We’re off sailing after our road-trip

Mt Kinabalu looking NE

Ahoy folks,

I have to give a big shout out to Liz who organised a most-splendid birthday trip for me last week. We’re waiting for a new calorifier (water-heater) after it pissed itself at anchor so we tucked Esper into the marina, hired a car and headed north-east towards Mt Kinablu. We spent five days in the UNESCO Kinabalu Park and I have to say it was incredible. We bombarded the Signal group with daily updates because there was so much to see, but don’t worry, many of these photos will end up in the High Res Dropbox folder and we will of course cover this in a future vlog.

The Sabah Tea Resort looking west towards Mt Kinabalu

The situation here is still tight. Although the state of Sabah is allowing local tourism, visitors are still locked out and we’re still locked in. The Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Taiwan, even the neighbouring state of Sarawak, are all either locked down or are enforcing long and expensive quarantine. Thailand is easier to enter as yachties can now quarantine on their boats but it’s 1,000 miles away in the wrong direction!

Name that fruit (because we’ve no idea what it is!)

This is one reason why we undertook the road trip. While we wait for things to change we’re keeping ourselves amused locally. Tomorrow we leave the marina for a week waiting for our delivery and will check out some new anchorages, providing we get permission from the local park ranger! I’ll be slipping in a few dives too!

A rare selfie

Of course our weekly vlogs are now a few months behind but this has been done on purpose. The boat yard and maintenance stuff always goes down well and we’ve not done that much sailing between hauling and now, so we’re staggering our content. There wasn’t much to video over the Chrismas period so after the yard we’ll be closer to real-time again.

Early morning sunrise

Thank you for the comments and feedback on the Signal group. It’s nice to share stuff that doesn’t get posted elsewhere. We’d love to be doing blog posts and FTBMates forum updates on everything we get up to but sometimes it’s easier to whack up a quick pic on limited bandwidth via phone. Keep an eye on the Dropbox folder as we work our way through the photos.

Hope you are all doing well!