At Mount Kinabalu, Saba Borneo

Where is Burneo and some facts...

For those that want to know:

Borneo is the third largest island in the world. The island is divided between three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

"A" is Borneo

The Hotel and Flowers

This is certainly a nice Hotel resort, and the service is great - they seem to all know your name, maybe its because they know they have important guests with Mandarin connections! It turns out the food and beverage manager worked with Shevaun at the Mandarin! We are staying the Ocean Wing v the Garden End. Our end is apparently newer - the business class v economy......our pool can only be used by guests from our end....so there!

We had a nice day round the pool on our arrival yesterday and had a very good buffet dinner at Tepi Laut one or their 7 restaurants.

Today we relaxed around the pool and had dinner at the Ocean restaurant right on the beach...oh and breakfast is great, a la carte included. Not looking forward to the bill on Sunday?








The gardens are very healthy and green (it rains briefly everyday at around 6.00pm for half an hour) and there are an abundance of beautiful flowers.

Arrived Shangri-La Kota Kinaballu, Malaysia

The Leach family, minus my Newport girls (: arrived safely at the Rasa Ria Resort - not too shabby!





Video of room and view...

Time to say goodbye to Hobey

Hobey leaves for Muscat tonight, where he joins Caroline and Kit. To say goodbye we all go out for a very tasty dinner at Enoteca on Elgin in Soho. There are about 15 - 20 small plate options and you pretty much can't go wrong with any of them. The lamb, harissa pizza, baked brie, fiery shrimp, spicy salmon brochettes ... plus great Mojitos.

We finished the evening with drinks at the Azure bar in the LKF Hotel in Lan Kwai Fong. The bar has a patio area where you can step out and fully appreciate Hong Kong's skyline, totally scintillating!

Early(ish) night tonight as we leave for Malaysia tomorrow.

Back to normality - Club and Clara AND Ros arrives

With Jean gone and Shevaun at work Hobey and I spent the rest of the day at the club with Clara and Alastair and of course did our work out.

Later in the afternoon Ros arrived to join us at the Club - Yahoo!



Still have not lost my feeding touch!

All good things come to an end… Jeans leaves for Bangkok

After a long few days Jean leaves in the morning for more partying in Bangkok and Koh Samui!

Sunday - HK 7's Finals Day

After a long day and night we crawled in for breakfast at the Club, in normal attire, and then went onto watch the finals of the 7's in the more sober but still very festive West Stand. A great day of rugby with Somoa winning the finals beating their rivals New Zealand. England did reasonably well being beaten in the semi finals by Samoa.

Cup Final:
Samoa 24-21 New Zealand

Cup semi-finals:
Fiji 21-33 New Zealand
Samoa 28-24 England

Cup quarter-finals:
Kenya 12-21 New Zealand
Fiji 14-12 South Africa
England 26-19 Australia
Samoa 24-7 USA







"Sweet Caroline" - featuring Alastair!


There was a really good parade in the middle of the day and a fine set of fireworks at the end. Just before the final presentation the crowds were also treated to a fuzzy suited streaker who climbed and danced on a pole, messed around with the game ball, bowed down to a security guard and ran past a few more guards.

Everything finished by 7.30pm after which we retired for a Team dinner at the Club and final drinks at the Jockey fro Jean, Hobey and me.....actually getting to bed by 11.00ish! In the mean time ali and his mates did another run at Lan Kwai Fong!

South Stand Madness - Saturday

We all had to meet up at Alastair's flat at 8.00am for breakfast in order that we could be at the ground by 9.00am. Even though there is a full day of rugby the South Stand is full by 10.00am and you can only get in if another person leaves. We started the day with 2 liters of Bloody Mary and went on from there! Every one was in high spirits, and it was a blast - and there were no nasty incidences. We had grown to expect the worst, but it was better than we all thought it might be.

All the games were played in order ot get into the quarters/semis and finals which are played on Sunday - so even if we missed some of the games the best was to come on sunday when hopefully we would be sober.

After the last game around 7.30pm we had drinks in the 7's Village, dinner at the Chili club in Wanchai (where mysteriously one of the arms of Alastair's baby reappeared) and rounded off the drinking in the packed Lan Kwai Fong area at Stormies.

Jean and I could not resist a foot massage at Happy Foot next to our Hotel - where at 2.00am we were awoken to be told the massage was finished. It was clear three 2.00am nights in a row was taking its toll!

Team dinner Lamma Island

After the England match we met up with Alastair and all his buddies and all took a junk for a boisterous dinner at Fu Kee Seafood Restaurant on Lamma Island.

Afterwards we all went to the busy Typhoon bar which is probably one of the least sleazy of the bars in Wanchai area until 2.00am in the morning!





Ollie eating the eye and tomato in the fishes mouth!

The games begin.....

Friday afternoon is the start of the 7's so Hobey, Jean and I went to watch England play and beat Hong Kong, and to scope out the famous South Stand where we would be partaking in the revelries on Saturday.....looked pretty calm today!