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Kinabalu
Solo Travel (Part 1)
A Travelogue
by Leif Pettersen
Posted
on March 12th, 2005
 The
people of Borneo are the daintiest pukers ever. I fled
Brunei on a
series of two, amusement park caliber ferry rides. I was sitting up
front, where the turbulence levels could have turned an astronaut green
and my neighbors were not enjoying the ride. As always, I was fine.
Comfortable even. I have never experienced significant movement related
sickness. You could feed me a four-course Italian dinner, then strap me
upside-down in a Johnny Jump-Up, put me on a Moroccan intercity bus for
eight hours and I’d arrive having expelled nothing but bad breath.
Unfortunately,
the same can’t be
said of my valiant anti-nausea
fortitude in the face of other violently retching people,
like the
Englishman sitting next to me on the whale watch boat tour in Kaikoura.
That guy was making noises that sounded like that he was ejecting every
organ all the way down to his colon. The Borneo islanders on the other
hand, never made a noise louder than a conservative throat clearing. I
wasn’t even aware that a large number of the people around me were
heaving until I killed both batteries on my laptop, packed it away and
looked around for the first time in two hours. Many of them
were in a
prone position, laying across three seats with wash clothes over their
foreheads, each with a plastic bag or trash can within spewing
distance. I
salute them in their vomiting discreteness!
| I was
deposited in Kota Kinabalu (KK), the capitol of the
Sabah region Malaysian Borneo. My presence in KK
was
necessary for
two reasons; stage my assault on Mount
Kinabalu, 88 kilometers west of
the city and sort out how I was going to get to and from Palau Sipadan
where I had a date with my impending SCUBA open water certification in
one of the best diving regions in the world. None of this ambitious
planning was accomplished due to my sole day of panicky organization
falling on a Sunday. I was still a bit salty about my repeated
encounters with untimely business closures in Bandar, so I did not
manage well with the understandable lack of resources available to me
on a Sunday morning in Kota Kinabalu. The closest I was able to get to
making any progress was to slide into the Kinabalu Nature Resorts
office minutes before its early closing, who informed me that there
were no open beds on the mountain for the following day, but I didn’t
buy it. I had already been warned that this office, despite being the
main booking agent for the mountain accommodations, seemed to only have
access to a certain block of reservations. The guy that had passed on
this hard-won information to me was told by this same office that there
were no openings on the day he wanted to go, three days in the future,
unless he was willing to sleep in a cabin with no heater, so he booked
in the non-heated cabin. |
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Then
after freezing in his bed, he met a group
of girls that had booked beds in the heated cabin just the day before.
I made the calculated risk to just show up at the mountain and hope
this rumor was true or, at the outset, that there would be a
last-minute cancellation.
 Meanwhile my
body was working to commandeer my carefully
formulated plans to show up at the mountain with nothing
reserved and
drop to my knees, begging for a bed. I woke up that morning with the
calf muscles in both legs sore and throbbing. Considering all I had
done the previous day was sit on two freakishly rough ferries for a
cumulative four hours, I wasn’t sure what I had done to earn this pain.
The mystery didn’t last long as I got the $hits right about lunch time.
I was on the toilet 11 times in 10 hours. Imodium, provided minor
relief, but in the interim, the aching in legs slowly spread over my
entire body. Every move hurt. My first thought was the flu. But when I
told Lucy about this - as in Lucy of KK’s legendary hostel “Lucy’s
Homestay, Backpacker Lodge” - she immediately whipped out a can of bug
spray the size of a didgeridoo and sprayed my room top to bottom. I was
too stunned to ask what she thought that I might have contracted via
mosquitoes. Instead I ran to the bathroom and checked my whole body,
finding no mosquito bites, but still, when you’re a former Planet Earth
Hypochondria All Star developments like this are hard to swallow. I
eventually doped myself silly on Ibuprofen and went to bed early,
sourly thinking that I would have to delay Mount Kinabalu groveling and
spend a few days in KK recovering. With my now stunningly behind
schedule itinerary stressing me out, losing a few more days to sit and
suffer were not comforting.
Miraculously,
the next
morning, I was feeling 60% better. This improvement
combined with the
non-demanding two hour bus ride that I needed to take to the Mount
Kinabalu park headquarters encouraged me to hastily set off
from Lucy’s
with wavering confidence. I was up and down the whole day. One minute I
felt fine, the next I felt like I needed a hospital bed. I resolved to
sit and rest in my hostel at park headquarters for the remainder of the
day, pooling strength and health for the first leg of the climb; a five
hour, six kilometer death march to the Laban Rata hut, the overnight
summit staging area ¾ of the way up the mountain.
 The
bus ride to the mountain was fantastic, but I
was stunned in that as soon as we were out of KK, we started going
uphill and continued like that the whole way. The scenery was amazing,
but equally I was wondering when we were going to start heading
downhill. If we kept going up like that would there be any mountain
left to climb? Soon after we had entered the cloud line, after 90
minutes of going straight up, I was deposited along with a few other
backpackers at the park turn-off. It was almost inconceivable that
after all that climbing there was still a good eight hours of walking
to get to the fog obscured top of this mountain. Well, I guess that’s
13,000 feet above sea level for you.
 My legs had
promptly cramped up on the bus and loosening them up was not pleasant.
It was only about 100 yards up hill from the road to park headquarters,
but by the time I got there, I was already gasping for oxygen in the
thin air of the mountain. And this was only the beginning. The good
news was that I was able to book a bed both at headquarters (not
usually and problem) and at Laban Rata. I was
relieved that I had gotten a bed (in your face Kinabalu Nature Resorts
office!), but it was in one of the dreaded unheated dorm rooms. Then I
recalled a message that I read in a BootsNAll discussion group, saying
that the heated rooms were far too hot and uncomfortable and you could
get all the blankets you needed in the unheated rooms. Hell, put a
family of bats in the wall and it would be just like a February night
in my old bedroom back in Minneapolis. Assuming that I wasn’t ailing
too much from my mysterious ailments, or exploding calf muscles, or
altitude sickness. Yes, I knew I was doomed, but when has that ever
stopped me?
| I took
it easy for the rest of the afternoon, eating a huge
lunch, doing some writing, packing my tiny day bag with the bare-ass
essentials for the climb, attending the pre-climb briefing and then
wolfing down yet another huge meal before retiring to bed early with my
new book “Middlesex” by Jeffery Eugenides. |
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