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Personal Life

Mulu Caves / Pinnacles Climb, Part 2

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The real adventure for us started with the trip to Camp 5. First we had to take a one-hour boat ride from the entrance to the Clearwater Caves, carrying all the gear that we would need for the next two nights with us. Then, led by our guides but carrying our own stuff, we had to hike along a jungle trail 8.8 km to Camp 5. The terrain was flat for the most part, but there were still plenty of roots, rocks and muddy patches on the trail, so we had to keep our eyes constantly glued towards the ground or else we’d trip or slip and fall. We arrived about 2.5 hours later, including time for a rest stop in the middle.

Camp 5 turned out to be a small cluster of wooden buildings next the swift flowing Melinau River. The accommodation is very spartan: basically each person is assigned a hard mattress on top of a wooden platform in a large communal room. The scenery however is fantastic. The camp itself is located just at the base of the mountain that we’d be climbing, part of Gunung Api. On the opposite side of the river lies the even more majestic Mount Benarat. Meals were prepared by the guides assigned to each group using rations that they had carried with them from Mulu and eaten in the large open cantine area. After dinner, our guide briefed us on what the climb would be liked, reminded us of what we’d need to bring and gave some advice.

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Personal Life

Mulu Caves / Pinnacles Climb, Part 1

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Writing everything that I have to say about this trip would both take too much space and too much time for a single post, so I’m going to split this into two parts. My wife and I went on a four day / three night trip to Mulu in Sarawak state over the extended Hari Raya holidays and, quite unexpectedly to us, had one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. We’d originally planned to have a small and simple trip to take advantage of the holidays, and since we’re currently based in Kota Kinabalu, thought that it would be a good idea to visit Sarawak, which neither of us had ever been to. The caves at Mulu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and we’ve all read about them in our geography textbooks, so it was the natural candidate.

Visiting only the caves however is normally just a two day / one night excursion, so my wife looked for something else we could do in the area. She eventually picked the Pinnacles to tack on to our trip. It was advertised as a hiking and mountain climbing trip. We expected it to be somewhat strenuous and thought it would make for a good warming up exercise for our Mount Kinabalu climb planned for early next year. I did not expect that it would turn out to be the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done in my life. But more on that in the second part.

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Personal Life

Mountain climbing

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As a self-confessed geek, I’m not much of an outdoors or exercise person. I do take short walks around the neighborhood with my wife everyday so that Spidey can exercise and staying in general good shape is never a bad thing, but that’s as much exercise as I’m willing to put time and effort towards. Recently, however, we’ve been kicking around the idea of actually attempting to climb Mount Kinabalu, which as all Malaysians know is the tallest peak in Southeast Asia. We don’t have a set date yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a family affair with lots of people and generally planned for early next year.

I have no illusions about it being easy. Sure, it’s not mountaineering with rope and pitons, but even fit and sportive people generally claim that getting to the peak is an exhausting and arduous ordeal. This means we’re going to have to put in some regular training and that in turn means going to the Bukit Padang recreational area to climb the hills there. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but even less than 20 minutes of effort is pretty hard on you given how steep it is and how many steps you need to climb.

We originally planned on going twice a week, once on Sunday and again on Wednesday, but we’ve found that the traffic in Kota Kinabalu gets too bad around rush hours to make that feasible. So we’ve decided to go only on Sundays for leg muscle training and jog around in our neighborhood as endurance training. We still have quite some time to prepare so I’m not unduly worried, but given how punishing even 20 minutes at Bukit Padang can be, I have a newfound respect for the people who manage to complete the two-day climb up to th peak of Mount Kinabalu!

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Fun

Giant Spider attacks Liverpool

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I’ve been terribly busy at work lately and don’t the time to write any lengthy posts. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a giant spider attacking Liverpool. In reality, it’s a giant robot spider created by a French group called La Machine as a giant piece of street theatre. As this article notes, using public funds in this way in these depressed economic times is sort of questionable, but then again public funds have rarely been used to make something more spectacular than this. Check out the original article for tons of good photos.

Personal Life

Away during Chinese New Year

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Obviously, I’ve been away for a while during the Chinese New Year holidays. My wife and I spent three days in Penang with my parents. This was mostly to make my mother happy because she grew up on the island and wanted to see the familiar places and sights from her childhood again. This made this more of a trip out of duty rather than pleasure for my wife and myself, but it was an okay experience overall.

My parents were particularly pleased with the Penang food though personally I could have gone without the ridiculous crowds and extremely poor service. Other than that, we did the usual rounds of meeting friends and family while in Kuala Lumpur. The only interesting thing that I did was installing a new ATI 4670 graphics card for my nieces’ gaming computer. We’re back in Kota Kinabalu now and happy to be reunited with our dog Spidey. We’d left her at a boarding school and she’s lost some weight and has shed quite a lot of fur while we were gone. I think it was more out of being miserable at being left alone than because she was treated badly, but she’s delighted to go back to our normal everyday routines now.

Personal Life, Politics

Solomon Islands Riots Photos

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I finally got around to uploading the photos that I have of the riots in the Solomon Islands in 2006, as previously promised. I didn’t have a camera handy during the 2000 riots, which was a real shame, since groups of guys toting huge guns all over Honiara would have made for more spectacular sights, and even in 2006, I wasn’t about to take any silly risks, so these are really just photos of the aftermath. You can get much better photos of the whole thing from the BBC. I also won’t really go into the specific details of the political situation since that’s been covered by much better writers than myself.

The riots in 2006 happened after general elections that eventually put Snyder Rini into the Prime Minister’s seat. Mr. Rini had a rather unsavoury reputation, particular after his earlier stint as Finance Minister, so the word on the street was that as Prime Minister, he would be susceptible to bribes from the Chinese businessmen active locally. Or more susceptible that the norm in the Solomon Islands. Anyway, a crowd had been gathering near Parliament House to hear who would be the new Prime Minister, and when they heard that it would be Snyder Rini, they turned nasty and after being turned away by the Australian-led and supported police, descended onto the nearby Chinatown.

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Personal Life

Spidey All Tied Up

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My wife and I have been experimenting with putting videos up on YouTube. Unfortunately since we’re only taking them using our old digital camera, the results aren’t really great, and they seem to be darkened after YouTube finishes with processing them. Here’s a video that we took when Spidey was smaller.

One of our worries about leaving for Kuala Lumpur was what to do with her. We wanted to put her in a dog boarding school here in Kota Kinabalu but didn’t have enough time to arrange for that. My wife’s parents happened to be here so we had to let them take care of Spidey instead. As expected, Spidey had to sleep outdoors for most of the week. She was naturally delighted to see us when we got back, but we discovered that she had developed some itchy sores on her belly.

The local vet here wasn’t open due to the Hari Raya holidays but we managed to call him and he said it might be a fungal infection. Since she’s back to sleeping in the room with us, the sores have dried up a bit, but we still need to be careful that her belly doesn’t stay wet for too long.