Have Field Kit Will Travel

Mount Kinabalu, Borneo | Day 22

Eau de Tiger balm fills the air having been used in extreme quantities in a desperate bid to soothe our legs which are protesting against even the smallest of inclines today.

Yesterday we proved that, despite much advice to the contrary, it is possible to scale Mount Kinabalu in a single day (8 hours 40 minutes to be precise) and to avoid having to spend the night in a cold, damp and hideously overpriced (£150!) dorm room at Laban Rata, 3/4 of the way up the peak.

Having booked our day passes on the phone in KK the day before (no, you don’t have to turn up at Kinabalu National Park to do this, simply call the Kinabalu Parks Office on 6088-889098), we rose bright and early from the very homely Kinabalu Mountain Lodge (just outside the national park – much cheaper), bundled large volumes of glucose-laden snacks into our packs,  paid the fees and were introduced to our 4 foot 8″ guide for the day (complete with golf umbrella) who proceeded to follow us up and down the mountain like a loyal hound.

The first 1.5km of the walk was kind. Gentle inclines were punctuated with sets of 10-20 steps, lulling us into a false sense of security. As we got higher (and the 0.5km markers became dishearteningly further apart) the  gradient became progressively steeper and our limbs progressively achier! After only 4km, the relentless slope made my muscles burn and I cursed Steve’s ridiculously long legs, propelling him up the mountain in front of me. I began to wonder whether I’d be able to reach Laban Rata, let along the summit as the paths became rocky, slippery and irregular, preventing any momentum from being gained.

Laban Rata checkpoint

After what felt like 2.5 hours on a travelator, we reached Laban Rata, the check point 3/4 up the mountain where most hikers stay overnight (in the aforementioned extortionately priced dorms), before ‘summiting’ at dawn. There we were treated to a fleeting glimpse of the spectacular summit through the clouds (along with high praise from the other guides, impressed by our pace!) motivating us to continue up the next stretch: a relentless 700m stretch of steep steps.

It soon became evident that the ten minute pause at Laban Rata was enough to make our legs cease up completely and for the first 200m, every step became a battle: mind over failing body.  Steve started to feel the effects of the increasing altitude and became dizzy and short of breath every time he tried to speed up. Our training hadn’t quite prepared us for this section; we had to slow to a snail’s pace to have any hope of continuing.

The rope phase

Above the vegetation line now, we had to haul our weary limbs the final 2km across sheets of shimmering granite, with a sheer drop below. It was a huge relief to give our legs a break as they’d pretty much given up at this point. 800m from the summit, the rain started and at 100m intervals, our guide threatened to take us back down but succumbed to our disappointed faces. A breathless Steve nearly gave up 300m from the summit, suffering badly from the altitude (at 6’4″, he was at much higher altitudes than me and the guide) but there was no way I was letting either of us stop now.

AT LAST!

After a final scramble up steep boulders, we made it! All our exhaustion vanished as we stood, elated, at the highest point in South East Asia! Not only had we scaled the peak in 4 hours 40minutes, we had the entire summit plateau to ourselves as nobody else had reached the checkpoint in time to summit that day( beats following a trail of 200 people queueing to reach the summit at dawn in my book). It was at this point that our guide (who’d clearly arrived at work that morning expecting to spend the entire day accompanying a typical rotund, velour-tracksuit-clad American tourist to Laban Rata) informed us he’d had no food or drink all day and urgently needed water. A celebratory picnic ensued before our rather rain soaked but very proud 4 hour descent.

Kinabalu in a day: the checklist

1. Make sure you’re prepared. Train beforehand (enough to comfortably walk for 8 hours on undulating terrain).
2. Call Kinabalu Parks Office park office (6088-889098) a few days before you want to climb to reserve a 1 day pass.
3. Get to the park early – there’s paperwork to complete and you’ll need to reach Laban Rata by 11am to be allowed to continue to the summit in a day.
4. Stay nearby (but it’s cheaper to stay just outside the National Park). We’d highly recommend Kinabalu Mountain Lodge which can be reached by public bus from KK.
5. Take plenty of water and high energy snacks.
6. Don’t overpack. We needed a t-shirt, a jumper and a light waterproof each.

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Kuching, Borneo | Days 14-16

Of orangutans and idiots (part 1)

Our skiff skims effortlessly across the placid surface of the South China Sea, the wind it creates providing a welcome reprieve from the suffocating heat of the day. Off the starboard bow (that’s ahead and right to you landlubbers. Yarr!) the silhouette of Bako National Park, blurred by the intense heat, begins to solidify. Muted, indistinct shapes rearrange to form a jagged, emerald green junglescape of breathtaking beauty.

As we round an impossibly photogenic sandstone promontory, a dazzling sandy bay opens up before us. The boat slows to a crawl and we splutter our way down a narrow, mangrove-flanked channel, before disembarking at a rickety jetty incongruously emblazoned with the words “Bako National Park” in metre-high lettering.

Bako National Park

Gazetted by the British in the dying days of colonialism, Bako is the oldest national park in Sarawak. Its 27 sq. km  are home to 40 species of mammal, 24 species of reptile and 200 different birds across every type of major ecosystem in the region. There are deserted beaches, pastel-hued cliffs, brooding mangroves, vine-draped jungle, and kerangas, a metallic moonscape studded with insect-eating pitcher plants. Bako may not be as plant-rich or as brooding as its older sibling Taman Negara, but it has good looks, charm and wildlife by the bucketload.

Fiddler crabs wave oversized pincers at bashful females, hermit crabs hide in plain sight, long-tailed macaques munch mangos and cause mischief. Bearded pigs sniff out their sustenance in the undergrowth and huge monitor lizards sunbathe on fallen trees, whilst azure-blue Asian fairy bluebirds dart energetically overhead. But not all the wildlife in Bako is harmless.

The lesser-spotted Englishman

Deep inside the park’s rainforest, we happened across a resplendent silver lizard about the size of a forearm. As we crept nearer, the author, with characteristic clumsiness, planted his left foot squarely into a nest of fire ants. The understandably angry little fellas were roused into a stinging frenzy and “bugger, balls, arse”, the distinctive call of the lesser-spotted, inappropriately shod Englishman, reverberated around the reserve. The same call was heard again later that evening on a night safari chock full of spiders, scorpions, pit vipers and yes, more fire ants.

Macaques and proboscis monkeys

We awake early the next morning to what sounds like a party on the roof of our rustic jungle lodge. Bleary-eyed, we stumble out of bed and on to the veranda to find a troop of long-tailed macaques launching mango stones at the roof of our lodge and drinking cans of Tiger beer. We decide to take a sunrise hike along the edge of the sandstone cliffs. After about 10 minutes, we hear some crashing in the tree branches behind us and wheel around to discover a troop of proboscis monkeys. We stand rooted to the spot, spellbound by these curious creatures with their absurd noses and sex-addict tendencies until we hear a much louder crash in the undergrowth.

10 bob-a-nob

The cretinous Muscovite with the mail order bride lumbers into view, jabbing a colossal finger skyward and repeatedly grunting “minkey, minkey”. I resolve to resurrect the 10-bob-a-nob campaign as soon as I return to the mainland, prefixing the final word with a “K” to ensure that any would-be headhunters know exactly whom to target.

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Kuching, Borneo | Days 14-16

Borneo has more than a few things to cause the hapless traveller discomfort. First, there are the leeches, bloodthirsty little vampire worms that scale your boots and sink their mouths into your skin. Once locked on, they gorge themselves on your blood, growing to many times their original size whilst pulsating in time to your heartbeat.

Second, there are the headhunters, and I don’t mean of the vacuous HR variety. Cranial detachment has been an important part of indigenous culture in Borneo for more than 500 years. During WW2, the British even encouraged tribesman to decapitate invading Japanese soldiers, paying the princely some of 10 bob (50p) for each noggin duly removed.

Then there is the Palang, an implement not for the faint-hearted. In certain indigenous peoples, this rod of bamboo, bone or hardwood is driven through the penis at 90 degrees, purportedly to increase the sexual pleasure of a female partner. Downsides include infection, death and a pebble of chalk-like calcine on each end of one’s Palang, deposited by the flow of urine.

And if leeches, headhunters and penile accoutrements weren’t sufficiently troubling, then there is coiffured 80s has-been Rick Astley too, in both classic Rickroll and lesser known Together Forever varieties.

In Borneo, as elsewhere in Malaysia, traveller discomfort tends to increase with both clumsiness and height, two qualities with which the author is particularly well endowed.

In cities, lighting cables at night markets are strung like garrotte wires at neck height, whilst low hanging tin roofs offer up unparalleled opportunities for a spot of DIY trepanning. In jungles, spine laden palm branches and snaking tangles of tree roots provide similar chances to lacerate one’s forehead or faceplant leeches.

Borneo

But enough about impressive feats of physical ineptitude. Back to matter in hand. Malaysian Borneo arcs across the northern part of the Island of Borneo. Indulge me in a tortured metaphor and imagine it were a Neapolitan ice cream. On the left is the chocolate state of Sarawak; on the right, the strawberry of Sabah. Between the two is Brunei, a thin, largely pointless sliver of bland vanilla (no alcohol; plenty of lashings for wrongdoers).

To get to Borneo, we’d travelled from Taman Negara through Melaka (mmm…satay) and Singapore (Asia-lite, with an equally bizarre fondness for Astley), before hopping across the South China Sea to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak.

Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre

If ASDA ever launched a range of nature superstores, they’d almost certainly site the first at Kuching: the area boasts an amazing array of wildlife adventures at absurdly low prices.

So it was that we caught, the morning after arriving, a local bus (1RM; 20p) to the Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre (3RM; 60p), one of only four orangutan sanctuaries in the world. At 635 hectares, this forest reserve is too small to fully support the 26 ginger apes that call it home, so rangers supplement their diets with daily food rations placed on specially constructed platforms in the forest.

In a safety briefing before the morning feeding session, the park manager warned the 50 or so assembled tourists against using flash photography. This, he cautioned, would cause the great apes to retreat from view, or more worryingly, to attack. He showed us some particularly graphic images of injuries to human heads, torsos and legs to underscore his point.

An hour later, and towards the end of the session, Ritchie, the dominant male,  made a rare appearance. As we were marvelling  at his luxurious coat and outstanding cheek pads, an obnoxious middle-aged Russian with a dangerously young Thai bride elbowed his way to the front and promptly set off his camera flash. For a split second, it seemed as if Ritchie might charge him (and so impertinent is the Russian, that I’m certain a large part of the crowdwas silently egging him on), but the great ape instead turned his back and ambled off into the forest.

Show over, we left the centre elated at the wildlife we had seen but frustrated with the tourists who lack the mental capacity to disable a camera flash.

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Taman Negara | Days 12 & 13

Palm oil plantations stretched, depressingly, as far as the eye could see as we climbed the windy road from Jerantut to Taman Negara in yet another plastic-seated, rickety bus, manufactured in an age long before air-conditioning had been invented. Perhaps they were trying to help us acclimatize to the extreme sweat we were about to experience during the next 48 hours which were to be spent in the depths of Malaysia’s rainforest.

Malaysia’s first National Park

Malaysia is the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, an economic goldmine in an age of processed food and cosmetics but one which necessitates the devastating deforestation of vast areas of tropical rain forest. Yet amid the sprawl of palm plantations lies the jewel in the crown for nature lovers in peninsula Malaysia: Taman Negara. Created in 1939, Taman Negara was Malaysia’s first national park and contains 1676 square miles of primary rain forest. At 130 million years, it’s the oldest rain forest in the world and almost twice as old as the Amazon! The diversity of wildlife within this pristine sanctuary is simply staggering and includes Malayan tigers and Asian elephants (both of which are critically endangered) along with rhinoceros hornbills, tapirs and MANY, MANY leeches.

Blood thirsty slinkies

We’d been warned about these pesky bloodsuckers in advance but as the early morning mist clung to the vast forest canopies, we set off on our first jungle trek and chose to ignore advice about wearing leech socks, despite their sex-appeal boosting qualities. Needless to say, we were wrong. The paths were alive with bloody thirsty slinkies excitedly rearing up and lurching towards us, hungry for their next fix of Homo sapien flesh. Using a combination of serious amounts of DEET, given a powerful flick to the adventurous few who reached ankle  territory and only stopping for water if we could do so safely perched on top of a fallen tree, the leeches were defeated!

Taman Negara pandered perfectly to my preconceptions of a primary tropical rain forest: mysterious, magical and full of weird and wonderful creatures. A chorus of insects, birds and tree frogs (mostly unidentifiable) echoed through the canopies building to a crescendo as we drew closer. Butterflies and dragonflies perched on branches in chinks of sunlight and lizards and squirrels darted away as we approached.

Lost in the forest!

What Taman Negara did lack was well marked footpaths. The park prides itself on its acessibility but the routes were poorly marked, overgrown and often barricaded by fallen trees. Within 500m of setting off on our 8km walk to a boat jetty, the route marker informed us we had 13km to go and after an hour of walking (3/5 on the sweat scale by now; think accidental confrontation with a garden sprinkler) it still read 13km. Needless to say after 5 hours of walking (and looking like we’d just completed an army assault course!) we’d well and truly missed the boat back. To add to our frustrations, the eco-tourism hub we had hoped to reach at the jetty was nothing more than a jumble of dilapidated chalets, engulfed with ferns, suggesting that this place had been abandoned for many years. There certainly wasn’t an obvious jetty in sight! To our immense luck (after collapsing, dehydrated and disheartened, on a lonely bench) we were greeted by a local fisherman who kindly gave us a lift down the tumultuous rapids of Sungai Tembeling in his tiny boat.

Later that evening (after much revival thanks to 100plus!) we were comforted to discover that the palm plantations surrounding Taman Negara were home to at least some wildlife on a night safari during which we saw palm civets, wild boar, a leopard cat, snakes and a variety of birds. Perhaps all is not lost.

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