[Kinabalu Park, Malaysian Borneo] So the start of our Mount Kinabalu epic today began with a long wait at the bus depot just down the street from the hostel. Same story as usual, our minibus driver was waiting for more passengers but he gave up after an hour – I don’t think the pouring rain was helping. As we set off I noticed the first ‘There, I fixed it’ (thereifixedit.failblog.org) moment of the day. The aging driver had ingeniously rigged a set of rods and axles from his seat through the van to the sliding door so that he could manually open and close it – very cool.

We headed out of town and up into the jungle. Not much to see through the heavy rain but the roads were good and the traffic light. Not long out of town we spotted another, but possibly not so brilliant, fix. Some workmen were on top of a building but their ladder was not long enough to reach from the ground. They had placed the ladder on top of a fully extended forklift to reach the roof. My but we are smart animals 🙂

Around 2 hours later V spotted the sign for our hostel on the side of the main road and the driver kindly deposited us at the intersection in the rain. We knew we would need to walk a bit to the hostel (Kinabalu Mountain Lodge) but it was longer than we had expected and definitely more than the 1km advertised.

The place looked tranquil and surrounded by pretty gardens. We were greeted by two labradorish puppies and a sign stating ‘Please remove and bring your shoes inside or our puppies will chew and hide them’ – we complied. The place was dead quiet. No one else there besides the three friendly staff members + two dogs and two cats. Nothing to do, no restaurants or shops nearby and the rain was making the place very chilly (no help being up at 1500m either). We had to dig into our hiking snack supplies while waiting for dinner and found entertainment in a leech that V had attracted. Instead of pulling it off she decided to see how big it would get if we just left it alone. We got bored after 10 minutes and scraped the little sucker off. Full and obviously satisfied (possibly drunk) it just lay there on the floor so V relocated it to the garden. Maybe we should get a pet leech one day.

We have stripped our gear to a minimum for the hike up to the hostel at Laban Rata tomorrow. Just our cold/wet weather gear and a change of undies. The next two days should be fun and challenging… if it stops raining!

[Pictures: Kinabalu Mountain lodge – hmm… Maybe this was a mistake]

– Posted from my iPhone via WiFi