Category Archives: Sabah

Tamu Besar, Kota Belud

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I went to the Tamu Besar (Big Native Market) of Kota Belud on last Saturday and Sunday (Sep 24-25). Actually I have been waiting for this annual grand event since May. The Tamu Besar is one of the most popular festivals in Sabah. After the visit for 2 days, the 1GB memory card of my digital camera went full. No kidding, my digicam was so busy working that it almost melted (Go ahead, so I will have an excuse to buy a DSLR). I was really glad I went there. Next year I will come again.

For those of you who don’t know “Tamu”, it is a weekly local market, where all the local farmers, fishermen and vendors sell their products such as vegetables, fruits, fish, shrimps, livestocks, traditional medicines, food, drink, cloth, shoes, handicrafts and almost every daily-use items. A truly village type setting. You are not only seeing the Tamu, you can smell the Tamu. The Tamu Ground of Kota Belud is the biggest Tamu in Sabah and open on every Sunday. Kota Belud is just northeast 70KM away from Kota Kinabalu. Due to the good road condition, you can get there by car in only an hour.

I can only use three words to describe this festival: Colorful, Interesting and Fun. “Tamu Besar” is the name of the festival that is more than just a Tamu. Bajau people is the second largest indigenous group in Sabah (first is KadazanDusun, third is Murut) and they are very popular on their colorful costumes, horsemanship and handicrafts. Tamu Besar is a 2-day event that let you see all these.


There are 5 things that you must check out during the Tamu Besar:

  1. Bajau Horsemen: See 100 Bajau horsemen in action then you know they are also known as the Cowboys of the East. Each horse is decorated with color mat and different design. It is an exciting day for the horsemen, tourists and horses.
  2. Bajau Beauty Queen Pageant: Beautiful Bajau and Iranun ladies, with unique and ornate costumes, line up for contest.
  3. Animals Sport: The buffalo racing and game with horses are really eye opener and make you laugh out loud.
  4. Tamu Ground: The biggest local market with lot of interesting stuffs not found in shopping mall.
  5. Performance: The colorful traditional dance performance by local Bajau, Iranun, Dusun, Malay and Chinese people.

If you miss the event, don’t worry. I have shared over 200 photos and 7 video clips in this web site for your viewing pleasure. My Streamyx broadband is not quite stable recently. It took me 4 hours to upload only 35MB of files. Such a pain… It always happens a few days every month, as if it got PMS. Anyway… here you go:

Check out the Photo Gallery of Tamu Besar

Photos taken in Kota Belud, Sabah, Malaysia Borneo

6 Things You Must Have in Sabah

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1) Emergency lighting
You know the quality of our electricity power supply. You should have candles and torch light ready at home, in an obvious spot anytime. I noticed some families even use a car battery to power up fluorescent and fan. But the end result is still the same, what can you do when there is no electricity? It will be so warm that you don’t have mood to do anything. Actually I am quite interested in knowing what others do during blackout. Please share your tips…

2) Power Generator
Running a manufacturing factory, meat storage, bakery shop, fish farm and closed-system chicken farm is considered as very HIGH RISK businesses in Sabah. You can lose thou$ands overnight. And guess what? SESB will not pay you a cent as a compensation. They will advise you to sue the monkeys and tree branches. If you insist, you should have budgeted for a power generator.

We never understand those in Peninsular Malaysia makes big HuHa about a 2-hour power down. WHAT is the BIG deal? Just look at part of our power outage records in the past two months:
Jul 12: Sandakan, power down for continuous 60 hours
Jul 13: Lahad Datu, power down for continuous 5 hours
Jul 14: Papar, power down for continuous 8 hours
Aug 20: Tawau, power down for continuous 3 hours
Aug 22: Kota Kinabalu, power down for continuous 5.5 hours
Aug 27: Kudat, power down for continuous 12 hours

And not to mention those hundreds of small small cases. Two hours? Sub Sub Water lah. SESB will classify it as a small case (minor disruption). Also not good enough to become a news headline (otherwise all the column will be full). I am looking for diesel-run aircon, TV and refrigerators but cannot find any on the market. Anyone got any info on Home use Generator? Any solution?


3) Water Filter
You cannot live more than the age of 40 if you drink unfiltered water in Sabah. It is more like a mud water. The water is also “poisonous” due to Chlorine. The fishes will die if you put them in the tap water. When you syok syok taking hot shower, the Chlorine will follow the steam gets into your body. Research shows that chlorinated tap water correlated with higher risk of miscarriage, cancer… Just install a water filter and see the filter turns black in a week. Clean water is so precious in Sabah. The mineral water is more expensive than the petrol (how come we sound like a desert region). I don’t understand why they sell so well coz our mud water got more minerals.

4) Water Tank
Many houses here got water tank to store water. You will really appreciate it when the water pressure is low. Having no water is worse than having no power (e.g. cannot cook, cannot bath, cannot flush toilet). For some regions that use power water pump, they will have big headache during the power outages, coz the pump stops working, the water will stop coming too… So don’t shake hand with others when there is no water…

5) Home Alarm / Security System
I don’t know you, but most of the houses in my taman were broken in by thief before, some more than twice. 20 years ago in Sabah, we could leave our doors opened and it was safe. Today it is the opposite. From time to time, you may see strange outsiders look look outside your house. Be careful oh, that night…

If you do not have a security system, at least get a watch dog. I say “Watch Dog”, not the kind that you can hug the whole day and can put into pocket. A watch dog means a 100-pound BIG dog that has the ability to tear you apart (the best is the one that is so fierce that it also bites you, haha). Get a black one so it becomes a stealth killing machine at night.

6) UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply)
If you have a computer, get a UPS for it. Besides preventing you from losing your unsaved work, it can stablize the power supply. The power fluctuation happens very oftenly, sometimes you don’t even notice it. The power trip can do serious damage to your “sensitive” electronic equipments such as refrigerator, air-con, computer… I have replaced the damaged computer hard disk twice because of the power trip.

Anymore? Please feel free to add…

Skull of Orang utan

Monsopiad Village and House of Skulls

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Hope the 360 degree Mount Kinabalu Panoramic views did not make your mouth wide open, cool huh? Before you close your mouth, I still have more Panoramic Virtual Tours to show you. Can you digest fast enough? 🙂

Yes, the next one is Monsopiad Village in Penampang. Monsopiad is the name of the most popular Kadazan headhunter, a legendary warrior who harvested 42 human skulls. In the past, the more skulls you owned, the more heroic you were. The headhunters believed that the spirit of the victim would trap in the skull and protected them. Today there is no more headhunter in Borneo, but you still can see the 300-year old human skulls displayed in the House of Skulls of Monsopiad Village. Monsopiad Village is one of the BEST tourism spot in Kota Kinabalu but is not very well-known among the Sabahans. Don’t know why…

Actually I feel a bit guilty to publish this virtual tour because it is so thorough and complete that — after you watch it, you can close your eyes walking in the village and know where you are, like you had been there. I have posted 150+ photos, 4 video clips, and 1, 2, 3, 4… 10 panoramic tours for this village. Goodness… I hope they will not kill me.


Click Here to Start the Tour

Video Clips of Traditional Dances
BTW, another thing that I would like to highlight is — I find that the Kadazan Sumazau video clip is the most popular download item of MySabah.com.

To make your life easier (find them all in one place), I list all the links to the Sumazau video clips below:
(1) Orchid De Villa, (2) Pesta Kaamatan, (3) Monsopiad Village.

If you are interested in Murut’s Magunatip (Bamboo Dance), I also got four versions:
(1) Monsopiad Village, (2) Pesta Kaamatan, (3) Orchid De Villa, (4) TV3 Carnival (by kids).

If you visit Monsopiad Village, normally they will show you Sumazau, Magunatip and Sazau (by Kadazan Papar) dances. For more video clips of traditional dances of Sabah indigenous people, you may check out my Pesta Kaamatan page.

Photos taken in Penampang, Sabah, Malaysia Borneo

Orchid De Villa, Horticultural Show 2005

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I went to the Orchid De Villa Horticultural Show 2005 on Aug 27 – 29. I would say this is one of the best places to hang around with your family during weekend. The only problem is the road condition. After my 20-year-old car running on 1 KM of gravel road full of mud, holes, rocks and dust, I was almost faint when I reached another sign saying “Orchid De Villa 2 KM”. Fortunately, if you don’t have a 4 wheel, you can take a FREE mini bus in front of the Sin Hin Bookstore in Inanam so your car does not need to suffer the 3 KM gravel road. The bus will move whenever it is full or it waits long enough.

It was an interesting experience. Many activities such as Little Miss Orchid De Villa, Children Body Building and other shows were organised during the exhibition.


I also took a walk in their orchid garden. Actually I was a bit disappointed in the beginning because I didn’t see a lot of blooming orchids around. Luckily I saw Mr. Liew (the owner) and his wife before I left. He asked if I found anything interesting to shoot. Before I answered, he already pointed out 5 to 6 orchid flowers NEXT to me. “Did you see this?”, “Did you see that?”… I was a bit embarrassed to say No coz I didn’t pay close attention to my surrounding. The flowers were so near but I didn’t “see” them.

Many wild orchids are very small and low profile. They could be hiding in the grass, under the leaves, and other corners. You could not discover them without paying very close attention. He also mentioned that’s why many visitors were disappointed and said they saw “nothing”. For me, this is an important lesson. Not all beautiful thing is OBVIOUS. They might be very near to us, but all are ignored by busy, insensitive and impatient city people like us. Probably we can learn to pay more attention to the little thing around us, such as the new haircut of our wife, the good little thing others do for us silently… then we would appreciate the world better.

I also visited their zoo. The Sep 16 Malaysia Day is coming. There is a bird would like to say something to greet you. Click Here to hear what it said (48 KB).

Photos taken in Inanam, Sabah, Malaysia Borneo

You are a Sabahan, if…

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1) You drive at right lane of the road, with a speed of only 50 KM/H. If people horn behind you, you still don’t know what’s wrong.

2) You have the luxury of working from 8 AM to 5 PM (get off work punctually).

3) You don’t believe that there is any “clean” politician in Sabah.

4) You feel “obligated” to reach the top of Mount Kinabalu at least once in a lifetime.

5) You prefer a big car than a big house (probably you can’t drive a big house around to show off).

6) You wear slipper and short wherever you go, even in city.

7) You still think that Labuan is belong to Sabah.

8) You will not go to any FREE seminar / function that has no food or refreshment.

9) You don’t care about service. You just want things cheap, cheap, cheap…

10) You know where to get your candles and torch light quickly in the total darkness (due to training by frequent blackout).

Please feel free to add more…

Sorry. No ice-cream for your eyes

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I don’t like going to the cinema very often. It always gave me a feeling that I watched the incomplete piece of the movie. They say pirated VCD is not original. However, to me, a movie that is censored is also NOT original. They always cut the BEST part. The so called 18SX rating, or whatever you name it, is purely meaningless junk. A 13-year-old kid in US can watch MORE than what the Malaysian adults watch here. I was always joking with my friends that all the movies shown in Malaysia are “children movies”, even those with a 18SX label. This ends up I have to watch the movie the second time on a DVD to see if I miss anything cool.

We Sabahan guys are so poor… Not only the movies and TV, even a sexy photo on a newspaper also got censored. These things were used to be my “spiritual food”. To see how they censor a photo, I took a few real photo samples from a local Chinese newspaper. Applying mosaic is one of the techniques to hide the eye candy. See the photos below. FYI, I got the original photos from the Net. Just do a search at www.google.com.hk or www.yahoo.com.hk can find them.

In the past, they were using something like a marker pen to blacken the cool spot. Today the censorship by computer becomes so advance that you may not aware that you are looking at a censored picture. I am a designer, so their lousy editing skill cannot fool me. Hope the photos can feed those hungry souls. 😉

Ghost Festival

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The Ghost Festival is coming, so it is hard not to talk a bit about the “good brothers”. The road next to the Chinese cemetery at 2.5 miles Tuaran Road has been known as one of the haunted spots. I had heard many stories about it. It usually goes like this – a driver passed by this cemetery alone late at night and saw someone (usually female) waved hand at his car and wanted to take a ride. The driver stopped the car and picked her up. The passenger would say she wanted to visit her friends in Kolombong (there is another cemetery facing the Puu Toh Temple). When the driver reached the destination, one of the five things below would happen:
1) The passenger disappeared.
2) The driver saw something horrible in the mirror (then he would get sick for months or something).
3) The passenger got out and vanished in the dark, without opening the door.
4) The passenger revealed her ghost face. The driver lost control of his car and died in accident (HAHAHAHA… who told this story later then? The ghost or CSI?).
5) The passenger gave the driver some money. The next day it turned into paper money.
(In most versions, the good brother always sat in the back seat, as if she already planned to scare the driver.)
Well, I don’t know if the stories are real, but they definitely do not sound creative. You always hear the similar story everywhere (only the names of cemetery changed).

Personally I haven’t seen anything weird there so far. Sometimes I needed to pass by that road alone, after 10 pm. There were many times my car was the only car on that road. A few time I did smell something like a dead rat in my car. My brother even smelled strong perfume in the car. Last year my sister also saw a human figure with long hair covering the face, standing by the roadside around 11 pm. Until today, she still wonder if it was a “real” thing, or just somebody fooled around.

But there is a real incident. Many years ago, my cousin was staying with my family. He was a school boy studying in a school nearby the 2.5 mile cemetery. I don’t know what happened to his brain. One day he went to the Japanese cemetery with a few friends. He scolded the Japaneses for what they had done in World War II, then he “she-she” on a Japanese grave. From that night on, he would see a Japanese ghost, next to his bed, staring angrily at him every night. My cousin was so scared that he could not sleep well. He could not take it anymore so he told my mom. My mom ordered him to go back there again and apologize sincerely in front of that grave. After he did that, the ghost did not harass him again. I was a bit unhappy because this “visitation” happened in my room (my cousin slept in my room when I was studying overseas). And I am typing this story in this room now.

If you ask me if I believe in ghost? I also don’t know how to answer. It might be a form of energy or brain activities that cannot be explained by our knowledge today. People tend to be afraid of something that they do not know or understand, and they will relate it with ghost or God. In the past, people also think that lightning was the act of God. Now we all know it is an electrical energy and we use it to light up our house at night. Same case to ghost? People just do not learn from history?