The Harvest Festival - May 31, 2009
As mentioned in our last blog entry we left Borneo on 1 June, however I thought I would put up an additional posting on our last night in KK.
It turns out the Harvest Festival was on - an annual event where the local indigenous people celebrate the rice harvest.
We heard about a big party out of KK in an area called Penampang. We hailed a bus for the half-hour trip, concerned that we wouldn't know where to get off our fears were alleviated when we found the place, the Harvest Festival is basically as big as the Royal Adelaide Show only very, very different. No fairy floss and scary rides but plenty of Tiger beer and beauty queens! Yep there's the annual Harvest Festival beauty pageant. We didn't arrive until about 5pm and much to Ben's disappointment we missed the pageant by what seemed like only an hour or so, but he was able to get a pic with this year's beauty queen
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.Ben and I had been discussing how handy it would be to have a set of portable speakers to play some tunes, remember this wish.
After the interlude with the beauty queen, we went into a strange portable house from which they were promoting cigarettes for Kent. We had to sign in (presumably to show we were over 18) and then played Ninendo Wii on this big screen, when we finished we got to pull a ping-pong ball out of a hat, the ball corresponded with a prize list on the wall. Here's me with our prizes! At the Harvest Festival wishes come true!
After this windfall we thought it was time to join the locals in some merriment. We headed to the rowdiest tent and bought a bucket of Tiger beer. Unfortunately we were seated in the middle of two karaoke sets, somewhat confusing to the senses.
A guy sitting next to us took a liking to Ben and gave him another Tiger beer. There also were roving magicians from the Sabah Magician's Club with some impressive card tricks. The karoke drew our attention when this bloke belted out a passionate version of Blue Suede Shoes.
When we finally decided to leave the nights festivities all the buses had finished and we negotiated RM20 (about $8 - instead of the usual RM3 - $1) with a bus driver heading the other way to take us back to KK, saving a very long walk. The Harvest Festival proved to be an entertaining way to end our trip to Borneo.
Hey Taren what are those prizes you scored?! And how did you decide which of the two kareoke sets to get involved in? Did they have two screens up showing the lyrics or is that a stupid question? ;p
ReplyDeleteTony
We got a very attractive yellow ashtray and a set of i-pod speakers! The karaoke had no screens just a bloke with a keyboard and a bloke with a microphone and they both were very loud for a while we were in the middle of the two before we wisely moved to listen to the bloke belting out Blue Sueded Shoes.
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