The Mountain That Eats Money

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Because Borneo is so full of tourists it seemed best to do the thing that I don’t like doing, and arrange all my accommodations in Sabah in advance. So I booked myself stupid to make sure of getting to the places I wanted to get to, and got four nights at Mt. Kinabalu National Park, then five nights at the Danum Valley Field Centre, followed by two nights at the Kinabatangan River, two nights at Sepilok and two nights at Poring Hot Springs. There really are a lot of tourists on this island, and all the tourists themselves seem surprised at this. Think “Borneo” and you think untrammelled rainforest, not tourist crowds, but its just one big intermeshed web of tourist routes. The two Dutch lingerie models that were in my dorm at Kubah National Park turned up at Bako National Park, half the people from Bako passed through Niah National Park while I was there, a couple of them were then on my bus to Brunei, I ran into a guy I’d met in Kuching when I got to Kota Kinabalu, and a girl from my hotel in KK then turned up at Mt. Kinabalu.

Mt. Kinabalu is a fabulous place, and it was definitely nice to get to somewhere cooler. It hadn’t rained in Borneo for quite some time and every day seemed hotter than the last, the heat just continually building up with no rain to stave it off. I stayed at the Bayu Homestay about five minutes along the road from the entrance to the park, where a dorm bed costs 20 Ringgits (about NZ$10). The prices for accommodation in the park itself used to be high, now they’re insane! 120 Ringgits for a dorm bed (NZ$60), up to 3500 Ringgits (NZ$1750) for a six-bed room; and if you’re climbing the mountain the cost of a dorm bed at the rest point of Laban Rata starts at 320 Ringgits (NZ$160)! If you want to get a minivan to KK the park charges 150 Ringgits (NZ$75), but if you walk two minutes out onto the main road you can get one for 15 Ringgits (NZ$7.50). Its an expensive exercise climbing Mt. Kinabalu, but its very popular. In the peak (no pun intended) tourist season the park’s accommodation is fully-booked and so are the climbing permits. You can climb the mountain in one day if you’re very fit or very crazy. In fact there’s a race held every year where very fit and crazy people do exactly that. The fastest time in 2008, up to the summit and back down again to the start point, was 2 hours 44 minutes and 47 seconds. But most people take about six hours just to reach Laban Rata at the 6km point, where they then get a few hours sleep before climbing the last 4km to the summit in the dark so they can be up there when the sun comes up and they get a fabulous view of mist - or, I hear, sometimes a sunrise over a spectacular view. You pays your moneys and you takes your chances. I could never climb the whole mountain: it took me five hours just to reach Layang Layang at the 4km point because I was stopping every 100 metres to look at things and take photos. There was a couple staying at the Bayu Homestay though who did the whole climb from Timpohon Gate to the summit and back in ten hours. They looked a bit tired when they came down.

If you are doing the summit climb you need to pay for a guide, but you can go up to the Layang Layang point by yourself. There are certain birds that are only found at higher altitudes on the mountain for which as a birder you need to do at least this part of the climb to have a chance of seeing, like the Kinabalu friendly warbler - which wasn’t so friendly towards me and remained hidden. There are also lots of regular day-tripper tourists to the park who do the climb to Layang Layang, and I don’t really understand why. I can understand climbing to the summit because that’s an achievement, something to be proud of; and if you’re a birder or a botanist or an entomologist or something like that then you’re looking for specific things at that level; but the regular folk who just struggle up the steps without ever really looking at anything except their feet, reach Layang Layang, and then turn around and come down again I don’t understand at all. I mean, its not like you can go home and boast about having climbed a third of the way up a mountain!!

Although I didn’t find the un-friendly warbler, I did see some of the other mountain birds like the Kinabalu bush-warbler and black-breasted fruithunter, as well as a variety of squirrels from the weeny Jentinck’s squirrel to the snackiverous mountain ground squirrel. On the way back down the Summit Trail it started to pour down which put an end to the birding, but did bring out the 70cm Kinabalu giant earthworms, found only on this mountain. What the rain didn’t bring out was the earthworms’ main predator, the 30cm Kinabalu giant leech, again found only on Mt. Kinabalu and something I’d been hoping to see. However the next day, once more in the wet embrace of another thunderous downpour, I did come across what I can only assume was the Kinabalu giant leech. It was a leech, it was giant, but was it the Kinabalu giant leech? Without any real working knowledge of the Mt. Kinabalu leech fauna I don’t really know for sure.

Most of my time at Kinabalu was spent not on the Summit Trail but in the forest lower down. Pretty much everybody goes to the mountain just to climb to the top and then they leave, so you don’t see many other visitors on the forest trails and those you do see are usually birders. There are absolutely tonnes of birds here, and many of them come in waves. That’s actually what they’re called, “bird waves”, where a bunch of different species all move through the trees together to drive out insects. Sometimes it seemed as if every 100 metres I was meeting another bird wave. They’re kind of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get several species all at once, but on the other hand most of them are new to you so you’re trying to identify unfamiliar birds from a flock of several different unfamiliar birds, and then a fog bank rolls in so you can’t see anything anyway! After the first day or two though you’ve got the commoner core birds sorted out and can flick through them to concentrate on the less common wavers.

One of the more sought-after birds of Mt. Kinabalu is the endemic Whitehead’s trogon. I’ve never had much luck with finding trogons so I wasn’t going to be too surprised if I couldn’t find this one, but to my amazement I’d barely arrived at the park (well, fourth day, but who’s counting?) before I saw my first pair, and then just twenty minutes further up the same trail I came across no fewer than four of them all moving as a group, sort of a “trogon wave” you might say. I also managed to spy the cute little Whitehead’s pigmy squirrel, which is only a bit bigger than the tiny plain pigmy squirrel of the lowlands and has long white ear-tufts, so long in fact that they look like horns giving it the appearance of some sort of devil-mouse. I couldn’t for the life of me find the Whitehead’s spiderhunter or Whitehead’s broadbill though. If you’re wondering, and I know you are, John Whitehead was an English zoologist who spent a lot of time in southeast Asia collecting museum specimens. He was the first non-local person to climb to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu, in 1877. He named the highest point Low’s Peak after Sir Hugh Low who was the first to attempt the climb some years earlier.

Its not all birds at Mt. Kinabalu. The place is an entomologist’s dream. Even just the Bayu Homestay would be heaven for a lepidopterologist. The variety of moths there was extraordinary, from tiny ones the size of ants to ones the size of small family cars, and all the colours of the rainbow from brown to another shade of brown (also white, green, multi-hued, etc etc). On one of my daily treks through the bush I took some time out from birding to have a dabble in one of the mountain streams, where in just one small side-pool I found freshwater crabs and limpets, the nymphs of dragonflies and damselflies, the tadpoles of what were probably large-eyed litter frogs (maybe), and three different species of hillstream loaches.

But too soon my allotted time at Mt. Kinabalu was up and I had to leave for the hotter climes of the Danum Valley….

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Photos

Kinabalu giant leech
I'm not sure if this is the real giant leech Mimobdella buettikoferi, but its definitely a leech and its definitely on Mt. Kinabalu and its most definitely a giant!

Comments

[Craig Smith]

very good
Very good blog on Mt Kinabalu, Israel. Craig Smith