Mount Kinabalu - Day Two

The night in the hostel on Mount Kinabalu was my second in a dormitory and therefore my second with virtually no sleep.  I just can't get off when I'm surrounded by others shifting, snoring and farting into the small hours.  Well, maybe it was me farting.  I rose at two and dressed in warm clothes and a head torch hired from the hostel and at 3.00am I and my climbing companion Glynn, joined the throng for the procession to the summit.  I'd met Glynn two days before and we'd decided to hire a Guide together, for companionship and to save costs.  Glynn lives in Greenwich in London, near Sue and my old stamping ground Blackheath.  In his early forties he'd casually mentioned he'd had a hip replacement only a few months back following a kick boxing injury.  Glynn was one of many interesting folk I bumped into on the mountain, including Wally and Faye a retired couple from Australia and a strapping pair of Scandinavian girls, one from Finland and one from Sweden, who I didn't exchange names with.

I say "procession" because that's what it felt like as all the climbers are bunched together on day two so most can reach the summit by 5.30am to catch the sunrise.  It seemed to me we were all worshippers in the modern temple of experience, looking to tick off something on our life list or make the celebratory "look what I've done" Facebook post.  The climb itself was magic, a moving stream of lights up the narrow path under a cold cloudless sky and a cream-coloured full moon.  Most of the way the mountain is smooth granite with only thin grass and lichen growing at this high altitude, adding to the spare and ascetic atmosphere.  Near the summit we got a view of the coast of Sabah around the capital Kota Kinabalu dotted with lights and with the yellow moon reflecting off the sea.  By about 5.30am Glynn and I settled near the summit to watch the dawn.  Most of our climbing companions also made it, though sadly Faye had to turn back early on having only one and a half lungs and suffering with the altitude.

The dawn reminded me of Sue and my only night passage on "La Fulica", when psychotic with tiredness, I was at the helm waiting for Sicily to come into view.  Like then, one's first awareness that dawn is beginning is not the light in the sky but the fact that the sea, in this case the granite, starts to become luminous.  The Sun itself was obscured by low cloud, but the colours were fantastic as more and more light flooded onto the scene.

We started our descent just after six and the less said about this slow, painful nine-hour slog the better.  By three in the afternoon I staggered out of the National Park and found a taxi, arriving back at the airport around six pm ready for my flight.  At the check-in desk I found to my despair that I'd managed to book a flight for June and not March and that that evening's flight back to Sibu in Sarawak was full, along with both flights the next day.  Luckily, I managed to get a standby ticket, helped by a very charming and camp young man in the Malaysian Airways ticket office who at one point had to pull me back from my mounting tiredness and hysteria with a sharp "sir, I need you to concentrate" as we worked our way through the purchasing procedure.

In the end I got back to our house in Saratok after a two-hour drive from Sibu Airport totally exhausted and barely able to crawl out of the car, relieved and peculiarly satisfied.

Mount Kinabalu - Day One

It's been the school holidays in Sarawak this week and while Sue was busy writing an essay I took myself off to Sabah with the aim of climbing Mount Kinabalu, at 4,000 metres the highest thing in southeast asia.  It's a well-worn track being on quite a few peoples' list of things to do before they die.

Even before starting there is a bureaucratic mountain to be climbed, permits to be bought and hostels booked, insurance forms completed and guides hired.  Once arranged most people are committed to climbing with a Guide over two days.  On day one you climb a steep path for about 1,400 metres to a hostel below the summit.  On day two you rise at 2.00am and climb another 800 metres to catch the obligatory sunrise, before descending the 2,200 metres back to the starting point.  The descent is the killer with one's knees and thighs getting a relentless pounding down the steep path.

Most of the climb on day one was through cloud and mist in dripping forest and later tall scrub as the altitude increases and the climate gets cooler.  It was a relief to reach the hostel and shovel in a stack of carbohydrates - noodles, bread, rice, some chewy beef and sweet syrupy desert washed down with coffee.  After dinner I staggered up to my dormitory a hundred or so metres further up the path.  As I reached the landing at the front of the building I turned around and was amazed to see that the cloud had cleared to reveal the most spectacular golden sunset.  I got out my camera then waited, transfixed, with three other spectators.

I felt like I was in Olympus with the gods, looking down through the mist at the Earth below.  The clouds looked like cushions that one could jump down onto and roll around in.  In the gaps I could see mountain ridges and forests and the whole was suffused in a buttery, golden light which slowly dimmed and flared into shades of blue and red.  After I don't know how much time had passed we heard the rumble of nearby thunder then a ghostly white cloud rolled in front of us, like a curtain being drawn across the scene.  None of us could think of anything worthwhile to say, so we exchanged nods and glances and some polite inanities and went to bed.

With this kind of excursion there is always the question of "was it worth it?"  On this occasion the account was settled in spades.

Small war in Sabah, Not Many Dead

A tragedy looks like it's unfolding in Sabah, the Malaysian province in the north of Borneo, about 900 kilometres from us here in Saratok.  If you don't live in the region you probably won't hear of it, unless the death toll gets large enough.  How many will that need to be?  The news agencies must use a formula - anything above ten in the so-called developed world seems to get a mention on CNN and the likes, but here in Borneo?  A hundred?  A thousand?

The story in brief is that a couple of hundred armed Filipinos arrived in a remote coastal area of Sabah a few weeks ago to pursue a claim to the province by the Sultan of Sulu, himself a Filipino citizen.  For a few days there was an uneasy stand-off between the "invaders" and the Malaysian police, then the police and army went in and to date there are sixty-odd people reported dead, about ten Malaysian soldiers and police, the rest Filipinos.  The latest information is that the remaining Filipinos are concentrated in a small coastal patch surrounded by Malaysian armed forces, but there are also rumours about people in fast boats moving to and fro between Sabah and the nearby islands, which are part of the Philippines, either retreating or reinforcing.

This is actually a very modern and a very ancient tale.  The Philippines and Malaysia are both post-colonial creations, which exist mainly by the historical accident of who happened to control what when colonialism evaporated in the aftermath of the second world war.  Sabah and the neighbouring Philippine islands are at the peripheries of the two nations and have strong cultural links with each other.  The Sultanate of Sulu is a pre-colonial creation, which covered Sabah and the neighbouring islands and there are rivals for the crown, including one who holds a very old and long-cherished sword - a gift from the Sultan of Brunei.  Coming back to the present, general elections are due in both Malaysia and the Philippines, so neither government wants to look weak and the rumour-mill is rife in the blog and twitter sphere.  There are accusations all over the place about government incompetence and the underhand involvement of opposition parties in both countries and dark stories about beheadings and eye-gougings by the Filipino "invaders" and support for them from Filipino immigrants - there have been about fifty arrests in Sabah so far.  There have also been panicky tweets about incursions by armed Filipinos in various parts of the province.

There is one other contemporary angle to all this - Sabah has significant oil and gas reserves and perhaps it is this more than anything else that is causing the various interested parties to blow the dust off a bunch of nineteenth century colonial treaties concerning who owns what.  The current reality is that there is a group of armed, desperate and possibly deluded men facing the forces of a government under political pressure to do something.  My feeling is that the governments on both sides are stamping on this like an incipient forest fire and that probably all that will be left are some ashes, smoke and dead bodies.  But who knows?