After emerging from the jungle it was time for us to catch our Air Asia flight from Sandakan back to Kota Kinabalu. We had spent one night in Kota Kinabalu, but didn’t have a chance to look around, so we were headed back for another day.
We had booked the very nice D’Borneo Hotel in Kota Kinabalu, where we stayed our first night in Borneo, knowing that it would be great to have a nice clean place to stay after our jungle accommodations.
That evening we took the shuttle bus from KK to check out the mega mall. Yes, there is a mega mall in Borneo. Sad, but true. And low and behold, at the mall we found what we hadn’t been able to find in the jungle! In the parking lot was an Asian elephant! You could pay to get your photo taken with it, but I thought it wasn’t a good idea to have the elephant in a cement parking lot, instead of in the jungle. There was also a reptile center in the mall, with snakes, which we hadn’t found in the jungle either. How ironic…