The 72, 500sqkm Sabah is a fertile region that falls just below the typhoon belt. Known as the ‘Land below the Wind’, Sabah has a rugged terrain with swampy, mangrove-tangled coastal areas, green paddy fields and the dizzy heights of the Crocker Mountain Range. The state is home to a variety of wildlife including the forest-dwelling orang-utans, bearded pigs, hornbills and turtles. Meanwhile the Crocker Mountain Range plays host to the loftiest peak between the Himalayas and New Guinea – Mount Kinabalu. There’s so much to see in Sabah – head to the east coast where the Sepilok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre is or saunter down to the muddy Kinabatangan River banks to see the cheeky proboscis monkeys.
Australian Memorial
The
Australian Memorial, on the site of what was a prisoner-of-war camp now in
taman rimba, off labuk road, commemorates allied soldiers who lost their lives
during the japanese occupation. Some 2,400 men, most of them australians, left
this camp on the so-called "death march" towards the end of
the war, only six of them surviving to reach Ranau, near Mount Kinabalu, a year
later.
The Gomatang Caves about 32 km south of
Sandakan, is a home to over one million swiftlets. These swiftlets' nests are
the famous chinese delicacy, birds' nest, and fetch a good price locally and
aboard. Twice a year, in the caves men can be seen scaling bamboo ladders to
height of about 90 m to collect the delicacy off the cave walls. The swiftlets'
neighbours are bats, More that a million of them which live atop an enormous
guano pile.
The
greatest concentration of wildlife in Malaysia, and possibly all of Borneo, can
be found remarkably close to Sandakan, along the lower reaches of Sabah's
biggest and longest river, the Kinabatangan. Wild orang utan, macaques, red and
silver leaf monkeys, elephants, dozens of beautiful birds including several
species of hornbill, crocodiles, civet cats and otters may all be viewed in
this region, although the most famous creature of all is undoubtedly the
bizarre Proboscis monkey.
For
an unrivalled panoramic view of Sandakan bay and a look at its newest temple, a
visit should be made to the extravagantly ornate Puu Jih Shih Buddhist Temple,
on the hill-top above tanah merah south of Sandakan town centre. Built and
decorated in 1987 at a cost of around us$2 million, the temple is a blaze of
red and gold, with writhing dragons, gilded buddhas, hundreds of gleaming lamps
and the fragrance of burning incense.
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