Falan Falan Jalan Sueann!

Hello.

So we have begun the Borneo leg of our trip. We are planning on spending the majority of our time in the Sabah region because of Mount Kinabalu and the tons of wildlife to see.

In case you are wondering the title of this entry is a badly spelt bit of Malay which was a great piece of advice while trekking up Mount Kinabalu. It means 'slowly slowly walk'.

Okay, firstly we arrived in Kota Kinabalu where we planned to organise ourselves for the next few weeks. Instead we discovered that our bank cards didn't work and we were running out of cash fast. It turns out that the bank fraud office had cancelled all the cards because it was out of the ordinary that we were using them in Malaysia. This would usually be a good move on their part, but on this occasion we were about to go to Mount Kinabalu, which has no ATM's, and it was to late to exchange any money. We had a word with the bank and they said they would be able to get the cards re-activated in 24 hours, then a nice person at the hostel dragged a money exchange man away from his dinner to change all of our spare pounds and dollars. We had just enough to get us through the next few days until we got to a town with an ATM again.

The only rooms available at the park at the base of Mount Kinabalu where deluxe rooms. It was lovely, more like an apartment really, so we booked into our deluxe room again for when returned from the climb.

The first day involved a 5 hour walk to another accomodation 2km from the top of the mountain. We ate a bunch of food, watched an amazing sunset from above the clouds (picture below), and tried to get some sleep.














We were due to get up early the next morning for the final climb so we went to bed at about 8pm. Firstly the room was like an oven, but luckily the heater shorted out giving Sueann a small fireworks display of sparks. The other people in our room decided to get up at this point and have a chat in the corridor. Rats where running about above the ceiling. I still managed to get a few hours sleep but Sueann had altitude induced insomnia so didn't sleep a wink.

We got up at 3am (half an hour after most people) had a cup of tea and set of to climb the final 2km by torch light. We don't have any pictures from this stage as most of our brains were taken up with putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to fall asleep. Some parts of the climb involved pulling yourself up steep inclines with ropes not knowing how far away the ground was if your were to fall.

After a hard slog we reached the top as the sun was coming up. There was no dramatic sun rise, which most people hope for, but it didn't matter. The mountain top and the surrounding view was breath taking enough. Here we are at the top of the top, 4000m above see level.














As we were just forgetting the pain of the assent we started heading down. The scenery was amazing. Here's me with an amazing rock formation thing in the background. It may look like I have drifted off to sleep but I'm pretty sure that was a blink.












The rest of the day was spent getting all the way down to the bottom. Sueann had a dodgy knee from all the downward climbing on the Inca trail and within a kilometre she was feeling it again. It took us a while to hobble down but it was all worth it for the view from the top. For a few days afterwards our legs ached quite a bit and we avoided walking down stairs where ever possible.

Then we moved on to Sepilok to see some orang utans...