Above the Clouds

It's like deja vu, we were here 3 months ago and here we are going through our paces climbing up the same mountain again. This time I have managed to convince my eldest and Noruen to join. It was also an opportune time to take the mind off from work and made full use of two public holidays during the week. We flew on Monday and came back today.

The 85 km taxi ride from the coast up to the mountain on Monday was accompanied by a torrential rain, roads were flooded and driving uphill under such condition was quite hazardous and not good for the faint heart. It was also enough to make us wary that our foot climb the next day might never happen.

But lo and behold, it was sunshine and clear sky when we reached our hotel - the Kinabalu Pine Resort. The place wasn't something that I had expected, internet could give quite deceiving impression, but overall the location was fantastic with the summit of the mountain in full view.

Fizah was a bit awed looking at the peak and was probably thinking what has she been taken into.

We started off at 8 am in the morning, much earlier than the previous trip. We had a petite lady guide, who

immediately offered to carry my heavy ruck sack that weighed 12kg. I was a bit apprehensive to let her do it but then she told us that she is used to carrying heavy load and that's part of her job to earn a living.

Later we found out that she is actually a very able lady, was overall 6th in the ladies ranking amongst Malaysian in the famous Kinabalu mountain race. She was able to run to the summit in 2 hrs and 22 minutes.

Her best time going up and down and running a further 5 km to the finishing line at the Kinabalu Park headquarter, a total distance of 24 km, was 3 hrs and 45 minutes. I found that

mind boggling. She has climbed the mountain over a thousand times!

Our climb up was slow. We let the two girls made their own paces. We finally reached Laban Rata at 3270 m height in just short of 6 hours. Everyones were tired. Apart from me, the kids didn't take the pre-trip preparation too seriously. Add to the misery were a few burst of cold rains while climbing into the clouds. But overall we were lucky as there were no such torrential rains like the day before.

At around 2.30 am in the morning, we started our final ascend. Faris stayed

back as he was again hit by attitude sickness, but mainly because he had done it before and didn't want to go through the ordeal again. Noruen turned back after 1.5 hours as she too wasn't feeling well. That left me and Fizah to wade our way to the summit.

We were told not to take too many stops and just take small steps to go up. We did that and reached the crowded summit well before 6 am. People seemed to be waiting for the sunrise before heading down. Imagine how it looked like when something like one hundred climbers were just squatting and sitting on the rocks up there. There was nowhere to go apart from just waiting near the top. In the end we managed to take our obligatory photos at the summit.

We made our way down. From Laban Rata it took over four hours to reach the gate. The taxi trip to our hotel in KK was again constantly interrupted by torrential rain. The taxi driver (the same one again) was saying that the rains were a sign of good prosperity!

That was my fourth climbs to the mountain, admittedly still a long way to beat my father who has scaled the Mount Kinabalu seven times before. I hope to accomplish the same feat. But for now I have set my sight to another mountain.