Limping home
Just a quick recap: Rasa and I are currently in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo and on our way to Brunai tomorrow. We just got back from climbing Mount Kinabalu. Next week we will meet my mom in Kuala Lumpur to travel SE Asia for a month. In August we will be going to Honduras for work.
Having never climbed a mountain before I didn’t really know what to expect. From what I had read, the first day was going to be the hardest with a vertical gain of 1,500m. Rasa and I were training while we lived in Sagada but it didn’t prepare us for the lack of oxygen at the higher elevations. At 4,000m Rasa was dying and could barely lift her feet as she walked. I was hopping around like a Tigger. But I shouldn’t be so smug because on the way down I was crawling as Rasa was zipping around taking pictures.
The summit at Low’s Peak was anticlimactic. If I was to make a suggestion, I would say summit South Peak because the view is better and there will be no people! We left Laban Rata at 3:30am, about an hour after everyone else. We wanted to sit on the East face all by ourselves to watch the sunrise. I attached a pictures of our view (#70). The other picture (#115) is of me walking the ridge out to South Peak.
We left Timpohon Gate (1866m) at 8:30am on Day 1. From there is was a 6km hike to Laban Rata Lodge(3272m). This took us 4hr 40min to do. Everything we owned was soaked from walking through the clouds for the last 2km. We were asleep by 6pm and awake by 3am the next morning. We made the summit (4095m) at 6:50am, 3hr 20min up but only 2.7km long. It took us two and half hours to get back down to the lodge and from there another 5 hours to the gate.
By the time we made it down to park headquarters we were so exhausted we crashed in the home stay right outside the park. We couldn’t bring ourselves to flag down a minibus back to Kota. We were asleep by 6pm and stayed that way until 8am the next morning. It was then we realised we couldn’t move and had muscles in places we never felt them before, like our armpits. This is what I get for not listening to my knees and using two walking-sticks as crutches.
Again, for those who would like to see satellite pictures of the mountain, copy the below coordinates into Google Earth. Believe me, if you have never tried this you will love it. And the very next place you will enter in will be your home address. Try it and zoom in on your car in the driveway (no kidding!).
Park Headquarters: 6° 0’21.70″N, 116°32’31.45″E
Timpohon Gate: 6° 1’47.46″N, 116°32’49.24″E
Laban Rata Lodge: 6° 3’31.89″N, 116°33’57.71″E
Low’s Peak: 6° 4’40.88″N, 116°33’30.92″E
Rasa has updated her webpage with the some more pictures. Will blog again after Brunei. Should be interesting, never been to a completely dry country.
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Robert J Kent Jr
Wat/San/Health Engineering Consultant
