For those of you who aren’t familiar with this part of the world, Kota Kinabalu is the capital of Sabah State and it is a fast growing city on the waterfront. Land right in the centre of the city must surely be at a premium, because there isn’t all that much flat land between hills and sea.

And yet, in the heart of prime real estate, there is a large vacant lot, littered with, um, pipes driven into the ground. They are, in wet weather, filled with stagnant water. I can’t find any reference to this place in any guide book…

So I have decided one of the following is probably true:

1. It is an artwork done by an artist of such renown that no one dares to use the land for anything else.
2. It is an experiment to work out how fast you can kill off the population by using dengue fever (the vector of which loves small pools of stagnant water).
3. It is a building site, started by a drunken architect and a drugged pile driver who a) couldn’t put the piles in a straight line and b) couldn’t decide how far to drive them into the ground.
4. It’s an example of what happens when you drive piles in too far into the ground in, say, Buenos Aires.
5. It was an experiment to get rid of those weeds (Australian acacias) that you can see in the pix, and it went horribly wrong. The trees thrived and the pipes died.
6. They are rubbish bins for people of differing height. After all, many of them appear to be filled with rubbish.
7. They are all that remain of a clandestine landing of aliens.
8. They are aliens and we haven’t woken up to that fact yet.

So, while I wait for a Sabahan to enlighten me in the comments section, those are my theories…