There Are No Bad Experiences

Being dehydrated is a bit like being drunk. You don’t have the same euphoric recklessness, sure, but after a time, you will have a similar loss of motor control. Your limbs start acting strange, you feel woozy, and often you’ll throw up and pass out in a heap.

Well, that’s what happened to me, anyway. Yes, indeed — I got dehydrated here in the tropics. This happened in Gunung Mulu National Park, when I climbed the trail to see the Pinnacles. And you know what, it was worth it.

It was the hardest hike I’ve ever done. That might not be saying much, but I have done some fairly strenous hikes. A couple pack-everything-in, hike-20-miles-in-three-days type deals. Well, those were easy, comparatively. This was hard, man. Fucking hard.

The reason I got dehydrated is because I sweated more than I ever have in my life. The reason I sweated so much is because (1) I’m in the tropics, where it is humid and it is hot, and (2) the trail was 2.4 km, straight up.

When I say straight up, I mean straight up. Straight motherfucking up, yo. They haven’t quite grasped the concept of switchbacks over here yet; no, not in the rugged jungles of Borneo. I mean, we climbed 1000 meters in 2.4 km. Or: 3280 feet in about 1.5 miles. In hot, humid weather. I drank 3 liters of water. Listen to this: my shorts, not just my shirt, but my shorts were soaked with sweat. So much sweat that it looked like I’d been swimming. My shorts! But also my shirt, also my socks, also my shoes. My shoes, still, are wet (and gross and smelly) from the hike.

Basically, for the first 2 km of the hike, you walk up at about a 45 degree angle. Up and up and up. Quads loving it. Then, the final 400 meters is a wicked system of ropes and ladders, to finally get to the top. And when you do get to the top, after heaving and ho’ing and jerking and shimmying — it’s awesome. You have a view of one of the rarest forms of limestone erosion in the world: the Pinnacles. 50-meter-high, razor-sharp crags of stone jutting out from the hillside, just across the way.

It’s a great view. And so you spend a half-hour sitting there, slightly dazed at the heights to which you’ve climbed — you can see Brunei — and you stare at the huge monolithic rocks daggering out of the jungle, and you see a pygmy squirrel run by and snatch a peanut that you dropped. And then, just like that, it’s time to go back down.

It’s taken you four hours to climb the 2.4 km trail — you started at 6:00 a.m. And it will take you four-and-a-half hours to go down.

So it was. Slow going. Real slow. And sweaty. Each step, keep in mind, is placed on a rock or a root, or in mud. All of which is covered in a thin layer of wet — rainforest wet. The dangerous kind of wet that makes people slip and sprain ankles, or slip and snap necks. You certainly don’t want to slip when you’re abseiling down a rope. Basically, you don’t want to slip at all, ever. So you make sure you take every step very carefully. And it’s hot, and it’s humid. And you sweat.

Someone else was more nervous about the heights than I was, which helped. If they weren’t there and I wasn’t put in the unlikely position of calming them down, I would have been much more shaky about descending the ropes and ladders than I was. But that first 400 meters down took more than an hour. Then it was the step-by-careful-step descent, on wet roots and moss-covered rocks. About halfway down my legs started to shake. Our guide said she thought I would be fine, but that I was sweating a lot. Everyone brought two, 1.5-liters of water. By the time I reached the 1 km mark, where we’d left our second bottle on the way up, I was desperate for a drink.

Anyway, I made it back. Got back to camp, weak and weary but thrilled with the accomplishment. I took a shower, then I threw up. Then I passed out. Then I woke up, and threw up again. Then the guide helped me, gave me some dehydration salt, some tea and a boiled egg. I drank some more water and fell back asleep. We’d gotten back to camp at around 3:00 p.m. I probably passed out around 4:30 or 5:00. After my light “meal”, I slept the whole night. We woke up the next morning, and — get this — we hiked 8 km back to headquarters.

That’s right, the morning after I was dehydrated, I hiked through the jungle for another 8 km. (We’d hiked to Camp 5, our base camp, the day before climbing to the Pinnacles, as well.) But this trail (“The Headhunter’s Trail”) was pretty flat, and I was able to keep my breakfast down — no one else had been sick, everyone was just sore with muscle and joint pain. Sure, I felt pretty weak (and sore), but I made it.

And that, my friends, was my Pinnacles adventure. I will recommend this trek to anyone I meet; it was a terrific sight to see. Awesome, after all the effort. The energy and effort required to reach the Pinnacles, no doubt, enhanced the sense that they are such a spectacle to behold. I think they are just that cool.

At the Pinnacles, pre-dehydration.

Gunung Mulu is a cool National Park, as well. The world’s largest cave passage, Deer Cave, is there — “cave passage” means single largest enclosed space. This cave is also home to over three million bats, who spill out of the cave every evening to feed. Well, they usually spill out in a giant horde of screeching blind hunger — except when it’s rainy, apparently. Which (naturally) it was every evening I was at park headquarters, thus thrwarting my chance to see the throngs of bats flying out. But that’s alright. The cave is also home to an image of Abe Lincoln.

Oh, here’s a quick note for Pepe and Peter, who are the only avid bird-watchers that I know: I saw a rhinoceros hornbill, which makes a great honking sound and is huge. A woman on the trek was a bird-watcher and was super-excited to see one and point it out to everyone. They’re only found on Borneo, and I have to say, I was pretty excited to see it, too. No time for a photo, though.

Also, there was a neat rainbow at our base camp the day we arrived. Yep yep…

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Tags: Borneo, Malaysia, Pinnacles, Sarawak

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Malaysia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.