The Signs (Mount Kinabalu Part II)

The City of Kota Kinabalu is quite quaint. You could walk around the major parts of the city, the main bus station, the pier, the shopping malls with no problem. I’m not even sure why they had taxis in that place. The airport was about a 5 minute car ride away but what was more amazing was that our lodgings for the night, a $2 a night hostel actually had a free airport pick-up service. The food was good, on our first night we unfortunately found ourselves in the more expensive waterfront eateries before we found the local market which was still a buzz at 11:00pm at night selling bbq, curries, home made donuts and other local fare at market prices.

The next night we had found an Indian eatery/canteen where patrons were expected to serve themselves, just pile the food on your plate and at the end of the meal a guy would go around and ask what you had and judiciously tell you how much you owed. No priced menu, no elaborate colored plates to keep tab of what you ate, just a guy who you trusted to give you a fair price as much as he trusted you to tell him what you actually ate. What a great system. On our way out to dinner that night we had run into a group of Koreans that had just come back from climbing Mount Kinabalu. All were wet, none were smiling and more than one person had a real hard time climbing up the four flight of stairs to the hostel which we had been running up and down on. This was not a good sign.

Maybe I should have been paying closer attention to those signs. The first one was the small print on the Kota Kinabalu websites that mentions that a “relatively good level of fitness” is required to reach the top of Kinabalu. The next one was the look I got from our guide when we told him that we had wanted to go up the normal route but go down the relatively harder Mesilao route and the final sign were the climbers we met at the base of the mountain as we had just started climbing. All were wet, none were smiling . . . . . you get the drift.

Climbing Kinabalu requires one to get a permit and a guide from the base station within Kinabalu National Park. We had planned to spend the night before and the night after the climb at the park which I highly recommend. You don’t want to start or end your climb of Mount Kinabalu taking a 3 hour ride from the city to the jump off point. The park itself has lots of different type of accommodations within the park itself so that should not be a problem. The climb however requires one to spend a night in Laban Rata before the assault early the next day and there the accommodations (camping is not allowed) are limited so it’s important to book a room in one of the heated or unheated huts or even in the Laban Rata resthouse itself in advanced. As a matter of fact, climbing permits will not be issued to anyone who does not have a booking in Laban Rata so sort this detail out early on. Luckily, we had allotted more than a week in Kota Kinabalu which was a blessing. On our arrival we found out that our preferred date to climb had all the huts and accommodations in Laba Rata fully booked already and so we had to move our climb itinerary one day back. This was going to be blessing in disguise.