I never thought I will be writing this post, 2, 3 4 or 6 months after ascending Mount Fuji. You see, Mount Fuji was standing at 3776m and Mount Kinabalu, aka Mount KK is standing at 4095m, about 300m higher than Mount Fuji.
I still remember the agony of descending from the peak of Mount Fuji back to “planet earth”… or rather, Fifth Station. The thought of that has forbidden or should i say, deter me from ascending yet another mountain. Its really funny because to me, it seems like going up is so much easier than descending.
But when my friends seemed so keen to wanna try Mount KK, for some weird reason, I decided to go with it. Maybe its the company, maybe… I still have that little explorer in me after all these years.
So, my friends and I book a 5 day 4 nights tour to conquer South East Asia’s highest peak. From Singapore, we took a flight from Air Asia to Sabah. After at which, we stayed a night at a local hotel before moving out the next morning to Mount Kinabalu HQ, which again, we stayed another night before our climb.
On the climbing day itself, we woke up at 6am, had our breakfast at 7am before moving to the front office to collect our pass and breakfast. We then started the climb to Laban Rata at about 8.30. The ascend is slightly different from Mount Fuji for there are plenty of steps and rocks. All in all, we need to cover a distance of 6Km to reach Laban Rata.
The first 3km are a breeze, but after that, our body and legs starts to tire (I mean, we didn’t train for this. In fact, we just waited for this day and start the climb without any training, conditioning… luckily, I am still pretty young at 33 lol). Somehow, you just need that motivation to carry on.
One little trick I use is to ascend a few meters, stop and rest my legs for say 5 second and everything goes back to normal. Once we reach laban rata, we need to climb a flight of starts to Pendant Hut (the overnight acomodation for Via Ferrata climbers). That flight of stairs is just one of the “longest” flight.
Seems to take forever lol. We finally reach Pendant Hut at 1330 hrs and have our rest before the brief on the safety instructions for our Via Ferrata activity tomorrow.
Continue reading at: The Day I Conquered Mount Kinabalu
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