“Just put one foot in front of the other, take three steps and rest. Then do it over again”. My friend wasn’t talking to me but he might as well have been, I was a zombie, walking dead. My higher functions such as thinking, talking, making funny jokes had long since ceased and now all my body was telling me to do was do whatever it takes ot get through this. Suiee, the guy with the smart advice was talking to Ivy at the front of our group. We were somewhere near Laban Rata, the rest stop 2/3rds up Mount Kinabalu and our stop for the night. I’m not sure what happened to me, I used to run, I used to bike. I used to rock climb and do stupid stuff like join a 100k bike ride with no preparation at all and still come out alive. The truth is I used to do a lot of things but the operative word being “used”. No I was stuck more than halfway up the mountain and running out of steam fast.
Just a few month before I had quit my work with just a sketchy plan of how to live the rest of my life. It would consist of traveling, writing and taking amazing pictures along the way. Just how I was going to fund this lifestyle was a small detail that I hadn’t quite worked out yet but it wasn’t about to derail my grand plan.
And so while I was making my mind up of how to kick off this amazingly smart plan of mine I got a call from a former climber buddy. He saw an ad for a budget airline promo which had a route Kota Kinabalu and wanted to know I was interested. Was I interested? Was I interested? Of course I was, even way back when I was still climbing I had always wanted to climb a foreign mountain. The mountains in the Philippines had always been more of long treks rather than climbs and even though I wasn’t planning on taking on anything technical like the North Face of Everest I still wanted to get a foreign mountain under my belt and the third highest mountain in South East Asia didn’t sounds like such a bad idea. So before I knew it I was on a flight to Kota Kinabalu.
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5 comments:
Hey fellow kaladkarers, if this doesn't get you on board the KKK 2009, I dunno what would?! Sure our friend Joey could be a little profound, but aren't the best climbs the most memorable ones?! And to climb together again after so many years, in shape, out of shape,one more for the road, last hurrah... seriously think about it.
Mount Kinabalu is actually the highest mountain in South East Asia
Not sure where I pulled the 3rd highest mountain claim from but as it turns out that may actually be wrong. Unfortunately, it's also not the highest according to the extensive research I did (if you can call wikipedia research. According to them it's the 4th tallest mountain . Other sites put it as the 5th tallest mountain - http://mount-kinabalu-borneo.com/blog/mount-kinabalu-is-not-the-highest-mountain-in-south-east-asia.html
Keep up the good work.
Thanks Phyliss.
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