One step at a time I kept telling myself. Just swing the hips and hopefully the other leg will end up in front. It sort of worked, until my right knee turned to jelly and decided to have a sleep preventing me from putting any weight on it! And I had 2 more hours of this left! A bloody long way for a sunrise.
Let’s start from the beginning, back at the foot of Mount Kinabalu, in Borneo, which at 4,100m makes it the highest mountain in Asia. By all counts this is a fluffy sounding mountain, one labeled as a fantastic adventure and which needs ‘no previous climbing experience’. No problem… I’ve been known to get out onto some peaks so this should be a doddle, a fantastic adventure even!
So let’s head off. Wait, I need a national park permit. “Over at that window please” I was told. Off I trot and pay my RM15 for the permit. Then for the climbing permit, “round the corner and at the little window please” another window and RM100. Then insurance (RM5) and guide fees (RM70) at another window and then finally the taxi ride from the park HQ to the foot of the mountain, another RM30 and “wait by that window please“. Well that was an adventure and I hadn’t even started up the mountain. Trust me to do the climb independently and not with a tour company like everyone else. I did save a shed load though so I would recommend it.
As I’d arrived a little late at 11am I’d missed most of the other climbers which apparently numbered about 100 for the day. No problems, I’m fairly fit I’ll catch them up; I had after all traded in my office chair for a life of leisure and had been keeping active… a stroll in the park.
So off I trotted into the mist and rain, the start of a 4 hour climb to the ‘base camp’ where we would grab a few hours sleep before heading to the summit for sunrise. My guide was as useful as a rubber teabag and kept hanging back and letting me go off before running to catch me up - from his limited English I learnt he was training to make the climb easier. I thought ‘Stop bloody running up it, that will make it easier’ but the git didn’t break a sweat the whole way so I guess he knew what he was doing. Anyway with him ‘training’ I tried to catch up some fellow climbers including someone I’d bumped into in Cardiff who lived in Grangetown, Cardiff about 1km from my flat! Small world!
As I started bumping into climbers coming down the hill I picked up the pace determined to catch up other climbers for some moral support. I had a spring in my step, this wasn’t too bad! Even when it started raining it didn’t seem to matter… press on old boy!
Mistake!
Even though it was a nice steady climb on a very well kept path, a bit like walking up a bunch of large stairs, by the time I’d caught up with some others I was starting to feel the pain and was drenched. Slow and steady they had told the other groups- trust me to have a guide who wanted to run it! So here I was swinging one leg in front of the other and just managing to move upwards. And so it continued, getting wetter and wetter and slowly heading up. Good fun though with everyone bitching and whinging, shivering and sniffing but all doing it together.
We reached base camp about 4pm looking like a bunch of drowned kittens in hike boots, it was 9°c and I laughed to myself when I couldn’t write my own name because of my numb fingers. We hung there in the warm for a few hours before heading off to our unheated dorms for a few hours kip. If anyone reads this then take plenty of warm stuff and pay the extra for the heating, it was bloody freezing.
Knock knock…. Who’s there?… my guide, at 2:30am!
The rain from the day before had cleared and like a scene from a 70’s zombie film half asleep climbers began to slowly emerge from the dorms and traipse up the mountain. It was pitch black and all you could see were a few headlights stretching like cheap Christmas tree lights off into the distance. Very surreal.
The gentle steps were replaced by slippery rock faces with the occasional rope for help and the smiles on the climbers had long gone too. By this time I was suffering the effects of the high altitude, I had a blinding headache and every 10 feet or so I was out of breath - why the hell had I bothered to get up and do this, this was hell on earth!
And then I noticed the first signs of light on the horizon, I could see the peak ahead of me and I knew I had only minutes to reach the top. With every last ounce of strength left in my body I pushed on. Except it wasn’t a few minutes to the top, it was more like 40! And it bloody hurt!
I was 5 mins from the top when I caught my first glimpse of the view. Stretching out into the distance was a carpet of clouds lying a few hundred feet below us, the first touches of light reflecting red onto their surfaces. Blimey, that was better than I expected and I was not going to miss the best light, I was going to get a picture if it killed me. It nearly did, I slipped and slided, coughed and spluttered, gagged and retched but eventually had my camera poised at the ready.
We were breathless with anticipation (actually we were breathless from the climb but it sounds better) and then the sun came up. I wont bore you with trying to romanticise a sunrise, it was pretty, red clouds, red sky, orange sun … you know, sort of sunrise like.
As you can see from the pic, it was quite a run of the mill sort of sunrise! Rubbish! I turned around and saw the shadow of the mountain stretching 2 hours away to the coast, I could still see the full moon shining in the sky and could just make out the city I had started in the day before, the view was amazing.
“We go down now” my guide suggested. Already? Ok. And off we trotted, only 7 hours to the bottom. We arrived at the base camp, had some breakfast and started the final decent. It looked like the rain was coming in and I stupidly bounced and bounded my way down the first hour or so, soon regretting it as my right knee gave in and it took me an extra hour to get to the bottom. This last bit was the hardest part of the walk and people were in tears around me with the pain in their knees. I was not far off myself.
As we saw the bus in the distance we asked each other if the view was worth the pain of the climb. All of us agreed it wasn’t. Even days after as I hobbled down the smallest of slopes with my sore muscles I was still wondering.
Now that I’m able to walk properly and looking at the photos… of course it was bloody worth it. I had climbed the highest mountain in SE Asia and had seen the best sunrise of my life; just don’t ask me to do it again!
