Kota Kinabalu Town Centre

Kota Kinabalu Town Centre is within a 10 min drive from the airport, so it is really convenient. Most of the hotels are in the town centre, and even some of the resorts such as Tanjung Aru and Sutera Harbour are just 5 min from the airport.

Kota Kinabalu is the capital of Sabah and has a population of around 600,000. It is the 6th largest city in Malaysia. The residents are very mixed, comprising of the local Kadazan and Dusun Ethnic Groups, Chinese, Malays, Indians and also immigrants from the Philippines and Indonesia.

KK Town Centre is small and compact. You can walk from one end to the other in probably half an hour. The town is laid out in a grid with main roads running parallel to the waterfront. It is an easy town to walk around, and there are lots of interesting things to discover as you will find out in my future posts. Over the years, the waterfront has been reclaimed to make way for new developments, and there is currently a major redevelopment under construction at the South-Western end of the town.

There are not many highrise buildings in KK Town Centre, most of the structures here are low-rise shophouses. One of the most popular building typology is a 6 to 7 storey shophouse or shop-office with courtyards or lightwells in the middle. The Api-Api Centre was one of the earliest examples of this typology and remains very popular till today.

The Api-Api Centre. Now painted in green. It used to be bright orange.

Wisma Sabah - one of the early local landmarks. There are many tour agents here.

The Grand Hyatt KK - one of the first 5 star hotels in KK.

The Centre Point Shopping Centre - one of the biggest in KK, now overtaken by OneBorneo, a huge development about 1/2 hour drive from KK Town Centre.

The heart of KK Town. Shophouses predominate.

Some new developments still following the shophouse typology - the Wawasan Square near the Waterfront.