Welcome to the Jungle

Borneo IS jungle paradise! At least the state of Sabah in the North Eastern tip of Borneo deserves the title. Rolling jungle covered hills and mountains, old wooden houses on stilts, mangy dogs loping along the roadsides, plants growing on plants growing on plants (e.g. ferns and orchids growing on trees). Life is just bursting through the seams here! Though sadly, apparently on the East coast oil palms are increasingly waving in the wind, where jungles once reigned supreme. Hopefully this disease does not spread over the whole state, since the old rain forests are just amazingly grand.

Rising over everything is the tallest mountain, by far, in South East Asia; Mount Kinabalu 4094 meters and rising (at a rate of some 2mm a year).

And standing on the top of this mountain on Low's Peak is Kati the Finn, flexing her impressive thigh muscles and feeling no pain (that came the day after - even sitting down in a chair is challenging, so guess how I feel about the Asian-type squat toilets right now...).

The route up is not exceptionally difficult as such. But boy, it's tough! I would like to believe that at least part of my huffing and puffing and general shortness of breath was due to the altitude and not my decrepid state. The steeper cliff sections near the top are aided with guide ropes, which are not such a bad idea, as the last part of the climb from the overnight shelters at 3200m to the top starts at 3.00 am to be at the top in time for the sunrise - so we are climbing in the dark. The rows of bobbing headlights in the night made a spooky spectacle.
Coming down I took the advice of friends (thanks Victoria!) and ran (jumped, leaped, whatever you like to call my rather erratic mode of descent) rather than walked, since walking down a gazillion steps is much harder on the knees than running down. The advice was good, my knees are doing just fine, and I earned much respect from the slowly ascending treckers as I whizzed past. However just as I was getting a bit impressed with my awsome powers and stamina, my guide, a sweet little (around 1,5 meters at a guess) local guide, casually mention that he had done the Climbathon in 3 hours.

Now Mount Kinabalu is the site of one of the toughest running competitions in the world - the Climbathon. The route is up the Summit trail (a 9km long, rock stewn and cliff-clinging climb, over 2km of which is upwards) then down again, and then another 3-4 km from the starting point of the Summit trail down to the park head quarters. The official record is around 2,5 hours, which is just insane, having seen the route! But then equally insane is seeing the local porters carrying provisions up to the refuge at over 3000 meters, since their loads are often up to 40 kg! I couldn't walk down a garden path with that amount of weight strapped to my back, but not only do they do this climb, many of them daily if not twice a day, but they easily overtake most of the tourists climbing up - such as yours truly. After seeing that, I can just and just believe the Climbathon results. My own efforts (probly around 11 hours of actual climbing and descending with a night spent in between at the mountain refuge) were not, on reflection, that exceptional.

However, going slowly gave me time to wonder at the beautiful rain forest nature on the way. Even when we were inside the clouds as in this picture above, the views were stunning. We also came across the famed pitcher plants of Borneo, some species of which are native only to Mount Kinabalu. The plant in the picture below is around palm sized and its bowl is filled with water.

This pitcher goes out especially to Zepa, Pekka and Reka as thanks for their comments on this blog. More flowers are forthcoming to all who comment! Its lovely to get signs of life from friends and know someone is out there and actually reading this.