(1062) Kundasan

My brother's family will be spending Christmas in Sabah. My sister-in-law talked about their plans with me.

I mentioned two suggestions: 1. bring drinking water to Kundasan*
                                                 2. bring a small torch in case of power failure

From friends I heard that the water supply is not that great in that hill station. In fact during a recent church camp, more than half of the campers came down with upset stomach. Apart from that, scenery is great. The weather is more than cool. I highly recommend the cow and goat milk produced there.

Sabah is a place where the electric consumption outstrips the production, hence the relevant authorities had to resort to power shedding. I was used to the sudden power black out or brown out. The first items I bought four years ago for my newly rented house were three torches. When I was alone in that rented house at night, I actually wear the small torch around my neck with a lanyard. In the outskirt of the city, black out meant literally total, I mean cannot see your fingers a few inches away, darkness.

Recently, a friend was sitting in a Mamak ( Indian Muslim) eatery, at seven thirty pm (the sun sets there at 6:45pm in December) the power snapped off. Well, candles were lit. It was determined that other shop lots had power supply. The young man who happened to be the owner's son called a  grab car and speeded to the power supplier to pay his over due bills. Apparently it was common practice for such a business to owe about two thousand dollars in electricity. Even an ordinary native household would owe about one thousand dollars before power is cut off to prompt payment. There, I told my sister-in-law, please don't say you haven't been forewarned. Fully charged hand phones, a torch with new batteries, even a candle or two with working matches would be handy in the outskirts of the big cities in Sabah.



* Kundasan is an area not far from Mount Kinabalu, supposedly the highest mountain in South East Asia. Though I have read that the real geographic high point is in Papua New Guinea.