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Published: April 25th 2011
Will trying to look cool ........
when really what he was thinking was shit don't fall, shit don't fall...Mount Kinabalu
We flew out of Singapore into Kota Kinabula, Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. We transferred into our hotel which was next to yet another shopping mall. The next morning I set off to climb Mout Kinabalu a 4,095m (13,500ft) mountain about a 2hr drive outside of Kota Kinabalu.
The day started out on the wet side and I kept raining for the whole day. We started walking from the Timpohon gate at 1,860m with my two Swiss walking companions and our 2 guides. The walk up apart from being wet was out of the way fairly quickly and we settled down in our dorms at about 3pm and as it was chilly we stayed there until we made our summit attempt at 2am the next day.
It had stopped raining – hurray!! We set off from the Gunting Lagada Hut at 3,200m and made our way up the slippy rocks using ropes attached the mountain. At one point I lost my guide so found myself on my own for the last 1.5hrs until the summit (I think my lack of pace caught him by surprise) which I got to at 5am before the sunsrise at 6am. The
feeling of getting to the top was great but not as good as how it felt to start coming down! The sun rose as I started to climb down and the views were fantastic.
We came all the way down to the bottom that day and got back to the starting gate at 11.30am. Coming down was the hardest bit and my 3 ringit stick turned out to be a life saver. When you get to the bottom you are knackered but feeling quite pleased with yourself all in all, that is until you walk past the records board next to the office which shows the quickest time for something that had taken my 1.5days to be 2hrs 33mins………..
And Tory managed to successfully navigate her way around the shopping mall only getting lost once, sniffing out a Starbucks and for the first time ever going to the cinema on her own. We therefore both achieved our personal goals.
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