Kota Kinabalu and some birthday photos (while not in Cyprus)

Here's the port where the Doulos arrived last Friday, after a remarkably calm four-day voyage from Hong Kong. People said it was the calmest sea they had seen in at least two years. The view from the port looks over Mount Kinabalu and some lovely green rain forest. We thought it would be wet here - there's more rainfall in October than any other month here - but so far it's mostly been fine, with a few showers and a dramatic thunderstorm late last night.


Here, as promised, are a few photos from the ' joint 71st' birthday yesterday. After a leisurely breakfast in our hotel about 9am, they opened the large number of cards people had given us to bring, and some presents from the family. Here's Richard, opening the present he had chosen from me:


And Daniel enjoying a new book he was given by one of his uncles:

We were all a bit tired so we didn't do anything much during the morning till about noon, when we went to the Coffee Bean cafe to check email etc, and had lunch there too. They do rather nice toasted sandwiches with salad.

After that we went back to our hotel for a bit, then walked to the Doulos as Daniel wanted to see various people... and he was greeted with ' Happy Birthday!' and a hug from most of the people he met, so progress was rather slow.

At 5.30pm, along with 18 of his friends, we loaded into Doulos mini-vans and drove out of the town, to a Malasian restaurant where we had a very nice meal. It was a bit like a Cyprus mese, with courses arriving a few at a time.


We had managed to order a cake from The Coffee Bean - a delicious chocolate one - which we took with us. The restaurant didn't mind at all - they put it in the fridge until we'd finished the meal. There were even two candles... Richard cut it into 24 pieces (convenient, since two people had been unable to come with us) and everyone sang the traditional birthday song.