I’m currently in a beautiful KFC at 10:30am eating a chicken sandwich and fries. This is the closest I’ve gotten to “food from home” in almost two months and I’m enjoying it more than I’ve ever enjoyed fast food in my life.
I arrived yesterday by boat to Semporna on the mainland with five other people from TRACC. We’re headed to Sipidan this weekend for a dive trip, which is supposed to be one of the best dive sites in the world. Our boat doesn’t leave until lunch time today so we had all of yesterday to kill in Semporna. I’ve written about Semporna before, as it is the dirty, poor town closest to us on mainland where the weekly shopping is done.
With nothing to do yesterday we spent almost the whole day “bar hopping”, which pretty much consisted of finding small shacks that sold booze and sitting at tables by the water. We grabbed some roti for lunch and found a place for dinner with a pretty American menu. I had chicken for the first time in weeks and we ordered about four plates of varying cheese- cheese fries, cheesy garlic bread, pizza, and cheesy spring rolls.
We later found a rooftop bar that was actually pretty nice if you could ignore the smell of garbage while enjoying the skyline view. They sold mixed drinks here which was a plus because every where else we found only sold beer. We spent a few hours here and were going to go home around eleven but heard about a club down the street. We have nothing to do today besides get on a boat so we decided to see what this club was about.
We walked into a dark, basement bar area to find two tables of old Malaysian men singing karaoke. Not what we were expecting, but hey we could get down with it. The bar only sold liquor by the bottle or beers by the bucket, so we got three buckets of beer and requested some Bon Jovi on karaoke, which surprisingly got the place going. I’m not kidding when I say that within an hour this place transformed into a full on night club. Bartenders pouring lines of shots, people dancing on stage and all over the dance floor, club music blasting. It ended up being a ton of fun and I think the Malaysians enjoyed watching some white people attempt to dance to their music.
Now it’s off to Sipidan today, should be a nice weekend to close out the trip! But first let me finish this tray of KFC alone.
Half-Seas Over 