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Kinabalu
Solo Travel (Part 3)
A
Travelogue by Leif Pettersen
Posted
on March 12th, 2005
 At
the lunch
shelter, I ate a candy bar and drank a fair amount of water.
I felt
surprisingly good for about four minutes and then it all went
dramatically wrong. I had been too focused and distracted to notice
while we were moving but sure enough, my full-body aches had returned
and they were extra pissed off that I had been exerting myself so
intensely. Then my stomach suddenly turned on me. I ran for the
outhouse, a filthy, squat, hole-in-the-ground affair. In a panic, I
sprayed the area down with the ubiquitous hose that is present in most
Asian toilets, which historically took the place of toilet paper – as
well as often serving as an excuse to never clean the bathrooms – and
beared down for The Squat That Never Ends. I won’t go into details, but
I was in there for a very long time, so it came as no surprise when I
emerged that the group, even the half-destroyed French guy, had pressed
on without me. Worse still, someone had decided to turn off the water
while I was indisposed and so there was nothing to flush down my
efforts or wash my hands.
Mount
Kinabalu had been
suffering from a
water shortage and to combat this, in the typical obtuse
Malaysian
decision-making way, they were combating the problem by turning off the
water at random intervals. Additionally, some senior management genius
got it into his head that if they locked half the toilets they would
save more water, because people would not have to go to the bathroom as
much. Instead there was a perpetual line of 2-5 people waiting for the
bathroom wherever you went. Worse still, while some sink faucets were
dutifully wrenched shut, these conservation-minded people didn’t seem
to take any notice of the numerous sinks that dribbled water
constantly, that could have been fixed with a simple quarter turn from
a screwdriver. No wonder they had a water shortage.
So
with body aches, stomach cramps, stiff muscles and soapy hands, I set
off alone. With no one to help me set a pace or distract
me with
conversation, I came unwound in a hurry. My discomfort seemed to be
multiplying with each passing minute. By the time I was ¾ of the way to
Laban Rata, I was sure I wasn’t going to make it. I still had 500
meters (1,640 feet) to climb and I was reduced to taking the smallest
steps, resting every minute or so. At the final rest shelter, I sat
down, drank lots of water and took careful measure of my condition. |
|
I
was either going to have to finish this thing, ask for a helicopter
rescue or throw myself off a cliff. I lingered for so long
that the
Czech couple eventually dragged themselves up, rested and moved on.
Ronnie finally appeared and all but stood there tapping his foot,
waiting for me. What, did he have a goddamn date up at Laban Rata? I
pulled myself together and got going just as it started to rain.
 I
know I’m prone to teensy-weensy exaggerations now and again
in this journal, but I can say with all honestly and
authority that the
last hour before Laban Rata was probably the hardest thing I have ever
done in my life. My trembling strides were barely the length of my
foot. I was gasping for air. I had to stop and rest after every few
steps. My vision was tunneling on me and I was having a hard time
focusing on the terrain so there was a fair amount of missteps and
stumbling. My head was exploding, my neck and shoulders were on fire,
my throat was throbbing, my hands were numb and I couldn’t feel my legs
below the knees. It was most definitely the most terrible hour of my
life.
I
saw Laban Rata long before I got to it. I
was moving at the slowest possible speed without actually being at a
dead stop. The short, but sadistic set of stairs that you’re forced to
climb to get to the reception/restaurant area had me cursing and
wishing a disfiguring disease on the guy that had designed the
building.
 I
staggered in the door more exhausted
than I have ever been
in my life and collapsed into the nearest chair. I saw the
rest of my
group across the room digging into some food, but I didn’t have the
strength to get back up and join them. I just waved and used what
little strength I could summon to drank my water. Ronnie tried to
encourage me to walk the 20 feet to the reception desk to check-in, but
I wouldn’t have moved for a naked Jennifer Garner at that point. After
a very, very long time, I got to my feet, I still had almost no feeling
below the knees and every fiber was in pain. I lurched to the desk,
slumped on it and got down to business. I’m sure the desk clerks at
Laban Rata are accustomed to dealing with half-dead people, but the
look in their eyes revealed that I was perhaps the most dangerously
impaired person they had seen in a very long time. My diminished
concentration and numb hands made it nearly impossible to fill in their
forms.
Finally,
I was given a key and the guy said
he would lead me to
my room, where I had every intention of lying down and
dying, but of
course dying is never as easy as you would hope. Instead of leading me
down the hall, he led me back outside, pointed way up the hill to a
white cabin that was barely visible through the fog and told me it was
a 10 minute climb to my hut. I wanted to cry, but I was too tired.
Instead, I turned around and went back into the restaurant where I paid
a ridiculous amount of money for a plate of cold noodles, a bottle of
water, a 7-Up-like drink called “100 Plus” and a Snickers bar. I ate
all of this as fast as my feebleness would allow, sat alone for another
20 minutes or so, enduring the stares of the concerned staff and then
finally steeled myself for the climb to my hut. There were many stairs,
there were steep rock inclines and finally an infuriating downhill wood
plank walkway that lead to my hut - at that point, my logic was that
downhill movement of any kind meant that at some point I had been
forced to go uphill unnecessarily, an offence punishable by death as
far as I was concerned.
I fell
into the hut to find
the French guy slowly unpacking
all his stuff. We traded stories about how unspeakably
horrendous our
days had been, before I gulped down two Ibuprofen and fell asleep.
 Two
hours later I woke up and felt a world better. Man, is
Ibuprofen the
world’s greatest drug or what? I swung out of my bunk and stood up with
astoundingly little discomfort. The French guy had also been napping
and was waking up now as well. Initially, I had no intention of going
back down to the main building. It was only 5:00PM, but I had eaten so
much back at 2:00PM and considering that we were going to be getting up
and having breakfast at 2:00AM, before our 3:00AM departure for the
summit to catch the sunrise, I thought that I would just go back to bed
and sleep straight through until our wake-up. The French guy convinced
me to go down just to drink something and try to firm up plans for
2:00AM with Ronnie. When several of us had stopped him earlier in the
restaurant and quizzed him about the protocol for the summit the
language barrier had been impenetrable. After carefully quizzing him
for five minute none of us were entirely sure about when or where to
meet. I was too tired to take part in this exchange and besides I was
making a spectacle of myself with my food and my half-dumb, hand-mouth
coordination.
Walking
back down to the main
building again was surprisingly
painless. I couldn’t believe that I had made such a quick
recover when
only two hours earlier I felt like there was an even chance of me
expiring in my sleep. We eventually found Ronnie and more or less told him
when and where to meet us, after which I loitered for a little while
trading stories with people before heading back to the hut. As tired as
I was, my body simply did not want to go to sleep at 7:00PM after
having a two hour late afternoon nap. The French guy came back and
promptly went to sleep with an accompanying chorus of snoring, heavy
breathing (for some reason sleeping on our sides, both of our
preferences, made it more difficult to breath, so it was either pant on
our sides or lie uncomfortably awake on our backs). Once every 20
minutes he woke up and blew his nose, making a noise that sounded like
tearing metal. I slept sparingly until 1:30AM when my stomach sent me
running for the toilet again.
 After
doping
myself up on Ibuprofen, vitamins, and Imodium and eating
what little I
could get down for breakfast we set off for the summit. Ronnie proved
himself to be even more severely inadequate with the “flashlight” he
brought along. It was a kids, toy army thing that cast a beam of light
only half as bright as my key chain light. Other than the
aforementioned key chain, I didn’t have a flashlight of my own. The key
chain was actually more than bright enough get by, but it had a push
button switch, which meant that I had to keep my thumb on it all the
time, which was impossible with all the crawling and rope climbing we
were doing. I could have rented a real flashlight at reception, but by
that point I had dropped so much money on that effing mountain that I
wasn’t going to part with any more than absolutely necessary. Plus, I
was starting to become genuinely afraid that I might not have enough
cash for a bus ticket to Sandakan.
 I
ended up
hanging back with a bunch of scrupulously
over-prepared Japanese people that had among their arsenal
of gadgets
super bright forehead lights. Less than 10 minutes into the 2 and ½
hour climb, I was already struggling and questioning whether I could
make it. I was deteriorating quickly and was reduced to the
couple-steps-stop-and-rest routine from the end of the previous day.
Fortunately, within another five minutes, nearly everyone else was in
the same condition and I wasn’t left behind.
| I
had assumed that the rope climbing would be insufferable,
but strangely it helped me to get a second wind. Being able to use my
arms took a huge load off my legs. While my arms were aching from
sickness, they weren’t numb from exhaustion like my legs and using them
to share the work improved my attitude immensely. I
realized then that
I was going to make it. Not very quickly, but eventually. |
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