TDY in the Abode of Peace: Epilogue/Mt. Kinabalu

I pretty much forgot this month that I have a blog and that I never wrote about the best part of the Brunei trip! November turned out to much busier than expected, with two trips to Shaoxing and one visit to the embassy in Beijing. Oh, and church activities and Thanksgiving happenings and the Marine Corps Ball. Whew! 

November 15 marked my one-year anniversary in Shanghai, and I've wanted to think about ways in which the next year could be better. I've been craving quiet time away from the city, and close to Brunei is Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysia, the tallest mountain between Papua New Guinea and the Himalayas. Climbing Kinabalu seemed bound to inspire all sorts of metaphorical thoughts about life and challenges and progress, and since time was quite short, I booked a package deal (for the first time ever) a driver, lodging, meals, and the required local guide.

The driver, a retired policeman with tatoos and a mustache, met me at 6:30am on a Sunday morning in an SUV blasting Ke$ha's "Tik Tok"....oh my word, this was going to be fun. Two hours and many dance club songs later, the humid coastal air had turned into misty cold fog, and we reached the national park headquarters.

A guide named Claudius met me, and we spent the next several hours in a slow trudge up a chilly rainy forest trail. Winding our way around the mountain, we broke into a more arid and windy piece around 3,000m - it felt more like Yosemite than Southeast Asia.

 At the treeline a collection of spartan dorms clustered around the main lodge awaited us - day one complete! Groups of hikers from Australia, Malaysia, and China steadily streamed in as the sun set. Incredibly, I found myself eating dinner next to a fellow visa officer from a European consulate in Shanghai. We all took mugs of hot chocolate and ate massive amounts of food and went to bed at 8pm for a 3am start to the summit on day two.

The march/crawl to the summit started out in a jolly mood under the starlight, everyone single-file with all our guides, and most people equipped with head lamps and climbing poles. But the last few hundred meters were so hard, one of the most challenging physical things I've ever done. The incline was so steep I had to lean on my guide the whole way, holding his arm and pausing every few steps. At the very end, struggling over boulders, I thought of Frodo and Sam climbing Mt. Doom - except with a hundred other people all struggling over their own boulder in a race to reach the summit.

And it was worth it. Not the end of the world, but the top of the world.

This was the moment my poor neglected camera was made for!

The summit of Mt. Kinabalu was sort of like being on the moon or in heaven or both. Surreal. Awesome. Full of wonder. In the beginning, it seemed impossible. And yet it was possible. That's the lesson I'm taking from this special trip.