Gayana Island Resort, Malaysia December 2005

Christmas holidays were coming up. I knew I would either have to take a vacation now or have to wait for a long time. I didn't have much money, so I picked someplace close. while browsing around, I came across gayana island eco resort, gaya island, just off the coast of kota kinabalu in sabah state, East Malaysia, Borneo. The resort was"eco" in the fact that they claimed to be rehabilitating the corals and giant clams in the area. Zaiton was really busy with work and couldn't get time off, so I went alone.

I caught a flight from brunei to KK. The flight is a quick 40 minutes. At the airport, I caught a taxi to the kk ferry terminal. However, when I got to the ferry terminal, I found out that I would have to wait another 2 1/2 hours for the next ferry ... the ferry terminal smelled like horses ... it was too far and hot to walk back to some resturants or shops to pass the time, so I ended up waiting all that time in the building. I finally caught the ferry, to the resort area.

I think it was a kind of"psychadelic" experience, unfortunately, very disorienting. I spent a lot of the time i was there reading Philip K. Dick novels, ("now wait for last year" and"martian time-slip"), which are about characters questioning reality while time travelling and taking science fiction drugs. The next thing that made it disorienting was the fact that there isn't much land under your feet. The entire resort is built on stilts and boardwalks. There is only a tiny stretch of beach next to the recreation center. It looks like the resort was built to house tourists in package tours. In fact, my room, even though I was alone, had 3 twin bunks. I was also disapointed to find out that the drain in the bathroom and shower emptied directly into the water below. This"eco resort" was actually dropping shampoos, soaps and cleaning fluid into the water.