(Don’t) Climb Every Mountain…

We have been carrying a copy of the Lonely Planet SE Asia on a Shoestring with us since the beginning of our trip. Colleen does most of the research around the destinations that we visit and at some point in paging through the guidebook she came across a few paragraphs on climbing Mt Kinabalu in Borneo. The peak is the highest point in SE Asia and the tallest thing between Himalayas and New Guinea. The trekking and hiking we have done in previous countries has been some of the highlights of the trip thus far so we knew this was something we should look into.

Still battling crowds and reservation issues due to Ramadan (does this holiday ever end?), we gave a call to Kinabalu National park and were able to secure two slots for the climb. Then we got ‘sticker price shock’ for one of the few times on the trip. The guide book had made the 2day/1night endeavor seem like a relatively affordable activity, after all the book is designed for shoestring budgets. A package that we thought would cost around $150 total ended up being double that, including a $90 charge per person to stay in an unheated dorm mid mountain! We almost balked but then reconsidered knowing this type of activity was something we both highly enjoyed (we have talked many times about how we hope to do more camping and hiking once back in the States).

We arrived outside the park a day early and spent the night in a guest house reminiscent of the tea houses in Nepal. The next morning, in an attempt to hitchhike the 3 kilometers up mountain to the park entrance, I took a nasty fall rolling into a ditch and broke my 3rd watch of the trip. Luckily I had no serious injuries and had saved parts from broken watch #2 to make repairs (I currently have multiple spare parts for Casio F-91W watches if anyone needs any).
We made it in one piece to the park headquarters and while in queue at check-in we made friends with a pair of traveling friends from Australia, Denver and Lindsey. I asked them if they wanted to split the required cost of a guide and with that we had a group of 4. We signed in, grabbed a packed lunch, headed to the trail and started our upward climb.

The trail is split into two days of hiking covering 19 kilometer roundtrip and topping out at 13,500ft . Day 1 covers 7 kilometers and rises steeply in elevation from 5,000ft to 11,000 ft. We completed this task in just over 4 hours, checked in, took a cold shower, ate and went to sleep in our unheated dorm room. We barely slept in anticipation of the next day’s climb and awoke at 1:45AM for some snacks before hitting the trail with our guide at 2:30AM for what we were told would be a 4 hour hike to the summit. The trail was pitch black except for the narrow rays of light given off by our head lamps. The wind was blowing heavily bringing with it fog and moisture. To make matters more difficult, the final 2.5 kilometers to the summit rose another 3000ft mostly through the aide of secured ropes.

Lindsey was worn from the previous day’s hike and having better foresight than the rest of us, decided to stay in bed and abort the summit hike. The three of us and our guide trudged upward getting ever colder and wetter as we went. I had followed Colleen’s lead in packing the day before and brought extra clothes knowing the predawn hike would be a cold one. We both had on 4 layers including a rain jacket but it seemed to do no good. The wind sliced through our layers and somehow reached our skin and the dampness penetrated our now well worn travel shoes. The worst part of the cold was on exposed hands as we hauled our selves of up secured ropes. Our saving grace was a hiker who was descending the day before and gifted to us a pair of cheep gloves now being worn by Colleen.
A little over two hours later we arrived at the summit (did we hike that fast?), a full 90 minutes prior to the sunrise. Although our guide had been working the mountain for 3 years and only spoke a little English, he seemed surprised at the earliness of our arrival. We were the only ones there, having not seen other hikers in well over an hour, and we were shivering cold in the dark. We could not see anything, neither the sky nor the valley below through the fog and the guide instructed us to huddle behind a rock and wait it out until the sunrise.

The wait turned out to be some of the longest minutes of the trip. I sat hugging Colleen with our arms wrapped around each other shaking uncontrollably. We were too cold and exhausted to even talk but both had serious thoughts of exactly how dangerous of a situation we were in. I felt the worst for Denver, he had no hat or gloves and only a flimsy poncho to shelter him from the wind and rain. A few hours later back at mid mountain we would see a thermometer that read 42 degrees F in the sunlight and Denver informed me that he was watching small icicles form on my jacket as we huddled mountaintop. Psychologically we focused on the warm that would come with the sunrise only to be disappointed a little over an hour later when we emerged from behind our rock to a sunrise that was blocked out by dense fog and no postcard view from the peak. We took a quick picture at the sign posted on the summit and headed down.

Ascending quickly put all of us in a better mood and the movement along with a little sunlight quickly warmed our bodies. We reached mid mountain, packed our bags, ate breakfast and started the hike back down to the park headquarters. From there we shared a taxi back to the town of Kota Kinabalu and said goodbye to our Australian friends. We had a flight the next afternoon, back to Singapore, and we bid farewell to Borneo.