The Adventure Continues
June 21st, 2007
Wow, what a packed couple of weeks it has been for me!
Singapore turned out to be great fun, by day it was the Botanical Gardens, Orchid Gardens, Sentosa Island, and the many many shopping malls and food courts…and by night Singapore Slings at the Raffles Hotel, Clubbing at the Ministry Of Sound, and views of the city from the 72 floor of the Swissotel. Singapore is a funny place, they have rules for everything with zero tolerance to public disturbances, drug use, violence, and chewing gum! The streets are spotlessly clean and everything is run with a degree of efficiency I have never experienced before; trains, buses and the metro all arrive bang on time no matter what time of day it is.
The people are friendly but slightly self-absorbed, running their own lives with the same degree of efficiency as their transport systems, however the taxi drivers are a laugh-a-minute, all real characters!
Random Fact:
By LAW, to be a taxi driver in Singapore you have to fit the following model:1. Male
2. Over 30 years old
3. A resident Singaporean
4. Married!! - The reasoning being that if a girl gets in your cab then you wont touch her. Makes sense![]()
The area I was staying in was quite different from the rest of Singapore. Little India was just as it describes, a little version of India (smelly drains and all), in the midst of this ultra-clean metropolis…quite an achievement! I enjoyed some of the best curries in my life there and loved the place.
Thanks to a lad called Dylan who worked at the hostel, I left Singapore on the 17th June with a pretty precise plan of what I wanted to do during my time in Malaysia and traveled by bus over the border to peninsula Malaysia and a city called Johor Barhu (JB for short, they abbreviate all their city names here). From JB I caught an Air Asia flight to Kota Kinabalu (KK) on the west coast of Sabah, Borneo. KK is a great place, a lot smaller and more “lived in” than Singapore and the people are really friendly, life here is considerably slower, I like it.
From day one here I was straight into it, Dylan had booked me into Borneo Global Backpackers and they in turn had booked me onto what turned out to be one of the greatest, and hardest, treks of my life…the ascent of Mt Kinabalu.
I scarcely had time to pack my daysack and stock up on cakes, peanuts and chocolate before it was time to leave for the base of the mountain. It took 2 hours to reach the gate and first checkpoint where I was teamed up with my guide, Chiki, and he and I began the ascent to the summit base camp. Now I had an inkling that this was going to be quite a strenuous exercise but boy was I in for a surprise…
The track up to the camp is 6km long, “Not that long” I thought, however over that 6km it ascends over 2500m in altitude along a track thick with mud, crude wooden steps, wet rocks and more mud. This was a grueling hike, several times I found myself asking the question “why?” and “I’m paying for this!?”…mainly to myself but occasionally to the other poor, red, sweating souls along the way. Meanwhile Chiki remained cool, calm and sweat free throughout and didn’t seem to even loose his breath! The altitude began to get to me at around 2 thirds of the way up, I began to loose my breath very easily and so began to hyperventilate as I tried to compensate for the lack of air…after a stop for water and chocolate I got myself back under control and we made a push for camp. Slowly the Kilometers dragged by until finally, and not a moment too soon, we arrived at Laban Rata, summit base camp. I’m not 100% sure of how long it took but I think we set off about 10:30-11am and arrived at the camp by 3.00pm, so it was long enough!
Rumble In The Jungle
Now I was hoping for a nice hot shower, maybe a spa bath and sauna but nooooooo…a luke warm shower cubicle was all I was greeted with. The beds were nice though and after a 30min power nap I was ready to face the world again and enjoyed an excellent buffet meal with my fellow climbers, over which we all reflected on the day and most of us agreed…”never again”. I was in bed by 6.30pm, wrapped up warm in my hoodie and blankets.
2am came around very quickly but I didn’t feel too tired and layered up, readying myself for the summit climb by drinking lots of tea and eating toast with butter and sugar on. at 2.30am we started up the final 2km trail to the summit. It was pitch dark and our torches hardly seemed to make any difference, in fact after about 30mins mine didn’t and it packed-up with a broken bulb. Luckily Chiki had great night vision and lent me his torch, I was quite worried for the guy and kept expecting him to disappear off an unseen drop or something but he was, as ever, cool as a cucumber and without a word (he didn’t speak English very well), we continued on. Soon the trail turned into steep granite and soon after that it became very steep granite, with ropes for pulling yourself up. I necked my one and only can of Red Bull and we made a break for it, getting in front of the leading group and heading for glory…however, we actually got up to within 300m of the summit a little too early and realised that we’d have to wait over 1.5hrs before sunrise…oops. It was getting pretty cold and the wind was starting to bite so we huddled up in a little bunch of rocks until it was time to go for the last section of the climb…by which time we had been joined by a friendly bunch of Canadians who contributed some more body-heat to the cause.
At 5:30am we reached the summit, 4095m (13,435 ft), it was amazing…as the sun rose above the mountains in the distance the darkness lifted and I could see for miles around, it was breathtaking (maybe that was the altitude too!). Soon after, mist and clouds began to form around the peaks and down the valleys and it was time to start heading back.
The World At My Feet
I’m not going to go into much detail about the journey back, as much to say that it was HELL. My legs and knees were aching before I even began to start the 6km back from camp to the first checkpoint and by the time I got back to where the whole adventure started, I could barely walk. But it was worth it
Since then my whole body has been a mess, I can barely walk let alone tackle any form of staircase so I have been using the past couple of days to recover - I even treated myself to a full 1hr body massage, which cost less than 10 quid and was worth 10 times as much. Yesterday I dragged myself out of the hostel and had a quick poke around KK before hopping on a boat cruise along the Klias river, a swamp system which is home to all kinds of creatures including the famous Proboscis Monkey, the Barry Manalow of the animal kingdom, and the bum-flashing firefly.

The monkeys were hard to spot and even harder to photograph but eventually we came across some that were less than 100m away…the fireflys however were amazing, once darkness fell the trees lit up with them so brightly that you could make out the branches and leaves, all outlined and flashing in time…and the guide said “Happy Christmas!”.
Today I haven’t done much, pain is still dictating my plans at the moment but tomorrow I should be a bit fitter to do stuff…I did have a look around the Sabah Museum which was pretty interesting and had some good exhibits such as the tribal blow-pipes and a huge replica cave containing models of the birds nests they collect for the famous Birds Nest Soup - an asian delicacy. These nests are made by swallow spit and can fetch nearly 1000 quid each!
I’ve made a couple of local mates so tonight i’m going to be able to go out and order something without guessing what it might be, looking forward to some Satay or lamb dishes…yum. I’m going to spend tomorrow in KK then head up north to Sandakan where there is loads off stuff to do, the Orang-Utan sanctuary, Turtle Island to name but a few.
Until the next installment, check out my photos!
TTFN! ![]()
Dave
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