Kinabalu National Park was Malaysia’s first UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. It supports a wide range of fauna and flora, some endemic just to the park. Some of the wildlife that can be readily seen are: the Mountain Ground Squirrel, Laughing Thrushes, Kinabalu Friendly Warbler and the Mountain Blackeye (bird).
Located about 40mins drive (43km) from Park Headquarters is ‘Poring Hot Springs’ (Poring from bamboo). Hot sulphurous water has been channelled into pools and tubs and is extremely popular for locals. It was a special bank holiday weekend and it felt like most of Kota Kinabalu were at the springs with us. The complex has changing rooms, toilets and you can even book private tubs. It’s a pity that these are not open after the mountain walk as it would be an ideal way to provide relief from the hike. Additionally there is a Butterfly Garden and a Canopy walkway. Not for the faint hearted, the series of walkways are suspended up to 40m above the jungle floor, little more than suspended plank-bottomed rope bridges swinging and swaying up and down and from side to side. Walkway 3 in particular is unnerving as the trees suddenly give way to a vertiginous drop to the canopy floor below. Whilst one can get unique views of the surrounding forest, one was hanging on for dear life to get to the next platform.
At the Park Headquarters there was basic accommodation with twin share rooms and showers; the latter were OK to freshen up but the water came and went and the temperature fluctuated from freezing cold to boiling hot. Dinner was at the canteen style restaurant offering a good assortment of food. Then it was an early night before the 2-day hike.
Borneo’s backbone is the Crocker Range. The highest peak on this is at Mt Kinabalu and is ironically known as ‘Low’s Peak’. It is named after Sir Hugh Low, the British Colonial Secretary who recorded the first official ascent of Mt Kinabalu in 1851. It is by no means low at an elevation of 4,095.2m AOD.
The two-day one-night ascent of the mountain up the Timpohon Summit Trail begins at Timpohon Gate (elevation 1866m AOD) and after a short deceptive descent to Carson Falls, leads up through predominantly steep steps (as in trail steps sometimes of knee height and sometimes in the very loosest sense of the word) and continues uphill for the rest of the 8.75km trip.
It may or may not be helpful that there are markers every 0.5km to show you how much progress you are making with the last km to the rest point at Laban Rata (6km into trek, elevation 3272m AOD) broken down into hundred metres progress (it’s that bad!). There are rest shelters at regular intervals with basic toilets and ground squirrel proofed rubbish bins.
The first four kilometres are fairly reasonable, respectively speaking, taking about three hours to reach the Layang Layang rest stop (elevation 2621m AOD) for lunch. After congratulating yourself that you’ve already reached the halfway point and 2/3rds of that days hike, the ascent to Laban Rata can easily take another three hours as the going gets tougher and the trail is a lot harder to climb.
Laban Rata is a welcome sight after the long trudge. Ice-cold showers and a hot buffet dinner await knackered hikers. Then it’s a safety briefing before getting a very early night. We were in bed by 7pm but awake again at 1am the next morning.
At 2am the restaurant opens for a supper-cum-early-breakfast type meal before heading out at 2.30am. It is 1.1km to the last checkpoint (Sayat Sayat hut, elevation 3668m AOD), of which 800m is a series of steep wooden stairways up the mountainside. It takes at least an hour and half to reach this point; any hikers not reaching this point by 5am are turned back as they will not make it to the summit. The last burst from Sayat Sayat can take almost two hours as tiredness and altitude kicks in. In places the only way to get up is to haul yourself up a thick white rope attached to the rock; this also traces the trail in the darkness. The route is traversed in zigzags to reduce the strain on the legs, meanwhile breathing becomes difficult to the point of feeling like your lungs are about to explode. One of the mountain guides came to my rescue around the 7.5km point as I started to really feel the shortness of breath with the thin air; if it wasn’t for him helping me, I would have struggled to reach the summit. But reach it I did and in time for the sunrise.
The descent was nearly as gruelling in its own way. We left the summit soon after the sunrise display and it took just over 2 hours to reach Laban Rata for breakfast proper. The paths and wooden steps were wet and slippery, so didn’t allow for fast progress. Leaving Laban Rata at 9.30, it took two and a half hours to reach the 4km marker and Layang Layang rest stop, then just under three hours to reach Timpohon Gate from there. The descent pounds feet and puts pressure on thighs, knees and ankles. In the other direction, porters put us to shame as they walk steadily past with various loads on their backs – anything from vegetables to girders, 3x 3m lengths of 6” pipes slung on the shoulders and 50kg bags of cement! However, I have never known a km to feel so long before in my life; the whole thing seemed never ending and it was a relief to finally reach Carson Falls. The downside to this is there was one small ascent to hobble up in order to complete the walk and actually cross Timpohon Gate. After a canteen style lunch at the restaurant adjacent to Park Headquarters, it was back to Kota Kinabalu for our last night in Borneo.
Whilst we seem to have done a lot here (the length of the blogs demonstrate that), we both feel that we have hardly scratched the surface and we were leaving before we’d even had chance to begin.
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