Kota Kinabalu to Kiau Nulu

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Introduction to today's journey

The conquest of a mountain is twenty percent physical preparation, physical strength, and physical endurance.

The conquest of a mountain is eighty percent mental preparation, mental strength, and mental endurance.

- Sapinggi, Dusun tribal chief.

Today's journey starts from Kota Kinabalu and heads up the mountain to a high pass beside Mount Kinabalu. At the top of the pass we leave the main road following a rough track up to a Dusun tribal village.

Today's Journey

Distance trekked today: 0.2 kilometres.

Total distance trekked to date: 0.2 kilometres.

I HAD arrived in Kota Kinabalu in northern Borneo two days ago. Having explored the city I returned to my hotel with a couple of hours to spare before meeting the rest of the group with whom I was going to attempt to climb Mount Kinabalu.

Upon reaching reception and getting my key, the receptionist told me that I needed to move to another room to move in with a roommate. Oh dear. Now I was going to lose my independence as I had done in Ho Chi Minh City at the start of my tour of Cambodia. I really hoped whoever I was sharing a room with would be a nice guy. The receptionist said he was already in his room, so I went upstairs and knocked on the door.

He answered the door. “Oh you must be Jeff” he said in a heavy European accent. I introduced myself and we talked about where we were from. Geoff was from Switzerland and he was near the end of a gap year travelling all around the world. Lucky him, I thought. I told him that I was doing a similar thing seeing the world, but only exploring small areas at a time.

My theory is that although it is cheaper to take a gap year and travel the entire world, I prefer to break it up into a couple of weeks each year so you always have something to look forward to. When you are travelling all in one hit, you do get a bit travelled out and when you get back there’s nothing to look forward to apart from endless years of hard work and no breaks.

I spent the next hour getting to know Geoff – that’s Geoff with a G. I thought that was a bit awkward with both of us having the same name.

I unpacked my gear and set up the chargers to charge the batteries. It looked horrendous with the powerboard and multiple adapters and cables, but Geoff didn’t seem to mind, or if he did, he was just being very polite about it.

It was nearly six o’clock, so I headed off downstairs alone. Geoff said he was coming soon. I sat at reception waiting for the group. No one else was there, apart from a redhead a few years my junior sitting on the floor in the next room with a laptop looking very serious and completely focused on whatever it was he was doing. Was he going to be in the group?

A young lady came down the stairs and sat next to me. “Are you on the tour group too,” she asked in a distinctive English accent. I sure was, so we introduced ourselves. She was Nadia from London, explaining she was half English and half Arabic. She had the pale skin and black hair of an English person, but the finely chiselled facial features of a person from the Middle East.

Two young guys arrived next. They were Tobias and Casper from Denmark. Actually they were from the southern part – Zealand, or Old Zealand as I called it, being from New Zealand myself.

The guy behind the laptop in the other room arrived and cheerfully told us to come into the other room. His face now lit up to something far friendlier than before, and he spoke with a strong South African accent. Very interesting I thought.

It’s interesting how people can look so serious when they are behind a computer, yet they become so animated when they come back to real life. Why is this? As I would get to know this guy over the next couple of weeks, that initial judgement I made about him being so grumpy behind the computer became totally idiosyncratic from his usual bubbly self. It’s amazing what computers do to you. As I’d later find out he hardly used computers and when he did use them he absolutely hated them.

Within minutes, the entire group had assembled. We were quite a large group of twelve, all from different parts of the world. This tour was going to be really interesting, and I could tell straight up that this was going to be such an amazing group to travel with. My fears had suddenly melted away.

The group leader introduced himself and handed out our itineraries. He was Richard, originally from South Africa as I had already figured from his strong accent, but he has lived in Melbourne most of his life before moving out here to Borneo. I was intrigued to know why he had moved all the way out here to work. Surely it was not for the money. From what I have heard the wages aren’t very good here.

I have already introduced Geoff, Nadia, Tobias, and Casper, so I won’t go through their stories again except Tobias and Casper had recently finished school and were on a gap year travelling the world before starting university later this year.

There was a young Asian couple in the group. Robert and Jessica were the first Asians I have travelled with to date on any adventure tour that involved hiking. Robert was Malaysian. His parents moved to Sydney from Kuala Lumpur when he was little, and he was here to see his origins. When they are finished the tour here, they will be going to Kuala Lumpur and down to Penang to visit extended family. Jessica is also from Sydney, having been born and raised there. Her parents were from Hong Kong. Her father Chinese and her mother was Thai. They were together on this tour to test whether they were ready to marry each other. Now that’s an interesting test.

Then there was Suzanne, a blonde nurse from Canberra. She was just here on holiday, and for some reason she hadn’t until two days ago been aware that the itinerary had included a major mountain climb. Gosh, I thought everyone read the itineraries before booking these tours. I had booked this tour purely to climb the mountain - everything else was relatively superfluous.

Then there was Therese from England who was about two years older than me. She had recently left the army after having been there all her working life. She wasn’t sure what to do with her life, so here she was travelling the world to find her destiny. Clearly these tours attract travellers on gap years.

When it came to my turn, I explained to the group that I’m from New Zealand, now living in Brisbane. I mentioned my absolute fascination for remote exotic locations, plant ecosystems, and climbing mountains. I said the highest mountain I have ever climbed to date is Mount Taranaki at two thousand five hundred and eighteen metres, and I never believed I could climb anything higher – ever. I was here to prove myself wrong. Borneo was one of the list of places I have wanted to go to since I was a small child, and I was now working through the list.

I also warned everyone that I’m a compulsive photographer. I told them not to let that bother them as I’m happy to share happy snaps with anyone.

Once introductions and the tour briefing were finished, we walked out of the hotel and across to near the huge Centrepoint Shopping Centre for dinner. We entered a clean restaurant and had dinner served up on banana leaves. The different dishes were served up in small piles on different parts of the banana leaf with a big pile of rice in the middle. I also ordered a pineapple juice. Richard mentioned most people here were Muslim and they eat with their fingers. How disgusting I thought. However, “when in Rome…” so I took the challenge of eating with my fingers. No one else was brave enough to do that. I didn’t blame them though. Give me my designer Maxwell and Williams cutlery any time.

Despite the grossness of eating with my fingers, the food was really nice. Obviously Malaysia stacks up with the rest of Asia with the food being so nice here.

Once dinner was finished we left the restaurant and walked through the darkness of the now overcast night towards the port, stopping at the Irish pub to find a large table we could all sit around. I got a good group photo using the little camera as the flash unit on the big camera was giving me some grief thanks perhaps to the low one 110 volts they had here – well that’s what I figured anyway. Maybe it was just the rechargeable batteries. Anyway it’s back to the drawing board with the flash I thought.

After about an hour at the Irish pub, we returned to the hotel. Richard mentioned that we will be having breakfast together tomorrow morning. After breakfast we will have the rest of the morning off getting ready for us to leave at one o’clock beginning our adventure of one of the most spectacular mountains on the planet.

It had been a long drive up the mountain from Kota Kinabalu. the winding road had ascended fifteen hundred metres before reaching the top of the ridge. The driver stopped the van at a village on top of the ridge, containing mostly cafes. There was a viewing platform across the road, so we climbed on it. There was supposed to be a spectacular view ofthe mountain from here, but the thick cloud hovering overhead denied us the view.

Once stretched and relaxed, we returned down the stairs from the viewing platform back to the van ready to start the next stage of our journey. We only drove another hundred metres up the road before pulling over to where several four wheel drive vehicles were parked. There were several people there. Their skin was the same colour as most other Malays, though perhaps a little paler, but the shapes of their faces appeared different. Rather than the flat rounded faces and small noses of the other Malays I had met so far on this trip, these people had faces that protruded out more. They seemed to be a slightly different race. They helped us unload our backpacks from the van and put them in the back of a four wheel drive pickup truck.

There were two men who sat in the front. The driver was Lianty. His assistant Muda would have still been a teenager, with hair a little too long and perhaps a little flabby obviously not having joined the workforce as a porter yet. Another man was in another truck taking the rest of our group.

We climbed into the back seats of the four-wheel drive vehicles with the locals and started heading down a gravel road that went off the main road. The contrast in road conditions was startling. The highway we had come off was in excellent condition and easy for any vehicle to drive along with ease. The gravel road we were now following was very narrow, winding and plunging steeply downhill.

Lianty negotiated the vehicles down a precarious spur and continued steeply dropping downhill until we eventually reached the ford over a small river. We crossed over the river in convoy before ascending steeply up the gravel road. There was a bridge under construction nearby, but until that is finished the only access was across the ford. The road turned twice in precariously slippery hairpin bends before we suddenly saw some houses along the side of the road. Then I realised this was the village I had seen from the lookout. The road continued to ascend very steeply through the village, passing several very small houses. We reached a very small saddle where the road continued climbing precariously uphill, but we stopped at the saddle parking right in the middle of the steep road. We had apparently arrived.

Echoes of metallic percussive music sounded as we walked up the short rise from the road towards a building on top of a small plateau. Cloud quickly closed in around us. It was a lot cooler up here than it had been in Kota Kinabalu, but not cold enough to chill us.

We approached the building, where there was an open communal area on a concrete slab with a corrugated iron roof overhead. Five men and one woman from the village were playing black metal gong-like instruments hanging from a beam elevated about one point four metres above the ground. They played in a percussive syncopation, each musician playing a simple beat. There was a mangy dog wandering around on the floor in front of the musicians who continued to welcome us with the music as we watched.

The people were all very short, but quite stocky and well-built with firm definition on their serious faces only encountered by people who live in mountainous terrain exposed to the harsh sun and storms only found in alpine areas. It was interesting seeing an Asian version of mountain people as I was all too familiar with the deeply weathered faces of the New Zealand wilderness folk who lived in the remote mountainous regions of the South Island.

There were about five other people sitting around. They were all younger than the musicians. Perhaps they were the apprentices? On the far side of the enclosed area were two rows of seats set up for us to sit in, but we needed to unpack and settle down first.

Lianty led us through the open roofed area to a large grassy common levelled from the top of the hill. The grassy common was surrounded by small wooden buildings. He led us to the nearest building, a two storey building where we climbed the precariously uncomfortable staircase up to the top level.

Once at the top of the staircase, we entered the building into a small common area with two bunkrooms going off on either side. I entered one of the bunkrooms with Richard, Casper and Tobias, while the others all occupied the other bunkrooms. I took a bottom bunk, and quickly unpacked before getting my little video camera and joining the others back in the open area where the musicians had been playing.

The swirling cloud was very thick now obscuring the surrounding trees into ghostly apparitions. It was quite dark inside the covered area. The chief of the village arrived with a large group. He gestured us to sit on some plastic chairs. He introduced himself as Sapinggi Ladsou. He was in his mid-fifties but looked far younger. The only thing giving away his age were the heavily weathered lines on his brazen face accentuated by his huge beaming smile. As we would later find out, the weathering of his face was the result of the countless ascents he had done to the summit of the mountain. It still wasn’t sinking in though. I was about a third of the way up the steep slopes of the mountain, yet what lay above was still eluding us. Sapinggi was well dressed for a tribal chief I thought, wearing an ironed grey short sleeved shirt untucked over his black trousers. He warmly welcomed us to his village, and said each time a group arrives, one of the families entertains them. One of the large families was going to entertain us today.

He went on to talk about the people who lived here. He was the chief of one of the indigenous Orang Dusun tribes of Sabah. The thirty or so groups of the Dusun make up about thirty percent of the population. Each group has its own dialect, and each has its own unique customs.

Most of the Dusun tribes live in the hills and upland valleys. They are well renowned for their peacefulness, hospitality and frugality, being adverse to any kind of violence. On the other hand, they are very hard workers and have a passion for their music, dancing and drinking. Their dance and music is attractive and gentle, yet demonstrating their passion for life.

Sapinggi mentioned that the tribe here were the keepers and guardians of the mountain, and they had been blessed with having been donated the section of the village in which we were staying. The donation had come from the Catholic Church, and obviously with it came a change in their values from animism to Christianity – perhaps buying out their traditional ways. Although Christianity was very important to them, they somehow managed to strike a good balance between their new faith and their traditional ways.

The musicians started beating on their drums and gongs again, and the children of one of the families started performing a dance. There were five young girls in beautifully coloured woven cloths wrapping loosely around their bodies in a figure of eight over black dresses tunics and five boys dressed in black short sleeved shirts and baggy long pants looking like ninjas. The dance had very simple, but very definite and effective moves.

Heavy rain was now falling on the corrugated iron roofing above our heads to the extent that it became hard to hear the music, but still the dance went on under the cover of the roof above us. The cocoon of cloud felt very thick, cold and damp. It was getting substantially dark even though it was still mid-afternoon and the sun would still be high above us.

Soon the children stopped dancing, and some of the adults of the village suddenly appeared from nowhere. We were led into a line on one side of the courtyard and the villagers lined up the other side. We danced their routine, although our attempt was nowhere near as effective. I’ve always found dancing to be very awkward at the best of times. We did quickly pick up the pattern where one person from either side would be dancing the slow dance whilst everyone on the sides was clapping slowly to the syncopated rhythm.

Once the dancing was finished, the musicians offered us their drumsticks to play their large metal drums. Several of us responded and took our seats at the gongs. Each man demonstrated to us the rhythm we had to play. Thankfully I have been playing piano for nearly thirty years, so from that I did have some concept of keeping a rhythm. The syncopation sequence I was showed would have been quite complex to a non-musician, but naturally I picked it up very quickly. Hitting the same place I think I was hitting a low F natural – it’s a little hard to tell with percussion instruments.

We all played along according to what we had been taught. A couple of us had been allocated complex rhythms, whilst others had a very simple regular beat. Amazingly we were pretty tight and it sounded amazing. Richard was impressed. He later mentioned most groups struggle with playing this music, and I don’t think anyone else apart from myself and Richard was musicians. Richard plays a lot of guitar so he said in the van on the way up earlier this afternoon.

After several photos were taken of us playing the small gongs, we left the instruments and took part in another dance with some of the adults of the village who had suddenly appeared from nowhere – they seemed pretty good at that.

The rain miraculously stopped falling just as the dancing finished. We were therefore able to return to our hut relatively dry. I took a few pictures of the thick mist before the cloud quickly lifted. There was a large grassy courtyard behind us, and buildings going around the courtyard. We didn’t know what most of the buildings were, apart from two blocks of rather crude toilets and showers.

We went out onto the courtyard to play with the children and admire the view. They were looking at a picture someone else had taken of them. We could see all the way to the river at the bottom of the valley now, and some of the lower slopes of the mountain were beginning to reveal itself as the cloud continued to lift.

By now the rain had completely stopped falling. We walked out to the front of the buildings to look up at the rest of the village. Sapinggi told us the mountain was in the direction we were looking, but the clouds needed to lift at least another two thousand metres before we would be able to see it.

Maybe the mountain elusive will show itself tomorrow.

The sky darkened and we returned to our bunkrooms to get out our headlamps to head to one of the village houses for dinner. Fortunately we were in the closest house, so there wasn’t far to walk. We walked down to the saddle, and then followed the steep road uphill until we reached the first house. We entered the carport area (though there was no car here) and took off our shoes at the entrance.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the house was the complete absence of furniture. There were no tables or chairs, just a large bench along the far wall where the food was being prepared. We sat on the green chequered lino floor. The walls were cheap fibreboard with no paint or other protective coating covering them.

Dinner came out on large serving bowls that were placed on the floor in the middle of the room in the middle of the circle where we sat. We were given cheap plastic floral decorated plates, cutlery and cups. We helped ourselves to the food - rice, beans, stir fry mixed vegetables, a salad, and chicken. It was really delicious and obviously fresh. Sapinggi explained all the food, including the rice, were picked from the vegetable gardens around the village today, and the meat was from animals killed today. You can’t get much fresher than that! It certainly wasn’t the rubbish I get at home that would have been in cold storage for up to and over a year.

Eating off the floor like this really was a bit of a culture shock. I had always eaten from sitting on furniture, and usually from eating from a table as well. Although this village was strongly Christian, they seemed to follow a lot of the Muslim eating habits, or perhaps the origins of the eating habits were from their indigenous animistic past.

As we finished eating, Sapinggi produced an old soft drink bottle filled with a white milky drink in it. It wasn’t properly mixed though. The top half was translucent and yellowish, and the bottom half was white and opaque. Next to the bottle was a stacked pile of small plastic blue translucent cups. He explained the drink was rice wine, homebrewed right here in Kiau. He introduced a game where we would go around in a circle and introduce ourselves, saying our names, where we are from, and why we want to climb the mountain. Then we needed to fill our plastic cups up to two fingers deep in rice wine, drink it all quickly, then turn the cup upside down. If any drops of rice wine fell out, Sapinggi would fill it up again for us to quickly drink again.

He asked if anyone in the group was a non-drinker. I put up my hand saying I never drink alcohol, but happy to make an exception tonight and give this a go.

We started around the room with Therese, who introduced herself saying she was from Ireland and currently in a trip around the world to find herself. Then it was my turn. “I’m Jeff White from New Zealand, currently living in Australia. I’m here because I have climbed mountains in New Zealand, but because it is so cold there, I cannot climb any higher than two and a half thousand metres. I have come here to go higher than any mountain in New Zealand.”

Sapinggi had filled up my plastic mug with one finger high of the rice wine before I started my speech, so upon finishing the presentation, I drank the rice wine. Amazingly I actually liked the taste. Every other alcoholic beverage I had ever drunken tasted absolutely disgusting. This was actually quite nice for a change. I don’t know why, perhaps it was because this rice wine had a very low alcohol content.

I turned the cup upside down and a few drops did fall out. Everyone cheered as Sapinggi filled the cup again and I drank from it. This time no drops came out.

Curiously exactly the same thing happened to everyone else. The first time they turned their cups upside down, one or two drops came out. The second time no drops came out. We had all told our stories and drunken the rice wine, quite naturally settling in to our cultural surroundings.

With introductions and dinner complete, Sapinggi began a fascinating briefing of the mountain.

He mentioned that no one knew for sure what the name Kinabalu meant, but there are two theories:

The first theory is the name is derived from the term “Aki Nabalu” meaning the revered place of the dead. That was consistent with the local beliefs that the spirits of the dead ascend the mountain on their way to the afterlife.

Sapinggi’s tribe considers themselves the guardians of the mountain, known locally as Gunung Kinubalu. This is a very spiritual place as indigenous Malays from all around Sabah believe their spirits go up the mysterious mountain when they die. The mountain is therefore revered amongst the peoples, but particularly for Sapinggi’s tribe, having been bestowed the huge responsibility of being its guardians. They consider it to be a real honour to be the guardians of the spiritual home of those passing into the afterlife. Effectively they are the guards of the stairway to heaven.

The second theory was the name really was “Cina Balu”, meaning Chinese Widow, named after a woman who had married a Chinese man and had died up the mountain after she had lost him.

He said there is a telling amongst the tribes around the mountain that a Chinese prince was cast away to Borneo when his ship sank in the middle of the South China Sea. Dehydrated and near death he was rescued by the natives of a local village. As he recovered he was accepted by the villagers and fell in love with a local woman. He stayed there for several years until he decided to return to China to visit his emperor parents.

Upon successfully returning to his home, he mentioned his new wife to his parents. They denied him his new wife. There was no way that a Chinese royal heir to the throne was going to marry a foreigner. Instead they had found a new princess for him. Having no choice he took his new Chinese wife and stayed in China.

His wife in Borneo patiently waited for him, but he didn’t return. She would climb Mount Kinabalu at sunrise every morning and return in the evening to care for her children. One day she fell ill and died at the top of the mountain whilst awaiting her husband. The spirit of the mountain turned her into stone – St John’s peak. She remains there to this day facing the South China Sea to forever await her husband’s return.

The people in her village were touched by her death, so they named the mountain Kinabalu – Chinese widow. It would remind the people that the mountain is a symbol of the everlasting love and loyalty that should be taken as a good example by women.

The first Westerner to climb Mount Kinabalu was Hugh Low in 1851. He only reached the dome though, documenting that all the peaks were accessible only to winged animals. Sapinggi assured us though that he was wrong on that count when it came to the highest peak. The highest summit was first conquered in 1888 with relative ease by zoologist John Whitehead.

Sapinggi became the leader of this tribe at the very young age of nineteen. He was now in his fifties. He started leading groups up the mountain in 1976, and has done so three times per week ever since. That’s about three thousand climbs! He has a number of assistant guides, and numerous porters. All the fit men in the tribe work on the mountain as guides or porters, going up and down a couple of times a week to earn their living. Their wives stay at home to look after the children and farms in the village.

Sapinggi mentioned that as this was a long climb up into high altitudes, we would have to go pelan-pelan (Malay for “slowly slowly”) to get up the mountain. After several hours, we would reach the lodge at Laban Rata. From there we would stay the night and set off at about two thirty the next morning to climb through the night to reach the top in time for sunrise. Then we will be heading down again.

Now not everyone takes it slowly. Sapinggi mentioned the Kinabalu Classic, a race from the bottom of the mountain to the top, then back to the bottom and to the information centre. Whilst this would take most people two days, the record for the race was two hours forty minutes up and down. That was amazing. Another man has done the climb to the summit and back barefoot in just over three hours. That’s insane.

On the other hand, some people are a lot slower. I imagined this comes from tourists not being screened in any way for fitness. The record for the longest climb was taking all day to climb to Laban Rata, then a slow climb the next day reaching the summit in late morning. They did not reach the bottom until one thirty the following morning. That sounded quite extreme.

With regards to age, Sapinggi didn’t mention the age of the youngest person to ever go up, but the oldest person to reach the summit and safety return was ninety two. This was all sounding encouraging to us. If a ninety two year old can climb the mountain, then maybe there is hope for me.

Now the weather at the top is nearly always clear at sunrise, and summit attempts are very rarely abandoned due to inclement weather. The weather usually turns for the worse by mid-morning though, and the peak is seldom clear in the afternoon.

There doesn’t seem to be any limits on what the porters can carry up the mountain. Everything used to build and service Laban Rata and other huts on the mountain is carried up on the backs of the porters. They don’t use helicopters except for emergency rescues, and they are very expensive. The porters are therefore used to carrying heavy loads, usually around thirty kilogrammes. The record for a single porter was one hundred kilogrammes. That sounded unreal especially given how small these people are and how difficult the track sounded going into such high altitude. Perhaps the scales were broken at the time his load had been weighed.

By the time Sapinggi had finished telling his stories, several of the other men in the village had arrived through the back door of the house to join us. Some were obviously too old to be porters anymore and others were still a little too young. On the other hand some of the men who had joined us tonight will be coming up the mountain with us as porters.

All the men in the room had a story to tell.

There was Agus, the man with the very round face and wearing a white shirt. He had only recently retired from being a porter for many years. He would have carried many tonnes of gear up and down the mountain in his time.

There was Bambang the man with the long pointy face with the bumble bee yellow and blue top who was going to be one of our porters this trip, but he looked as if he should be retiring by now. Obviously he still needed the money.

There was the young guy in his late twenties wearing the bright royal blue shirt on top of a black tee shirt and faded jeans. His name was Lianty. He will be our assistant guide. He seemed pretty normal and quiet compared to everyone else. Nice to know there was one sane man taking us up the mountain!

There was Sulung the old man with the deeply wrinkled long pointed face. He was wearing a dark green woolly hat far too large for his head and with a small pom pom at the top. He wore a very baggy unironed white shirt several sizes too big and totally non-matching black tracksuit pants with yellow stripes up the length of his legs. This was the worst case of dress sense I had seen in a long time. He was obviously long retired from climbing the mountain, but he sure had a few stories to tell – or rather unintelligibly mutter through his toothless mouth. He went around the group introducing himself to each person in his very friendly murmur.

There was Guntur the man with the puffy face and khaki green tee shirt who was single and had showed clear signs of mental health issues as he was talking to himself a lot as if there was someone there. Richard would later tell me this man’s wife to be had died suddenly and unexpectedly on the way to their wedding ceremony. That had severely affected him mentally for the rest of his life. That explained why he was talking to himself so much tonight. He was actually talking to his wife as if she was still alive. He always did that. I don’t know whether he could genuinely sense her presence, or whether he was in a state of perpetual shock and denial. Without access to proper psychiatric help up here in this remote village, no one will ever know.

There was Muda, the young guy in the blue singlet and baggy cream shorts who wasn’t quite old enough to go up the mountain yet. He was nearly ready though, and as part of his training, he will be taking us on the village tour tomorrow morning. He picked up the guitar and started leading everyone in song, playing contemporary songs that perhaps Richard had taught him. We danced away the night, as Sapinggi got up every so often and reached through the window for another bottle of home brewed rice wine supplied by the women of the village. There were women and children outside peering through the windows. It appeared in this culture they were not allowed to join in with the festivities with the foreigners.

Richard would have a go on the guitar whilst the Muda the young guitarist would use a couple of plastic water bottles as drums and a couple of knives as drumsticks. Even Sapinggi had a go on the guitar. They were all very good and obviously musically inclined.

Finally the celebrating stopped. We had to call it a night as tomorrow will be the final preparations before the climb. We left the house and staggered in the darkness back towards our hut. Fortunately it wasn’t raining, so perhaps there may be a chance of seeing the mountain tomorrow morning.