D.U.K.E. S1xE01: The Day of Long Walks

Recently I took on a trip which totally not my kind of activity - hiking. And guess what, it's not any typical kind of hiking... I had to go and jump into the deep end of the ocean, well, in this case, I went to highest possible peak in South-East Asia. Yes, as some of you know already (since I've been ranting about it for the last three months), I went to climb Mount Kinabalu. Can you imagine that? Me? Climbing Mount KK??? It's almost equivalent to Chee Wai taking siu-yok!

Ya... Ya... I had my extra "motivation" to go in the first place, but when that motivation kinda vanished, well, I kinda went for the sake of going. Li'l did I know what was ahead of me...

To give you a brief intro, you need two days to climb this hunk of rock. The target is to reach Laban Rata about afternoon of DayOne, and then move on to climb to the peak early (really early) on DayTwo, and come back to the bottom by afternoon of DayTwo itself. Sounds easy? Well, it's just a 19km walk up and down. How hard can it be?

I meant look here, within one hour, I'm already seeing this scene here. I've almost puked by KM1.0! [Note: To Laban Rata from Mersilau is 8.0km+]

That's what you get for NOT TRAINING at least! (My excuse is that I've only done 1 x swimming,2 x jogging, 3 x football... in the span of three months!!!). It was an uphill (literally!!!) climb, and I was thanking God all the way that He gave me really long legs.

By the time we reached about 1.5km+, it was a much, much more easier downhill trend. Well, it was then I thought, "Hey, I should be able to do this!", after the pschological shock I had earlier. The whole group of us that went up comprise of 15 people. Our smaller group here, is termed as the "B" team. Why? Cuz we were the middle team. There is a super-fit "A" team of five who went waaaayyy ahead of us, and well, there's a slightly less-fit team who's trailing us... You the see uncle there? He's 55 and he's more fit than me!!! Talk about looking for a hole to hide...

Anyway, back to the story... Things got really tough after KM4. Yes, we kinda looked smilling here, but little did we know what was ahead.... The REAL uphill was just beginning. It didn't help that it starting raining... To summarise it, I've never felt so tortured and helpless (there's not turning back, no giving at this point) in my life before. At this point, I gave up taking photos of every 0.5KM... It was reaching Laban Rata the only ONE thing on my mind...

Ok.. By now you would have enough of the whining that I have... Well, you see this kid here? To him, it's like a walk in the park, just about the same as Chee Wai taking a Bukit Jalil jog.. And you know what? He's carrying like 10-15kg worth of our stuff!!! On the plus side, there are some nice scenes when I remember to BREATHE and look. It's no joking, these are the kind of rocks we have to climb up, which became a river when it rained heavily.

Oh, did u see that 5KM again? Nope, it's not a mistake, it's because we took another trail up. Effectively, this is 7KM. Only 1 more KM!!!! At this point, I've abandoned all thought of picking which rock not to step to avoid drenching my legs. I'm already WET!!! Just a bit more, I can really sit down already... Just a bit more, I can have a HOT cup of tea, and some DRY clothes... Just around the corner... FINALLY!!!

I'll never take a warm room for granted again. You know the feeling of drinking Coke when you were so THRISTY??? The satisfaction feeling 100x of that!!! TIME STAMP: 8KM in 7Hour45MINS.... We took a really long, long rest, before makan-ing dinner and hitting the sack at 8PM... [Side story: We BBQ-ed our shoes over the stove before we slept, cuz the dryer was broken and there's no way other ways to dry our shoes...]

You see this? That is a sneak of the next day's climb... To give you a feel - today's walk was a stroll in the park compared to what was to come...

[TO BE CONTINUED - EPISODE2: The Day of Difficult Heights]