TL;DR — Sandakan’s offbeat thread is its layered ghosts: a bombed-flat “Little Hong Kong” port [1][2], a leper-island POW escape [7], a colonial croquet lawn [20], and tarts the locals call “cow dung” [39]. Base in town for the heritage + food curiosities (walkable Heritage Trail), day-trip out for the natural oddities (bat exodus, palm-estate monkeys, turtle hatchery, fireflies). Best window April–June — least rain; avoid the Nov–Dec NE monsoon when river and sea crossings get unreliable [45][46].
Everything below leans offbeat by design, so each find is tagged by where (town / day-trip) and when. Nothing here is vertical, permit-expedition, or extreme — it’s the weird-but-accessible layer.
When to go (and the heat/monsoon trap)
Sandakan has no real dry season — it logs ~3,057 mm of rain a year [45]. The rains ease April–June (your best bet), with March–May and July–August the clearest stretches for outdoor plans [46]. The northeast monsoon (Oct–Feb) dumps >300 mm/month, peaking Nov–Dec — that’s when boat trips to Berhala, the Turtle Islands and the firefly rivers are most likely to be cancelled or rough [45]. Heat is constant; the genuinely cool window is dawn, which doubles as the best wildlife and fish-market hour.
History oddities — the backstory most visitors miss
| Find | The quirk | Where / when |
|---|---|---|
| “Little Hong Kong” | British-encouraged Cantonese & Hakka migration built a dense shophouse port so HK-like it took the nickname — then Allied bombing flattened it in 1944–45, erasing the very thing the name described [1][2]. Still a live 2026 tourism narrative [5]. | Town / anytime |
| The town that was twice named | William Pryer founded the settlement on 21 June 1879 and called it Elopura — “beautiful city” — but locals kept the old name “Sandakan” (Suluk for “the place that was pawned”) and it stuck [3][2]. | Town / anytime |
| Kampong German | The first European settlement here was renamed Kampong German for its German trading bases — then burnt down by accident on 15 June 1879, a week before Pryer’s Elopura was founded [4]. | Town (Buli Sim Sim area) |
War-history relics — rust, bullet holes & a dynamited shell
- The Berhala Eight. Pre-war Pulau Berhala was a quarantine station for Chinese and Filipino labourers and a leper colony [6]. On 4 June 1943, eight POWs stole a boat from the leper colony and paddled/sailed ~250 km of open sea to Tawi-Tawi — an escape that, by luck, spared them the Sandakan Death Marches [7]. The island is now being developed as a recreational-forest day-trip, ~8 km from the jetty [8]. (Day-trip island; calmest seas Mar–Oct.)
- Sandakan Memorial Park. Built on the actual POW-camp ground where ~2,400 Australian and British prisoners died [10][9]. The eerie detail: a rusting excavator, generator and boiler still sit in their original positions in the garden [11]. From here >1,000 POWs were force-marched 260 km to Ranau in 1945; about half died on the way [12]. Free entry, 9–5. (Day-trip, ~11 km out / quiet midday.)
- Bullet-holed mosque. Sandakan’s oldest mosque, Masjid Jamek (opened 1890, founded by an Indian cloth merchant named Damsah), still has WWII bullet holes in its timber pillars [14][13]. It once overlooked the sea, but land reclamation shoved the shoreline ~350 m away — leaving a “waterfront” mosque now stranded inland, and flagged as heritage under threat [13]. (Town / Heritage Trail start.)
- The dynamited stone church. St Michael’s & All Angels is Sabah’s oldest stone church (foundation stone 1893; 30+ years to build) [15][16]. Its white window stone was imported from Hong Kong; the Japanese dynamited it before surrendering in 1945, yet the granite shell stood through the blast [15]. (Town / Heritage Trail.)
Colonial & architectural curiosities
- A croquet lawn in Borneo. The English Tea House keeps 1.5 acres of manicured lawn with an actual croquet pitch on a hill over Sandakan Bay — scones, cream and a mallet game, in the tropics [20][21]. (Town / afternoon, beside Agnes Keith House.)
- Agnes Keith’s “Newlands”. The reconstructed villa of American writer Agnes Keith and her husband Harry, the colony’s Conservator of Forests; her 1939 book gave Sabah its enduring nickname “Land Below the Wind” (it sits just below the typhoon belt) [17]. Now a Sabah Museum house, dressed in period furniture and the family’s own artefacts and photographs [18][19]. (Town / Heritage Trail.)
- The Hundred Steps. The self-guided Heritage Trail starts at the ~century-old Masjid Jamik and climbs the landmark “Stairs with a Hundred Steps” to a hilltop viewpoint — the stairs once led to colonial officials’ quarters that no longer exist, so you climb to a ghost address [22]. (Town / cool early morning; ~1.5–2 hrs whole loop.)
Ritual & religious curiosities
- Three Saints and a divination jar. Sam Sing Kung Temple (1887) venerates an unusual trio — the “Three Saints” — and holds 100 pre-printed Taoist divination poems worshippers consult; its bronze bell was donated by Sandakan’s first Kapitan Cina, Fung Ming Shan, the year it was built [23]. At 138 years it’s the heritage anchor of the old “Little Hong Kong” Chinese community [24]. (Town / Heritage Trail.)
- Seven steps to enlightenment, with a sea view. Hilltop Puu Jih Shih Temple (1987) at Tanah Merah has a seven-tiered pagoda (one tier per step to enlightenment) and is rated Sandakan’s best sunset spot over the bay [25][26]. (Town fringe ~4 km / late afternoon.)
- Rattan-ladder nest harvest. At Gomantong, licensed collectors scale cave roofs on nothing but rattan ladders, ropes and bamboo poles to gather edible swiftlet nests (the bird’s-nest-soup ingredient), under strict twice-yearly Wildlife Department quotas [27][28]. (Day-trip en route to Kinabatangan; harvest seasons ~Feb–Apr & Jul–Sep.)
Nature-oddities — beyond the orangutans
| Oddity | Why it’s unusual | Where / best timing |
|---|---|---|
| 2-million-bat exodus | A swirling vortex of >2 million bats pours out of Gomantong’s cave mouth nightly — often pursued by bat hawks [29] | Day-trip / ~5:30–6:30 pm |
| RDC night walk | Guided after-dark walk (~RM30) under Sabah’s longest canopy walkway (620 m) hunting tarsiers, slow loris, civets, flying squirrels [30][31] | Sepilok / dusk, pre-book |
| World’s smallest bear | BSBCC rehabilitates ~41 sun bears — the smallest bear on Earth, found only in SE Asia, and easy to skip next to the famous orangutans [32][33] | Sepilok / 9–3:30 |
| Monkeys saved by accident | Labuk Bay: an oil-palm planter spared a 400-acre mangrove pocket after finding proboscis monkeys on it — wild big-nosed monkeys inside a working palm estate [34][35] | Day-trip ~38 km / feeding times |
| Sleep beside a hatchery | Overnight on Selingan to watch a green turtle haul ashore and lay eggs at the Turtle Islands Park hatchery — one turtle per night, by ranger call [36] | Day/overnight 40 km N / Mar–Oct |
| Firefly rivers | Evening mangrove cruise where thousands of synchronous fireflies light the riverbanks, usually with seafood dinner [37] | Day-trip / after dusk |
| 3,000 crocs + an Amazon fish | Malaysia’s largest crocodile farm (~3,000 reptiles) tucks a 100 kg Amazonian arapaima into its mini-zoo, 12 km out [38] | Day-trip / near Sepilok road |
Food rituals & a stilt village
- The “cow dung” tart. Sandakan’s signature snack is the UFO tart — biscuit base, custard, torched meringue — but locals proudly call it Cow Dung Tart (牛屎挞) for its shape and refuse to rename it [39]. It was an accident: Hainanese baker Fu Ah On scorched a batch in 1955 and the burnt version was a hit; 5 May is now “UFO Tart Day” [40]. (Town / coffee shops & night markets.)
- The dawn fish-market ritual. Sandakan’s is the biggest, busiest fish market in Sabah — go at first light for the landings [42]. The local-breakfast move at the three-storey Central Market: dry kway teow topped with deep-fried pork [41]. (Town / before ~9 am for the catch.)
- Where the city began, on stilts. Buli Sim Sim is the original 1879 stilt settlement Sandakan grew out of — plank walkways over the water ~3 km east, with a former fish market expanded into a floating seafood restaurant [43][44]. Free to wander; a lived-in fishing community, not a built attraction. (Town edge / morning light.)
A loose offbeat itinerary
- Town day (cool morning → sunset): Central Market dawn + dry kway teow → Heritage Trail (Masjid Jamek bullet holes → 100 Steps → Sam Sing Kung divination poems → Agnes Keith’s Newlands → English Tea House croquet & scones) → UFO tart → Puu Jih Shih for sunset.
- War + island day: Sandakan Memorial Park (rusting relics) → boat to Pulau Berhala (the Berhala Eight story, calm-sea months only).
- Nature-oddity day (Sepilok/Kinabatangan side): Sun Bear Centre + RDC botanic garden by day → RDC night walk for tarsiers; or push to Gomantong for the bat exodus then a Kinabatangan firefly cruise.