Memorial garden

This morning I took the bus from Kota Kinabalu to Mount Kinabalu. The scenery on the journey was the most spectacular of all my Borneo bus journeys. As the road wound up the hills, there were amazing views over the forest and down to the distant ocean. Mount Kinabalu towered above with a circle of clouds around it. The journey was quicker than I expected and the bus dropped me at the entrance to the national park just before 11am. By that time, the top of the mountain was completely in cloud and it looked like it might rain. I walked the few hundred meters to downhill to the hostel.

I decided to wait until tomorrow to go into the national park, hoping for clearer weather first thing in the morning. I got the bus into the next town along from the park. That meant standing by the road waiting for about an hour and 20 mins for a bus to come past. The town is only 5km away and I might have walked except I’d be walking directly on a very busy road – no pavement.

In Kundasang there’s a war memorial in pretty, walled garden. It marks events during World War II that I’d not heard about before. There was a prisoner of war camp at Sandakan, on the coast of Sabah, where the Japanese held around 1800 Australian and 600 British troops captured in Singapore or Malaysia. In January 1945 the Japanese feared an Allied invasion so decided to move the prisoners. Three Sandakan Death Marches followed. The prisoners were marched about 260km through thick jungle and over mountainous terrain to Ranau, just east of Kundasang. They were starving and ill. Those that struggled to walk were either left to die or were shot by Japanese guards. Only 6 prisoners out of all those held at Sandakan survived. The six survivors were all Australian. They managed, separately, to escape during the marches and were helped by local people.

This flower is in the Australian garden memorial.