We left from the B&B after breakfast at 7:30 and the majority of the day has been spent travelling back to Kota Kinabalu.
We stopped for lunch in Ranau, where we were given an allowance of RM15 and the choice of eating wherever we wanted rather than having to eat in a specific place, usually with a specific meal too. Unfortunately there wasn't exactly a big choice of places to eat in Ranau, and none of us really fancied chicken and rice again, so in the end all of us opted for that famous Malaysian delicacy: KFC. What a surprise, we found ourselves eating chicken once again...
A short drive after lunch brought us to another stop - a war memorial. Here there were three memorial gardens (Australian, British, and Bornean) together with a list of all of the names of the people who were lost in the death marches from Sandakan to Ranau, ordered by the Japanese army towards the end of WW2. The Japanese were realising that they had no hope of being on the winning side and so they decided that it was necessary to kill all of the POWs. However, rather than kill them in the camps where they were, they took the 2242 POWs on these 260km death marches, ordering them to carry supplies with them - in 1943 these were supplies to build an airfield strip, but later on it was just generic army supplies that the Japanese didn't want to leave behind. Nearly all of the prisoners died on the way. The soldiers were already starved and sick, and therefore extremely weak, and in the heat of the Borneo jungle, with barely anything to eat at all, it's no wonder that they didn't make it. As soon as they showed any signs of struggling, the Japanese soldiers would take them to one side and shoot them.
Only 6 of the POWs escaped and survived. All of the rest perished. It still is to date the biggest loss that the Australian military has ever experienced.
We watched a video explaining about the death marches and then we were able to wander around the gardens, which were styled in relation to each country involved. All of us were really humbled, and shocked that barely any of us knew that this had even happened. It was a really interesting stop, even if a little melancholy.
We then had a final stop at the same market we've been to several times on our journeys now for some souvenirs and toilet stops, and then after the final leg of the journey we reached KK this evening, where we're now staying once more in Travellers Light, the first hostel we visited before going to Gaya.
We've just been out for a quick wander around some market stalls where I bought some hand-crafted jewellery made by local art students, and now we're back in the hostel again waiting to go out for dinner soon at another local restaurant.
9:55pm
Dinner was about a 15 minute walk away, further into the city in a part we'd never been to before. It was chicken fried rice (interestingly served with two slices of cucumber, a slice of tomato, an egg and three fragments of poppadom...?) and then we were left to ourselves to either spend some more time in the city or make our own way back to the hostel. None of the people I normally walk around with had brought their purses/bags out to dinner with them, and neither had I, so we decided to go back to the hostel as we have the whole of tomorrow to explore anyway.
It had been beginning to rain a little when we were walking to the restaurant, but as we stepped outside of the mall where it was located, we realised that it was now hammering down, so we were soon absolutely soaked to the skin - most of us were just in shorts and tshirts... When we got back our first priority was to dry off and change into PJs, and since then we've been sat out on the balcony, and it is now the surprisingly late time of something past 10 at night (a time several of us feel very unacquainted with by now) and maybe it is time for bed at last...
Tomorrow we actually have the opportunity to lie in!!! Although having said that, I'm 90% likely to still wake up much earlier than I need to, as I'm pretty used to the early starts by now!
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