Lest you ever consider dipping your bare hand into an unassuming pool of water on Sabah’s Mount Kinabalu, allow me to dissuade this notion – it is freezing cold.
That may be an obvious fact, but to a curious-minded teenager, a (literal) first hand experience was needed to confirm it.
Mere seconds was all it took to make my fingers feel like popsicles.
Content with my findings, I hastily slipped my glove back on and continued my climb down the rocky plateau.
The view halted my steps.
During our summit earlier, the houses in the valleys thousands of metres below appeared only as a scattering of star-like lights dotting the darkness. Now, a panoramic sea of clouds – fluffy and wispy – blanketed the valleys.
Everything felt surreal.
And to think that a lightning strike could’ve ended this climb before it even begun.
We’ll get to that. At the moment, I was still in awe that I was standing on a 4095.2m-tall mountain.
Just the previous night, my classmates and I were doing “the finale” – our final training.
For several weeks, we had been waking up after midnight to train for the climb. The entrance to our boarding school was built on an incline, perfect for us to run laps on.
By now, the security personnel at the guardhouse were accustomed to the sight of students running up and down the small hill basically every night. We were not the first bunch to do this.
Our school had a unique condition for graduating: We must hold a Mount Kinabalu Climb Certificate.
Despite our principal hailing from Peninsular Malaysia, he was insistent that Sabahan – and the smattering of non-Sabahan – students be highly familiar with the state’s pride.
The previous year’s Form 5 students had succeeded at the task. This year, it was our turn.
My friends and I had declared our finale a success. Back to bed we went, confident that next day’s climb would be a piece of cake.
Except, a walk up a mountain is no walk in the park, we soon learned.
First of all, we trained on perfectly tarred roads. The mountain trail was, of course, dirt. But it was dirt that had turned to mud due to the rainfall that greeted us at Timpohon Gate, the main access up the mountain.
What a welcome.
Our entourage had driven almost three hours from Papar to Kundasang, Ranau, so we were not about to let a little downpour stop us. (Also, we’d paid for everything, from climbing permit to accommodation – no refunds.)
We put our raincoats on and trudged up the muddy paths, careful not to slip. Even more careful not to accidentally trod on one of the writhing masses that occasionally appeared throughout the trek.
(Apologies in advance for the following imagery.)
They were earthworms. But not the typical ones you’d find in your garden. Scale the size to about 10 times longer and slightly “girth-ier”. And now imagine a wriggling “wad” of them wrestling each other for some reason.
These wads appeared again on our climb down the next day as a light shower persisted.
The climb was arduous; the rain never letting up. But worse, now there were thunder and lightning, too.
Seeing a bright flash of light a little way ahead, I had said to my friend, “Luckily that didn’t strike us.”
We resumed walking until we bumped into two other friends, just standing there giggling. Nervous giggling, it turned out.
They told us they had witnessed lightning strike the ground mere inches in front of them.
What a close call. But perhaps none of us had incurred Thor’s wrath that day, because we all escaped unscathed.
We later safely convened with our fellow students and teachers at Laban Rata, where we would rest for the evening.
After midnight, we began summiting.
If viewed from the villages below, all one would see were rows of tiny specks of light bobbing up the mountain. From our point of view, we saw only misty darkness around us, our respective headlamps providing limited illumination.
Our gloved hands grabbed tightly on the ropes guiding us up. No muddy paths here. Just one vast granite landscape leading to the peak.
I’m drawing from two-decade-old memories here, so things are a little foggy (like it was up the mountain). I remember failing to view the sunrise from Low’s Peak. It was unsurprisingly crowded as we weren’t the only climbers there, there were others which included a large group of tourists from China.
But the view I was seeing now more than made up for it. Watching the world wake up, from all the way up Mount Kinabalu.
I did it. I felt like I wasn’t just standing on top of a mountain – I was standing on top of the world.
