service and situated near everything. Easier to dine and shop also easier on the pocket. Even better there are lots of small resorts located out of Kota Kinabalu. Most of them have their own private beaches. They are about 10 km away from Kota Kinabalu International Airport. Very quiet, peaceful and a chance for you to see the local people. You can rent a car but don’t go for those car rental services at the airport or hotels. They are way too expensive. Go for outside car rental. A small car usually cost RM 70 / day. If you rent longer the price can go down a bit more. With a car you can learn the roads in Kota Kinabalu in just one night. Trust me, Kota Kinabalu is not that big. It took me one night to drive around and remember places. Better drive during midnight. Less cars you can go anyway you want just watch the road signs and the police. If you are lost just turn back. Lots of place to do U turn.

For now its time for me to bring my baby turbo for a spin. I like to drive around at night. Sometimes at 2 am I just drive around at those night spot looking for leftovers or left behind. Just looking btw.

Travel Industry Dream Jobs

Yukata Disco by Carl Parkes

I've been a travel writer for almost 20 years and have traveled around the world, and written six guidebooks to Southeast with Moon Publications and National Geographic. I've also updated and written original reviews for several hundred hotels in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore for Reed Travel/Star Service, the largest travel-trade publication in the world. Also, staff journalist for two years at Pacific Asia Travel Association, back in the days when they had an American publication outlet. I've also written for scuba diving magazines and photography specialties.

I know the score.

And then USA Today runs a story on dream travel jobs, and I almost want to throw all the authors out the window for their lying ways. There is NOT a hint of truth in any of these profiles, but they continue to feed the public hunger for notion of travel employee as gifted bird.

I've done most of these jobs in one form or another, and have the real lowdown on these so-called professions.

Jen Leo gets sick and tired of my cynicism, so I don't bother making comments on her excellent blog, but somebody, somewhere needs to drill down some sense of realism in this travel profession. Rolf Potts is also skeptical of my jaded views, but then he did the Round-the-World thing last year and hasn't peeped a word about the reality of that event (disaster?).

Nobody should write for free. Nobody should write for slave wages. Nobody should promote websites that don't pay or pay shitty wages. Thirty years ago the going rate for travel writers was $1 per word.

What are you getting paid today? Blogs will never get you coverage and will not impress any real editor. Don't do it. Don't kill what remains of the travel writing industry.

Who is killing the travel writing industry? It ain't me. I'm just lighting a candle over the corpse.

Ask someone what he or she'd do if they won the lottery and chances are the T-word will come up. For many, travel is the dream realized, the ultimate reward for a job well done.

But there are workers out there who don't need to hit the jackpot to take off. Travel is their job, and it doesn't involve herding passengers onto airplanes or swabbing ship decks, either.

USA TODAY's Jayne Clark looks at five of the best jobs and profiles those who have them.

USA Today Link

Tom Swick and the Key West Literary Salon

Nikko by Carl Parkes

Last week, the two good fellows who own the incredibly rich franchise known as WorldHum asked their buddy Tom Swick to pen a few notes about the week-long literary fest in Key West, and Tommy Boy came through in spades. Tom can write like your best buddy in your favorite neighborhood bar, who just returned from a wildly successful fishing trip and not only offers you some fresh trout but also his heartfelt advice and colorful stories.

Tom Swick is a great travel writer because he doesn't act or write like a travel writer. He writes like your friend. He attends the conference but seems half indifferent to most of the speakers with the notable exception of Pico Iyer, who dazzles everyone with his stories but mostly his philosophies about life and love and the art and craft of successful travel writing.

Video Night in Kathmandu has always been one of my favorite travel books, though I always wished Pico had made it a plural night. Just sounds better. But I digress.

Tom is such a casual and cool character that he takes the time to chat with street people and street performers, who honestly seem to be more interesting than the windbags going on inside the tent. And he takes notes, and then translates the notes into prose. It is so simple and so honest, so why don't more travel writers use this simple technique? Beats me.

Anyway, Tom filed five reports with WorldHum and all of them are worth reading. Another view comes from another reporter, who found the Key West event all puffed up and full of itself.

I'm a travel writer and have been know to get all full of myself at times, so I understand the dilemma. Talk, boast, pride, SATW awards, and all that other crap you can take with you to the next life. Yeah.

WorldHum Welcomes Tom Swick

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day One

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Two

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Three

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Four

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Five

And then there's this cheerful but revealing follow up story about the Key West event:

Lost amid the aimless speech of renowned travel writers
By Chauncey Mabe
Books Editor
Posted January 15 2006

Sometimes the main purpose of literary events seems to lie in giving writers the opportunity to show how inept they can be when they let their mouths, as opposed to their fingers, do the talking.

Take last weekend's Key West Literary Seminar, which gathered top travel writers for three days of bloviation on the meaning of their profession in the not-so-brave new world of the 21st century.

Keynote speakers Pico Iyer and Tim Cahill offered opposing examples of the way writers can make fools of themselves in talking extemporaneously. Iyer, delivering the opening night's John Hersey Memorial Address, spoke with a rapid, breathtaking grace, tossing off thought-provoking ideas like a parade Santa with a bag of candy.

Which was wonderful. Really, wonderful. And yet Iyer's lecture grew wearisome in its unparsed intellectual weight. Iyer would have been more wonderful still had he perhaps blocked up a few ideas, jotted down an outline, spoken to some specific point.

Cahill, a writer known for his use of humor, also spoke without notes when he took the podium for the John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Talk on Saturday evening. Judging from the ungainly pauses and vast distances between punch lines, Cahill had never spoken in public before. At least, not in English.

Unintentional amusement was offered by many writers, especially in the naked ego category. Barry Lopez, speaking in tones not heard since Moses descended the mount, said that once we've been to the places he's been, met the people he's met, had the spiritual experiences he's had, then we too can go home in the serene knowledge that everyday life is what really matters.

Kira Salak displayed an appalling ignorance of her own literary tradition, declaring the world is yet to be discovered by women, all the classic-era travel writers having been men. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, as the careers of Frances Trollope, Freya Stark and Beryl Markham attest.

That's not to say Key West was anything less than the usual thrilling literary experience. While the great minds on stage never arrived at consensus -- beyond the obvious "the inner journey is what matters" -- they provided much stimulation and entertainment.

Perhaps out of politeness, no one pointed out the obvious flaw in the "inner journey" idea of travel writing, which is that most writers aren't nearly as interesting as they think they are, and surely less interesting than the places they visit. Inner journey, indeed. Tell it to your mom.

To their credit, the writers grappled bravely with what novelist Kate Wheeler called "the costs of travel." Gretel Ehrlich said "almost every ecosystem in the world is in collapse," while Lawrence Millman said the bodies of Inuits are "toxic waste dumps" containing eight times the American average for mercury; all "concerned" travel writers should be radical environmentalists, he said. Others rued the "McDonalds-ization" of the world.

Indeed, the writers even hinted at what became obvious to any attentive listener, which is that travel writing is among the trivial genres. Apart from self-discovery and a cool lifestyle for the writer, what do these journeys and the resulting verbiage mean? More than one writer implied that only by crossing the frontier to journalism does travel writing gain heft. "There is a nobility about making the effort to be a witness" to a troubled world, Wheeler said. "All good writing is reporting," added Eddy Harris.

But the best part of the seminar, as always, lay not with enlightenment, but access. If you weren't satisfied with an author's remarks on stage, you could easily talk to them personally afterward. For example, I found Pico Iyer happily pinned in a corner next to the men's room, signing autographs and chatting. I asked about the morality of travel in an age of global warming, social unrest and terror.

"In the modern world travel does all kinds of damage, it is true," Iyer said. "But there is good, too, just in the fact of going to different places and meeting different people. The rest of the world loves America, but you might not know that if you don't travel.

"I take very seriously the idea of `global neighborhood.' It's good to get out and meet the neighbors."

Chauncey Mabe can be reached at cmabe@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4710.

Sun Sentinel Link

New York Times on Cambodia

Cambodia Portraits

Are you an aspiring travel writer, looking for inspiration and good instructions on the art and craft of the genre? Then run, run, run from anything ever published by the New York Times. Don't believe me? In one of the most arrogant, misguided, self-centered, and off balance travel articles of the year, the NYT wants you to see Cambodia as an ultra-rich tourist, just so you can avoid the realities and wonders of this marvelous country. The attitude is sheer stupidity, overlaid with smug satisfaction that you will be protected by your wealth and never subjected to the long and torturous history of the country, not to mention its perilous present.

Somebody should send this writer to Tuol Seng, to get the Raffles out of his system. Excuse me, I'm gonna puke.

In almost every part of the country, you can find a conceptually and architecturally ambitious hotel: In mountainous Ratanakiri, there's the Terres Rouges Lodge, a former provincial governor's lakeside residence that has, Time Asia said last July, "the best bar in the middle of nowhere." On the Sanker River in Battambang, Cambodia's second-largest city, there's La Villa, a 1930 house that in October opened as a six-room hotel filled with Art Deco antiques. And sometime this summer, you should be able to head south to Kep and stay at La Villa de Monsieur Thomas, a 1908 oceanfront mansion that's being transformed into a French restaurant ringed with bungalows.

Cambodia is not alone in its luxury revolution. Since the mid-1990's, the former French colonies of Southeast Asia have made enormous leaps in catering to tourists who prefer plunge pools to bucket showers. From the forests of Laos to the beaches of Vietnam to the ruins of Cambodia, you can find well-conceived, well-outfitted, well-run hotels that will sleep you in style for hundreds of dollars a night.

Less than a decade ago, there were no hotels with infinity pools, no restaurants serving fricassee of wild boar, no silk merchants who took Visa. (Also, no paved roads.) The foreigners who climbed the 328 steps of Mount Phousi were usually backpackers who sought guidance from Lonely Planet's "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring." Today, the traveler with a Lonely Planet in one hand is likely to have a Mandarina Duck carry-on in the other.

Outside, however, it was a different story: A guest assistant from Hôtel de la Paix carried my bag through the parking lot - past a new terminal designed to handle 1.5 million passengers a year when it opens this summer - to a Lexus S.U.V. As we drove into town, listening to Morcheeba on the car's iPod Mini, the driver and I discussed development on the airport road: I could remember when it had few hotels and restaurants; he could remember when it had none.

At la Paix, an artfully serene white palace designed by the landscape architect Bill Bensley, another assistant led me into the expansive arts lounge, where I sipped fresh orange juice and split my attention between the movie "Indochine," which was being projected on the wall, and the youthful staff members, who moved about with a surprising sureness of purpose.

Soon, an assistant took me to my room - dark woods, creamy fabrics, functioning Wi-Fi and another iPod - and cheerfully helped me plan my stay: a trip to Angkor Wat (with an "excellence guide," he wrote on his notepad) and, almost as important, a local SIM card for my cellphone ("first thing in the morning"). I wandered to the second-floor pool, which flowed like a river from the spa and down to the courtyard, at whose center grew a knotty ficus. Everywhere: calm. The hotel was aptly named.

New York Times Link

Travel Resources for Travel Writers

Young Burmese Monks by Carl Parkes

Each year, the fine folks at the Los Angeles Times go to the trouble to update several very important lists for both the casual tourist and the professional travel writer, and we all humbly thank them for their efforts.

States Government Tourist Offices

Foreign Government Tourist Offices

California Visitors Bureaus

National Parkes in California