Tag Archives: mountains

Personal Life

Mt. Kinabalu Climb

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I suppose I should write a post about my experience about climbing Mt. Kinabalu, but there’s already so much information out there about it that there’s little of value that I can add. We did what is by now the standard three day two night package, staying overnight on Tuesday evening at the National Park HQ and starting out from Timpohon gate for the trek to Laban Rata at about 8:20 AM.

My wife and I did better than average on this part of the trip, arriving at about 12:40 PM. One guy we saw however managed to arrive at about 10:30 AM. The rest of our group arrived at about 2:30 PM which is about the average I think. Shan’s mother insisted that we use a porter so that helped us to be faster as we only had to carry our food and water but it also created a problem for us as the porter stayed behind with the rest of them while we raced ahead, so we had no warm clothes to wear at Laban Rata and had to snuggle under the blankets while waiting for our luggage to arrive.

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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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