When we planned this trip, we weren’t sure if we wanted to work with a tour company. We thought about renting a car, booking the hotels ourselves and more importantly traveling at our own pace so that we could spend more time doing something if it was interesting and less if it wasn’t. After reading the guidebook and talking with previous climbers, we found a company on the web, Wildlife Expeditions, with an office in KL that was willing to arrange a tour around our stated itinerary.

As soon as we got to Sabah, we congratulated ourselves on making a wise choice. The guidebook said that Sabah had bad spots in the excellent highway system, but being from the west, you only understand what that means when you see it. The roads are eroded away by landslides, so that there is no dirt under the pavement to hold it so the pavement slides down the mountain too. In most cases there was a ‘caution’ sign directly in front of a hole as big as the lane you’re driving in and you have to wait for traffic coming toward you to pass so that you can use their lane. And you get a nice view down the cliff as you pass the hole. There are also places where there’s a drop of 4 feet or so, like a steep driveway, usually with no warning. It was definitely better to have an experienced driver. We spent a lot of time getting to remote places.

The scenery in Sabah is very different from cosmopolitan KL. It’s more rural, of course. Poverty is more evident. Houses are traditional Malay houses built on stilts. (There aren’t any of these in KL.) The structure of buildings seem flimsy--a thin layer of wood for walls and a tin roof. Maybe in a place with so many landslides it’s better not to try to make anything too permanent. Even the Mountain Lodge where we spent our first night, which had beautiful flowers and a nice view was built like this. We found out that a "mosquito proof" hotel room means there is a plastic screen over windows that don’t shut. We only stayed at one hotel that could be considered a hotel by western standards. Mostly, we stayed in hut-like buildings out in the wilderness, but they were always clean and reasonably comfortable.

Day 1

We arrived in the afternoon and drove out to the mountain. Our guide, Jo-Jo, explained over the engine noise that there are two pronunciations for Kinabalu and two meanings that accompany them. We decided we liked kin-A-balu with all the vowels short and the stress on the second syllable, because that name was given to the mountain by people who believe that their dead inhabit the mountain for a while before passing on to heaven. Driving around, we couldn’t ever see the mountain because clouds always covered it. Jo-Jo called it shy.

Jo-Jo gave us a tour of a path at the base of the mountain and pointed out the vegetation, which included moss twice my height. Brett and Liann tried a wild banana. They said it tasted like a banana, but was mostly seeds. There was a garden and we saw wild orchids of all shapes and sizes. We settled into the lodge for a rainy afternoon, playing cards and chess to pass the time. We also had some very good banana fritters, which are a regional specialty. Throughout the trip, we had afternoons free of activities. We were freezing that day because we weren’t used to the cooler weather, which was probably in the 60s.

Day 2

The park requires that you are accompanied by a guide. Although the path was very clear throughout, the guides would have had to carry us out if one of us had been injured.

We did manage to climb the mountain and climb is a more accurate word than hike. We did our first kilometer in 25 minutes, but the whole hike to the overnight rest house took 6 hours (Brett bolted ahead and got there in 5).

We got in bed at 7 p.m. knowing we had to wake up at 2 a.m. to walk the remaining 2.5 km to the summit. Brett fell asleep first. As I dozed off I could feel Brett’s whole leg, moving at the knee, taking big steps in his sleep and an occasional hand movement to steady himself as he dreamed about climbing the mountain. He was really excited about climbing to the top.

Day 3

Brett and Emmanuel were the 3rd and 4th persons to reach the summit in morning. I walked more slowly and Yudi showed me how to criss-cross the steep rock instead of taking smaller steps going straight up along the rope. Some places were so steep you had to use the rope. It was a good thing we were walking in the dark, because if I’d seen how far I had to go I might not have made it. The procession of flashlights was quite charming.

One our way up, we were inspired by people making their way down, who told us we could it and that it would be beautiful. I don’t remember them limping and tottering like I was. My knees couldn’t stop shaking and I didn’t feel like smiling encouragingly at anybody. It was so steep coming down from the peak that my knees were pretty much shot by the time we got to the rest house. The next 2 kilometers were okay, but the last four were almost impossible for me. Brett is practically holding me up in the picture of us at the end of our descent in front of the waterfall. Back at the hotel, we hadn’t noticed the steps up the dining room before, but we sure noticed them now. After dinner, we took them backward on the way down. It wasn't until 4 days later that I could walk on a downhill slant without painkillers and just feel a little pain.

Our total time on the way down was 4 hours, which makes our time on the way up very respectable.

Day 4

The ride to the Poring Hot Springs was short and fun. We passed the biggest vegetable market in Sabah. Each one of the stalls had piles of cabbage in front and big piles of cabbage in the back. We found out cabbage is Sabah’s main vegetable export, which explained the number of cabbage dishes we were served at every meal. There was an amazing amount of cattle sleeping in the road, which largely ignored us as we passed, and there were goats sleeping on the benches of bus stops.

We were incredibly lucky with weather when we were climbing Mt. Kinabalu. It didn’t rain on us at all on the way up to the rest house. When we were climbing to the summit, the intense wind which chilled previous climbers to the bone as they waited for sunrise was absent.

Day 4 was the one day that weather effected our trip. The jungle canopy walkway is a bridge constructed 120 feet up in the air. It was first used by biologists for observation of monkeys, apes, birds and anything else that they couldn’t observe from the ground. Because it was rainy there was no wildlife in the trees and it was too foggy to get much of a view, so the only thrill was being up so high.

Down below, the hot springs smelled of sulfur and were boiling hot. The sulfur baths were small with with two taps—one for sulfur water and one for cool water so that you could adjust the temperature. The hot springs felt good on our legs after the climb.