Chapter 30
UNLIKELY MOUNTAINEERS
The Tanjung Aru Beach was a luxury resort hotel in the West Malaysian State of Sabah on the northern tip of Borneo, it was situated in a landscaped garden of twenty five acres facing the South China Sea, one hundred and twenty kilometres from the 4100 meter high Mount Kinabulu.
It was not his first visit to Sabah; Ennis had made a few brief trips from Hongkong to check out the local dealers but had never gone further than the capital Kota Kinabulu. He remembered reading in a guide book that Sabah was about the size of Ireland, but that was about where the similarity ended, with only a few thousand kilometres of surfaced roads and most of its million or so population in and around its sparse isolated towns and villages, the rest was a dense mountainous jungle.
Harrisons’ girl had booked them into the beach resort hotel surrounded by dense tropical jungle. Only fifty or sixty years earlier head-hunters had roamed the same jungle amongst wild bearded pigs, flying squirrel, gibbons and clouded leopards.
He planned to spend a few days relaxing with Harrisons’ girl, a break from his business and the excavations in Kalimantan. They planned to visit the Kinabulu National Park and climb Gunung Kinabulu, along the trail that was popular with the better off tourists, who were still young enough and strong enough to make the one and a half day climb. Every month hundreds undertook the adventure taking the southern approach. Harrison’s girl had reserved beds for the night in the mountain lodge at 3,500 metres before tackling the final ascent early the following morning.
Seen from Kota Kinabulu the summit of the mountain resembled a formidable castellated rampart of bare rock, the lower slopes were covered with dense tropical forest, it rained every day and by nine the summit was shrouded by thick cloud. Harrisons’ girl had told Ennis that to the Kadzans the mountain was the home to the spirits of their ancestors. To the other side of the mountain was Low’s Gully, a precipitous valley that had been carved into the mountains by a bygone ice age, plunging down in a sheer drop of 1700 metres, named after the British army officer who first conquered the mountain in 1851.
Ennis had arrived in thriving capital of the state, Kota Kinabulu, after a two and a half hour flight in the first class comfort of a Singapore Airlines Airbus. The city was formerly known as Jesselton, after the vice chairman of the Chartered Company, Sir Charles Jessel, who had founded the town in 1897. Before independence it had been a quiet unimposing town when the state was a British Crown Colony, and then in 1967 Sabah joined the newly formed Federation of Malaysia.
Ennis was picked-up by Harrisons’ girl at the airport in a specially built four wheel drive Proton, the pride of Malaysian industry, constructed by a joint venture firm owned partly by Mitsubishi. The silver metallic Proton was a special, designed for the rough and ready roads and the jungle tracks of the mountainous state. It was a status symbol by local standards, where though most vehicles were also four wheel drives they were imported Nissans or Toyota Landcruisers.
The people of Sabah were composed of many ethnic groups different from those of the Malaysian Peninsula. There were Proto-Malays, Deutero-Malays, but for the most part they were Kadzans, who were more closely related to the Chinese as a race, having migrated from the north in the distant past. There were also the Murats, who still hunted the teeming wild pig in the depths of the rain forest with blowpipe. Then there were Bajaus who were sea gypsies whilst the Illanuns were freebooters. Finally there was the ever-present overseas Chinese population in the state.
Most of the city dwellers had been Christianised as a result of the British presence that had commenced in the nineteenth century. This gave them a very different outlook on life compared to that of their fellow countrymen in Kuala Lumpur.
Over the previous decades Kota Kinabulu had been transformed by resource development projects based on agriculture, timber and minerals with the capital mushrooming into a city of 350,000 inhabitants. It was a strange mix of old timber structures, some on stilts, and modern buildings along the sea shore at the foot of the steep green hills.
The skyline of Kota Kinabulu was dominated by a thirty story building in the form of a multi-sided polygon, which housed the Sabah Foundation, financed by timber royalties, a monument that would certainly outlast the rainforests of the state.
The next day they set out before day break, the early morning was agreeable with a light breeze. They were driven in a company Nissan Patrol towards the jagged crown of Gunung Kinabulu, which was set with white clouds; it had been named long ago by the Kadzans as Akin Nabalu, or the home of the departed spirits, who were believed to live among its peaks. Gunung Kinabulu was the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
The road to the first town, Tamparuli, 47 kilometres to the north was good, crossing a flat landscape of rice fields and scattered small farms, where water buffalos waited patiently in the fields to start the day’s work. The fields then gave way to tall Imperata grass and then to the forest where they saw the enormous hardwood dipterocarps that rose up to eighty meters into the sky. The road gave way to an unpaved forest track, the dense canopy of the surrounding forest projected outwards above them almost blocking out the light of the sun. Gradually they started the climb over the rough forest track that wound up the mist covered foothills of Kinabulu that dominated the National Park.
They abandoned the mud splattered Nissan in an eerie mist at the base camp where they met the guide who was to accompany them on their climb the summit. Though it would be physically demanding it was by no means technical in terms of alpinism but required thick waterproof cloths and sturdy climbing boots. With their rucksacks comfortably settled on their backs they started their long climb to the lodge up a stairway of damp slippery logs set into the dark rich earth. The humidity and the weight of the rucksacks soon left them streaming with perspiration, as they followed their guide who walked at a brisk pace, leaving them no choice but to do likewise.
As they progressed Ennis had the feeling that they were in a gigantic greenhouse. The air was filled with a cacophony of strange sounds, there were myriads of insects, and the shrill cries of unseen birds hung in the heavy air.
Streams tumbled down over green moss covered boulders. An odour of damp earth and rotten vegetation hung heavily in the air and shafts of light fell like columns of clouded glass through the dark shadows of the forest contrasting with the dark pillars of the giant hardwoods.
The going was hard as they climbed towards the lodge a further 1,500 meters above them amongst the clouds at Panar Laban Hut. On either side was an impenetrable thicket of undergrowth but from time to time when the mist cleared they caught a glance of the jungle covered valleys that lay below.
They climbed breathing the air saturated with a multitude of smells that hung in the mist, whilst around them the forest changed from rainforest to montane forest, then bamboo and temperate forest followed by heath forest and aerial moss gardens. They could not see more than ten or so metres into the forest where giant epiphytes, orchids, mosses and ferns clung to the trees in a strange beauty, finally crossing an alpine forest with its bright flowers.
They reached the lodge ‘Panar Laban Hut’ an aluminium cabin at 3,500 metres altitude just as night was falling. They felt the chill, which soon seemed to penetrate to their bones, it was not extremely cold but compared to the heat of the day at lower altitudes the temperature difference felt great.
They dined simply without exchanging more than a few phrases; the fatigue of the day’s efforts was having its effect. Their tiny room was rudimentary with two single wooden beds, one of which they abandoned for the tight bodily warmth and comfort that they found together.
‘Are you cold?’
‘Not now.’
‘Imagine what we have seen today without the trees, like in the Philippines, or the barelands in Kalimantan.’
‘Yes.’
‘Our children’s future! For what! For chop sticks and pampers, we have to sto
p it.’
‘I know,’ he said, too weary to discuss the philosophy of her rain forest conservationist ideas.
It was just before four in the moring in the dim light of their torches that reflected in the thick mist that carpeted the surrounding vegetation they climbed for another four hours until the reached the last few hundred or so meters hauling themselves up hand over hand on fixed ropes up a wide grey valley where the cold naked granite broke through the brown sandstone. Slopes that glistened under the starlight looking like the crackled back of a gigantic saurian rising to the barren summit of the mountain as patches of mist and cloud swiftly crossed the hostile landscape carried by gusts of icy wind.
With the first sign of daylight they could vaguely make out the distant coast line to the northwest and islands lying in the South China Sea, to the south and east was an endless form dark green mountain ranges that continued to the horizon and behind was Low’s Gully.
The locals believed that a dragon lived in the gully guarding a giant pearl. Harrisons Girl pressed herself against Ennis for warmth. It was easy for him to imagine how the locals had created their myths in such an awe inspiring and strange place. The summit formed a crescent of about half a kilometre around the gully that plunged in a sheer drop below them before reaching the tree line. Their guide warned them of the treacherous lip and of the clouds that thrust their way up engulfing the unwary.
‘Your fellow country man, Mister Low, toasted the Empire with port wine from this point and after generations of visitors did the same thing leaving their debris of broken glass behind them.’
Ennis shrugged, he wasn’t going to be blamed for the sins of Empire builders and past generations.
‘If loggers continue at the same rate as today in ten or fifteen years what you can see below will be like this, naked, dead!’ Harrisons’ girl said waving into the cold air at the fuzzy blue mist covered green carpet that lay far into the distance below them.
‘You can imagine for yourself what that will mean for the future of our people.... humanity.’
‘There is a solution…plantations,’ Ennis said in a weak effort to justify the ideas that Aris had been developing, a justification that seemed to be deserting him, fading rapidly away like the morning mist in the sun.
‘Not here John, that takes generations or even longer, in the meantime they’re cutting down the forest and pushing its people into the misery of civilisation’s slums.’
Ennis looked out to the horizon, swaying uneasily in the wind as the vastness of nature sucked at him drawing him into the infinite space. He felt the fingers of latent agoraphobia reaching out; his ancestors had not bequeathed him with genes adapted to high altitudes.
She drew close to him sensing his unease and communicating her own anxieties. Ennis understood but could only nod weakly.
‘Let’s start down, it’s cold here,’ he said.
‘Let’s do that, we can have some coffee at the lodge before we start the descent.’
The Lost Forest Page 30