KINABALU—THE GRANITE EYE OF THE JUNGLE
When foreigners land in Borneo, they are so overwhelmed by the ubiquitous equatorial jungle, its wild inhabitants and its rivers, swollen by the frequent rainfall and cutting through the jungle like anacondas, that they hardly expect any surprises. …Until they make their way to the North, where a stone island suddenly sticks out of the smooth monotonous greenery of the ocean of tropical forests. It rises kilometers up in the sky and around it clouds and fog, heavy with moisture, rage like fierce surf.
This is Mount Kinabalu—a granite massif, decorated by erosion with some ten peaks, sharp as steeples, making it look like a modernistic Mormon cathedral. Besides being famed as the highest point of Southeast Asia at 4095 meters, this peak is probably the most popular four-thousander on the planet for climbing. So, if 30 thousand people of different ages and physical condition (or totally lacking such) successfully reach the top in a year, why not try yourself? Generally the mountain peaks in the world could be divided in two categories: peaks for the initiated and peaks for common mortals. Matterhorn, for example, is a place where you would hardly meet anyone who had got there accidentally, who hadn’t dreamt for years climbing precisely that peak. While Kinabalu—although not exactly our Cherny vrah (Black peak)—is a peak for the people.
You take comfort in this thought, but you forget that the displacement from the foot of the mountain to the top is 2200 meters and the linear distance—only 8000 meters. It means a very serious ascent! Such a difficult climb simply doesn’t exist in Bulgaria, nor in many other mountains higher than ours either. Not to mention the descent. However, these are just details. The important thing is to book beds near the top in Laban Rata chalet (3277 meters) in time, where there are only 120 beds and no people are allowed to sleep on the floor in the canteen. You are lucky—the last free plank-beds are yours—and the next morning you leave the starting point, the town Kota Kinabalu, cheerless because the tropical clouds have descended right next to the jungle and are on stand-by, ready any second to pour down.
After a three-hour drive in the soaking-wet jungle with visibility like in a dirty aquarium, you stop in front of the main entrance to the Mount Kinabalu National Park. Here your guide is waiting for you—a young man from the kadazan tribe who is a university student in the town and who speaks English well. On this mountain a guide is compulsory by regulation, although you don’t really need one as the path is so well traced out that you wouldn’t be able to get lost even if you wished to. You set off as if for fun—it’s just there, a three-hour march at most and you’ll be at the chalet–but after several long series of steep and slippery stairs inflaming your calves, you are not so enthusiastic any more. The only advantage is that it hasn’t started raining yet. Gradually you slow down and desperately hope to see the next kilometer sign showing the distance you have covered from the start. The hands of your watch have gone mad and at the third kilometer it turns out that three hours have passed since you have started. And you expected to be at the chalet by that time!
You continue walking up the tunnel cut through the jungle, where there is nothing at all to break the monotony in your mind swollen with fatigue. On the fifth hour you are at last rewarded for your efforts—you are above the tree line. However, the clouds here get thicker and it starts raining, of course. You walk the last kilometer to the chalet, holding an imaginary obscene dialogue with the person who has lured you to undertake this climb. Clearly he doesn’t show any signs of compassion or even a sense of guilt. He doesn’t wait for you and probably is already drinking his tea in a dry place.
Thoroughly wet in spite of the Gore-tex equipment you drag yourself to the canteen of the chalet where a group of noisy Englishmen climbing the peak for some charitable cause are drinking rum and tea. Your partner meets you, obnoxiously dry and in a high mood. He says that only a mere 800 meters of displacement remained to the peak. Two to three hours easy walk and we would be there to welcome the sunrise. Superb!
The next morning you prudently get up after the crowd of tourists who have rushed right after midnight to look for the rising sun on Mount Kinabalu. With a torch in hand you walk gropingly on the granite flagstones fitted with thick gaskets as a security. Soon the slope becomes less steep, but the promised two to three hours to the peak are over and we are still nowhere. Threatening rocks peep through the fading darkness like gigantic skeletons. The freezing cold and the shallow breathing add to the fire raging in your legs to the point of fainting. You approach the magic– for common mortals– height of 4,000 meters above sea level. A string of flashlights twinkles in front of you. A train of people, yearning to set foot on the highest point of Southeast Asia, winds up towards the peak. You are at its foot when on the east the horizon begins to gleam like a glowing coal that swells unbearably before a sudden sunbeam tears the frozen skies over Kinabalu. Your heart starts fluttering but this time not from exhaustion. For unexplainable reasons your pulse calms down and your lungs, having stopped gasping for breath, swallow the light amidst the jutting stone towers. Unwillingly, you admit that what you see is worth all the effort in the middle of the night. Refreshed, though you don’t know why, you climb the last meters on the mountain ridge of Kinabalu and stare at its ghostly shadow cut out to the west by the slanting sunbeams. Perched on the surrounding rocks, dozens of people shivering with cold worship the appearance of the sun like heathens.
The moment, like every moment, ends too fast for you to be able to realise its value. The twilight diffuses and the bare truth faces you: a headlong climb down lies before you–from the dwelling-place of the dead who live on Mount Kinabalu (according to the beliefs of the local tribes) to the prosaic dimensions of the living civilization.
Going down is always easy at the beginning. But not for a long time and not on Kinabalu. Before you have reached the chalet your legs begin to fail you. All of a sudden you start feeling some strange weightlessness in your knees, as if there is no muscular strength with which to stop the irresistible call of gravitation. The frequent breaks help to a certain extent, but the more you penetrate into the jungle, the more your body from the waist down feels like rubber. So you do the descent painfully, step by step, until you overcome the 2200 meters displacement.
This is the moment to remember that on the previous day, while going up, you met a group of Japanese tourists who were going down aided by assistants, as they had no control over their lower limbs. Obviously they weren’t people with partial paresis–as we thought–who had come to strengthen their spirit in defiance of their physical disability. They were, just like you, some of the many people who wished to climb up the “people’s” peak not knowing that they had to pay a little more than the standard entrance fee for access to the seductive enchantress of Borneo, Mount Kinabalu.