Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Well, this post is about a month and a half out of order, but it seemed to fit well after my Mt. Batur story of the bastards in Bali. Since I wasn’t able to make the ascent to that pissant little volcano at 1,717 metres (5,633 feet), I decided to climb the tallest mountain in SE Asia instead. Mt. Kinabalu is in Malaysian Borneo (not BASTARD Indonesian Borneo) and stands at 4,095 m (13,436 ft) Wiki Mt. Kinabalu. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my camera to the internet cafe with me tonight. So I’ll give u a link to a site about the climb w/ photos. I’ll post my own when I get a chance.

I arrived in Sabah and gave myself 2 weeks to get a reservation on the mountain. You can’t climb the mountain unless you have a room reservation and they are usually booked out well in advance. I was told that there was no way to just rock up and get a reservation and that I should make a res. at least 1 week in advance. Of course, that would be too difficult for me to do. …What u want me to plan something…? I get to Kota Kinabalu and just happen to meet the brother of a former tour guide in Sabah. What luck! His mom not only picks us up from the airport and gives me a ride into town, but helps me find a place to stay and asks her son to help me get a reservation on the mountain. Chee Hou and I walk over to the agency and within 10 mins we both have reservations for the climb the next day, 25% cheaper than I was quoted by myself. He had wanted to go also, so this was the perfect opportunity for him to go as well.

We decide that we should leave town at 7.30am and head up to the park HQ about 2 hours away in order to get a reasonable start on the ascent. I find 4 other people 2 go up with us to split the cost of the guide and we start at 11am. 4-6 hours is a typical climb from Park HQ to Laban Rata at 3300 Meters (10,000 feet). The only place worth staying on the mountain is the Laban Rata Guesthouse. The others don’t have heat or hot water. The group I was with were a bit slow, so I took a scenic detour while I waited for them and still got to Laban Rata in 4 hours 15 mins. I had been in the Cameron Highlands for the last week training for this climb with much lower mountains, 2000M. But after sitting on islands for the past 3 months, I figured I was gonna need some stamina training in order to summit a 13K foot mountain. I had hiked 3 hours a day while I was in the Highlands and didn’t expect to summit until sometime next week. So I figured I’d get some recuperation time. But no rest for the wicked I guess, I started my climb for the summit the day after I got here. I was pretty tired after reaching the guest house and took a nap at 5.30.

Unfortunately, I woke up to watch a beautiful sunset at 6.30 and couldn’t get back to sleep all night. We “woke up” at 2am and started the climb at 3am. I didn’t want to leave too early because I was woefully unprepared for the cold at the summit. It was 0 degrees Celcius at the top. I figured I could climb the last 3KM with a verticle of 800M in 2 to 2.5 hours in the dark. Except for the fact that all the really slow people left at 2-2.30 in order to reach the summit in time for sunrise, it worked out perfectly. Within 15 mins, I had already caught up to the hordes of people following the path up to the summit and was stuck in a traffic jam worse than any in Bangkok. Fortunately, there were planned rest breaks on the way that got a lot of the slow pokes out of the way and then in the last Kilometer, the trail opened up a lot and I could climb around the others. At 4000KM, I started to get altitude sickness. I was within a hundred meters of the summit and I just had to sit down. I was very dizzy and wasn’t getting enough oxygen. But I could see the sun just starting to crack above the cloud line and forged on to the summit and got a great spot to view the sunrise. I can’t wait to post my pics.

It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. There were clouds all over the place probably 1000M+ under where I was standing. The lighting was surreal, all sorts of reds, oranges, yellows and whites intermixed in a sea of blackness. It worked out perfectly because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay at the top very long. I was freezing! I asked one of the guys in our group if I could borrow his girlfriend for a few minutes and we huddled together like the penguins in the AntArtic trying to keep their eggs warm. I spent about 30-40 mins watching the night sky’s darkness turn into light and quickly started my descent. I wore everything that I brought up the mountain: 2 pairs of pants, 4 t-shirts, a scarf, hat, gloves and my windbreaker. We got back to the lodge and ate a huge breakfast and then headed down to the bottom. 8 hours later, I was back on solid ground in a minibus back to town. All in all, it doesn’t sound that impressive, but I walked a total of 12Km today with a 4000M+ climb and descent. I’m wiped and going to bed, but I thought I’d share that with you before I went to sleep. G’nite folks.

Tags: Malaysia

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 5:08 am 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.