- Climbed up a mountain, came down a mountain

Paul - thanks for the pain!

Everyone said it'd be a "doddle". I didn't know that that was the only word i'd be able to say when i did it though. After a bit of cooking on the beach the day before we sort of knew it's be a bit of a challenge to walk - never mind climb - some tiny slope in central Borneo. It was a 3 hour drive to the foot of the place.

From wikipedia: Some believe the name Kina-balu means "Chinese widow", from "China" and the Malay word "Balu", meaning "widow". An alternative derivation is from the Kadazan dusun phrase "Aki Nabalu" meeting "the revered place of the dead".

Ha ha! Good one!

Anyway we reached base-camp which itself was at 4900 ft and to which we went via astounding jungle scenery and winding roads. The driver seems to like hugging the absolute extremity of the s-bends and you could almost touch the canopy below. We stopped off for a dodgy sand-flavoured ice-pop on the way and there was a local mountain-person market going on selling all sorts of made-in china local wares.

Having reached base-camp we were introduced to our guide. I'll call him Yung Fella as i didn't catch his name and when i asked he showed me how well he could smile and nod. We thought we'd be put into a group of climbers but it seems Yung was our personal looker-afterer. "Many people have lost their way up there" we'd been told. Funny cos in the end the never-ending path was pretty obviously only going one way, a never-ending way as it turned out. It's true though that there had been a few deaths on the mountain and only the previous week some chap decided to go off without a guide, got lost in an early morning fog and was found frozen inches from the path the next afternoon. Stay with us Yung Fella!

The first few hundred steps were'nt too bad I suppose. After awhile your blisters sort of become one with the rubber/leather your wearing. You decide early on to take a water break every 100 steps but like every other aspect of the climb, this soon turns out to be a little too ambitious.
So you'd climb 10 steps, turn a corner and see another 50. You do them, turn the next bend and there'd be 2, then 10, then 40, then 10 then 100 then some rock, then a flat bit then a sign sayin "4km to go" then 50 more steps. It was a gruelling 5 hours of corners and steps. Not only this but climbing through a height of 10,800 ft leaves you a little breathless... and not just because the scenery is amazing............ were talking falling O2 coverage here.

I can see my house from here!

5 hours later, having been bypassed by scores of Japanese old-folks literally prancing up the mountain as if they do mt Fuji for morning stroll, we arrived at the pre-summit hostel Laban Rata hut at 3300 m. It's funny becasue by the time the thing came into view, after all thoses steps, I expected to feel like some soldier after clambering throuh the desert to see an oasis, or like that chappy in "Ice cold in Alex" when he reaches for the Carlsberg. Instead I was asbolutely uncaring of the closeness of a chance at lying down in a bed. I saw the hostel, with its' promise of a rest, some food and possibly a tank or 2 or pure oxygen but i really didn't care. I managed to drag myself the final few hundred years, over the biggest steps i'd encountered yet.

As a joke, the built some extra steps to the hostel just for me!

Improving my altitude

We registered at the hostel, thanked our guide who'd merely stayed 10 ft behind us all the way up just to make sure we didn't suddenly take a shine to some invisible trail on the way up. Found a bed-shaped thing and crawled in for a nap or 20. When I woke I heard the sounds of some kind of game going on and looked ou the window to see The Match At the Top of the World....a freindy happy-sac game bewteen guides and climbers...... all with an amazing sunset and a blanket of mist as a backdrop. It seemed to be all worth it...

Postscript:

Er ....we were supposed to get up at 2am at the hostel and be led up the rest of the sheer granite face to the ACTUAL summit to see the sun-rise over the tropics. That would have been a further 3 hours climb in zero-degree temperatures. So i called my doctor and he told me the risk wasn't worth it so i stayed in bed. You got a problem with that talk to the doc!!

Coming down was a LOT easier and i could only laugh my ass off at the poor feckers ascending the next day. Oh how I poited and laughed and told them how tough it was and they only had 1500 more steps to do!

I joke of course