Mt. Kinabalu

Mount Kinabalu, one of the highest mountains in Southeast Asia, at 4095m (13,495 feet), and 20th in the world according to topographic prominence.  This was the original reason I wanted to visit Borneo.  From KL, we went to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, and largest city in Malaysian Borneo (with a population of about  500,000), which is the closest hub to the mountain.  The city itself is not particularly charming–a mix of uber-modern malls, dingy noodle shops, uninspiring markets, and guesthouses.

After a night in KK, we headed to the mountain, whose peak was already hidden in thick cloud cover by the time we arrive in late morning.  We pick up our guide, Maikin (whose services were mandatory to be allowed into the national park), and two friendly Kiwis, who ended up hiking with us.  And then we’re off–eager, not yet sweaty, and relatively naive about the challenge ahead.

Day 1: 6.0 km to Laban Rata (3272 meter ascent)

After a few brisk meters downhill, the mountain begins its unrelenting rise, which insists that every step we take from here on out will be up.  For the first few kilometers, all of this ascent is in the form of stairs, which sounds like a joke.  ”Mountain climbing up steps? Hah.”  NOT a joke.  Instead of the comfortable, 7-inch-or-so, rise on a normal staircase, picture steps 2-feet-tall as far as the eye can see.  One. Foot. In front. Of. The other.  I was unfortunate to get into a minor motorbike accident the day before our departure to Borneo, so small open wounds on my foot and hand are aching–starting the climb I was worried about how my minor injuries would hinder me.  It turns out I should have been more worried about how out of shape I was! (I guess my training regimen–2 days a week at the gym for two weeks–is not a great one.  Who knew!)  I am so distracted by constantly catching my breath that I don’t notice my foot at all.

Each half kilometer is marked, in a demoralizingly slow countdown to the summit.  After we pass the 0.5km mark, Maikin (who has climbed the mountain twice a week for ten years as his job) tells us that some people are so discouraged they turn around at this point.  But the day passes, one step at a time.  Porters, lugging uncomfortable loads of supplies for the resthouse, puff by us, wearing only sandals.  Each time I move out of the way for them to overtake us, I feel both guilty and amazed, given how much I’m struggling with a very light pack.  We stop for lunch and are pestered by curious ground squirrels.  The stairs give way to rocks, which is a bit of a relief at first, until the rain sets in.  Suddenly the rocks are slippery gullies of running water, and I wonder quietly how long it would take people to carry me down in a stretcher if I slip.  We are damp, muggy, chilled.  Finally, about 6 hours since we departed, we arrive at Laban Rata–our accomodation for the night.  Extreme relief is an understatement.  I am overjoyed at the dryness, warmth, dinner buffet, and the most comfortable bunk bed ever (or so it seems at the time).  We turn the lights off to sleep at 7:30pm.

Day 2: 2.5 km to the summit, 6.0km back to the park entrance

The alarm rings–1:30am.   Perhaps on a normal night, I’d be thinking about going to sleep, instead I’m bundling up in as many layers as I can manage, eating what they choose to call “supper” at the buffet, and soon after, switching on my headlamp and stepping out into the abyss to continue the ascent.  The path is just slippery rocks, all we can do is just look down and trudge by the headlamp’s beam.  It’s only after another 0.5km that we finally break above the treeline and really get a look at the sky.  The stars!  One of the first sights that reminds me that the pain is worth it.  The Milky Way is in sight, and there are enough of them to even manage a photograph.

If this many were visible in my camera, you can only imagine what it actually looked like...

We reach the famed rock face rope climb, then an interminable trudge up the looming granite dome.  In the blackness, the path is defined by the sight of other climbers–a silent and mesmerizing procession of weary lights bobbing slowly.  The mountain is traditionally sacred for the locals, and today is still revered by this daily pilgrimage of devotees suffering in the name of the sunrise (or perhaps really just worshipping the possibility of the perfect photo op). ”Did I really think this would be fun, or did I just want the pictures?” I ask myself again and again.  The cold and wind increasing, we trudge toward a distant point of light, seeming ever far away like a mirage.  Low’s Peak.

This is what we came for...completely untouched by Photoshop(!)

The approaching sun is glowing red, the moon is dwindling as we attempt to clamber the rest of the way.  Finally!  The brightest, most intense, most colorful sunrise I have ever seen.  No more than a chilled 20 minutes, accompanied by the complete loss of feeling in my fingers and toes, is spent on the top.  The journey down between the peak and breakfast stop at Laban Rata is the best part, once sensation has returned to my extremities.  We are moving slowly, but more briskly than the ascent.  Hikers move each at their own pace, silent and alone, with the warm early morning light parting the blanket of clouds slightly to reveal jungle and lesser mountains below, as well as the terrain of the early morning ascent.  The word “moonscape” is the cliche most often used to describe the top of the mountain and it seems apt in the stillness of the morning, with nothing but rocky turrets and clouds in view.

After a quick breakfast, we begin the descent, taking almost no breaks, for fear that losing the momentum will cause us to give up entirely.  The stairs are equally strenuous on the way down, perhaps even more so than on the way up.  By the end, each step feels to the knees and thighs like a brutal impact.  At last, the mountain has its last laugh, as we practically crawl uphill the last bit (that nice and easy downhill beginning when we started).  As we wipe sweat from our eyes, we pass by the yearly Climbathon record board, now completely in awe of the fact that anyone could manage to make it all the way to the top and back in less than 3 hours, without fatally slipping.

Sure, it isn’t Everest, but climbing Mount Kinabalu was far from a walk in the woods.  Given that it’s such a popular tourist attraction, and doesn’t require any technical skills, I seriously underestimated the physical and mental challenge of the climb.  Even now, with the mountain weeks behind me my memory of the arduousness the two days are seriously diminished.  But the hours and kilometers that went entirely unphotographed on the way to the peak were a battle.  The walk down from the peak, with the silence of 13,000 feet, and the pink sky above the rainforest, reminded me why I’d bothered to take each of those painful steps up.  And the soreness–Oh, were we sore! It was a struggle to move at all for days–reminded me that it was my own body that had managed to take myself to that astounding overlook.

2012: Back from Borneo

January is halfway over, and I’m long overdue to refresh my blog.  Two weeks ago, I said goodbye to my dad at the Suvarnibhumi airport, and since then, life has been a whirlwind of nametags and icebreaker games.  Has it only been two weeks back at school?  Has it already been two weeks?  Both are surprising.

Though we have four terms per year, and so four “term beginnings” of workshops and new classes, none is quite as busy as the real beginning of the year.  The weather might feel like it’s perpetually June, but there is a distinct sense of new beginning at work that reminds me it’s January.  Almost 100 new daytime scholarship students have come to begin their studies for the year, many of which will end in Australia or New Zealand, and the first weeks of getting to know each other, tone-setting, and orientations are reminiscent  of making group new year’s resolutions.  Many of our overarching messages to the students for the year–about reflection, active learning, goal-setting, and changing–are equally relevant to me in my role as a teacher.

This term I’m teaching two daytime classes, one on a year-long program that prepares Master’s candidates for their postgraduate study in Australia, in which I’m teaching Information Literacy (in other words, research skills), and the second on a six-month program that prepares government officials to better qualify to be accepted to the previous program.  I’m teaching them Learning Strategies (in other words, effective study skills).  In the evening, I’m teaching the second half of the Creative Writing course that I taught last term, and a children’s class (I like being able to have deeper conversations with most of my students…but what would I do with all of my stickers if I didn’t continue to teach some kids?!).

Toward the end of last year, I made the decision to stay on in Vientiane through the end of 2012 (at least), and so the new beginning of the school year has been a good time for me to renew my excitement about the 11 months ahead.  One of my personal resolutions has been to DO something more with all of the photos that have been accumulating by the thousands in my iPhoto for the past 16 months.  En masse, they are overwhelming, more than could be properly examined or posted on Facebook or on a blog.  So instead, each day, for the 350 remaining this year, I’ll be posting a single photograph I’ve taken somewhere in Asia, in no particular order, as a simple visual impression (unaccompanied by my ramblings).  The first 15 photos for the month of January are up, so feel free to peruse my Impressions, ทุกวัน (thuk wan means daily).

But before all of this, I was in the jungle with my dad.  Where were we?

Borneo.  The world’s third largest island, after Greenland and New Guinea (Australia doesn’t count…it’s the world’s smallest continent).  The island is split between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, and we visited just the northern Malaysian parts, which includes the states of Sabah and Sarawak.

In our “fourteen days of Christmas” spent in Malaysia, we saw 14+ wild pygmy elephants, 13 (thousand) feet of mountain, 12 meals of noodles, 11 proboscis monkeys, 10 story malls, 9 early mornings, 8 giant hornbills, 7 different flights, 6 hour bus rides, 5 Mulu caves, 4 orangutans, 3 million bats, 2 Petronas towers, and an epic sunrise over the clouds.  Whew!  Try singing that to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Before flying to Borneo, we spent a day and a half in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a mall-filled, multicultural, sprawling city, with the former tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas twin towers.  If I thought there would be no signs of Christmas in this majority Muslim capital, one look into the nearest ten-story mall proved me wrong.  But we were all too happy to escape the craziness of KL for a different type of chaos–the noisy, humid, chaos of the jungle, of nights echoing with the sounds of bats and giant frogs.  The first stop: Mt. Kinabalu…

Holiday Wrap-Up

As is evident from my sparse posts on Australia, as the holidays get closer, life has been getting busier.  Term 4 has come to an end, my dad has been here enjoying the relaxed Vientiane lifestyle for a week already, and tomorrow we are off to Malaysian Borneo for two weeks.  Walking in the woods with my dad was a common pastime of my childhood years, and now we’ll be taking it to the next level with a climb up Mt. Kinabalu and visit to the world’s largest cave chambers.  These woods will be hotter, more exotic, and filled with wildlife much more interesting than the deer of central Virginia.  As our itinerary consists mostly of activities involving nothing but insect repellent and hiking shoes, my connection to the world outside the jungle will be sporadic.

Happy holidays!  Happy new year!

The blog will return in 2012.

Crikey!: The Australia Zoo

Since I didn’t think I had seen quite enough Australian creatures on Fraser Island (the only kangaroo I had seen so far at this point had been roadkill), I stopped off in Nambour on my way south to allow for a day trip to the Australia Zoo.  The zoo itself is actually in Beerwah, but Nambour is not far away, and since I had a place to stay there, that’s where I headed.  ”Why are you going there?!” asked the bus driver when I handed him my ticket, “No one goes to Nambour.”  While this seemed to be true, as I was the only passenger to disembark several hours later, the ride was made worth it by a stop at a Matilda gas station, where I saw this 42 foot, winking, kangaroo from the 1982 Commonwealth Games.

The Australia Zoo belongs to the Erwin family, as in Steve the Crocodile Hunter (RIP ’06).  His family franchise has continued to thrive after his death, and the Erwins, Terri, Bindi, and Bob, were at the park running the crocodile show for the day, since it was in the midst of the “Spring Holidays” in Australia.

The highlight of the zoo visit for me was not the jumping crocs, however, but getting to see all of the other native Aussie animals in action, and petting some very disinterested kangaroos and koalas.

Fraser Island: Creatures Big and Small

In the trees: the kookaburra’s crazy laugh can be heard throughout the forest.  We spotted this one sitting very still next to the freshwater creek awaiting an unsuspecting fish.

In the undergrowth: a wary goanna lazes, keeping an eye on us passersby and hoping we don’t get so close that she has to move from her sunlit resting place.

What’s that in the leaves?  Just a 7.5 foot long copper python.  Non-poisonous, and drunk on sunlight, this guy was calm and relaxed enough to touch as we walked by (he was also missing an eye from a previous, less-friendly, altercation).

On the beach: watch where you step.  Jellyfish, horseshoe crabs, and sea snakes are some of the many ocean-dwellers that meet their end on the sand.

In the tide pools: anemones, trilobites, crabs, and sea squirts hide in this rocky playground.

Open water: on my brief airplane joy ride over the island, I spotted this mother humpback and  her calf heading south.

Fraser Island: On the Wild Side

It’s about time I finish up the posts about my trip to Australia all the way back in September…

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“Australia is invigorating, because you’re usually 10 meters from something that can kill you.”

This is how guide Peter Meyer began my two days on Fraser Island, the world’s biggest sand island, and UNESCO world Heritage site.  Peter regaled me and my fellow tour group members (who came from the US, Germany, and France) with Aussie legends and endless factoids about the island (and really about everything…did you know that wombats have square poop? Did you know that finding rare whale vomit on the beach can make you a millionaire?  Neither did I).  A nearly 15-year resident of the island, with seemingly endless energy and enthusiasm for the place he loves, Peter is also a professional photographer plus naturalist, snake handler (in keeping with Australian male stereotypes), and off-road vehicle driver, while leading tours.

Central Basin Lake.

Stunning Lake Mackenzie.

"Butterfly Lake"

Eli Creek.

Fraser is a massive sand island off the coast of Hervey Bay, Queensland, where I went whale watching.  A sand island?  That means–you guessed it–the island is made entirely of sand, no soil.  The coasts of the island of surrounded in stunning beaches (popular with fishermen, campers, and 4WDs, but not recommended for swimming thanks to riptides, sharks, and jellyfish), the interior of the island has sand-grown rainforests, migrating dunes, and gorgeous lakes with white sand beaches (no soil=pristine dirt-free lakes).

The roads on the island are made of sand, so all of the vehicles are 4WD.  It’s possible to rent them and drive around yourself, but I opted for a tour, as I was traveling alone.

75 mile highway from above.

Along the way we passed many an SUV stuck in the sand for hours.  The beach along the coast is known as the “75-mile Highway,” and is so popular with SUVs that there are actually speed limits posted.  Many of Fraser’s highlights lie along this coast–the shipwreck of the Moheno (a vessel washed up in 1935 en route to Japan), the “Indian Head” overlook, a good place for spotting whales and sharks in the ocean below, the “Pinnacles” colored sands, and some giant inland dunes, great for jumping and getting sunburnt.

But the real highlight of Fraser is its biodiversity.  In the tidal pools along the beach, you can see anemones, sea squirts, crabs, and other shallow water creatures.  Jellyfish and sea snakes wash up on the beach.  Inland, the dingo is king–there are strict protocol set up to dispose of trash to try to keep their human contact to a minimum.  Dingos cohabit with kookaburras, freshwater eels, goannas, and pythons (all of which I saw during the trip).  We saw so many animals on Fraser that I’ll even save those photos for another post.

Fraser colors: sea and sky.

What Peter said at the start of our trip was certainly true on Fraser.  Every time I turned around there was a giant lizard camoflaged underfoot, or a crab scuttling into the surf.  It was here that the preconceptions I had about Australia–of a slightly wild place, where bizarre animals live in every puddle, and people pick up snakes and drive off-road at full speed–held true.  Of course, the whole country is not about crocodile hunting and adventure seeking, but my time on Fraser Island allowed me to indulge that fantasy for a few days before discovering the more-refined city life in Sydney.

Final highlight: takeoff and landing from the beach.

Feeling Thankful

As many of the other Americans are on the go this Thanksgiving, there will be no giant feast like last year.  I’ll have to make do with my turkey sandwich at falang-favorite Joma Bakery.

It must be fall now because this is on the menu.

Though I am not celebrating by nodding off to sleep in a tryptophan-induced food coma tonight, I still have so many things to be thankful for this year, including:

Friends and family around the world.

Meeting up with friends in all corners of the world (India, Dec. '10).

A job I love.

YLPF1 celebrating Halloween (October '11).

Adventures.

Gliding through the villages of Inle Lake (Burma, April '11).

…and much more.  Still, I’m thinking a bit wistfully this evening about football (the American kind!), Black Friday, the parade, and the official beginning of the overwhelming, yet nostalgic, commercial bombardment of the Christmas season.  And I certainly miss these colors.

2009 in Princeton: the last time I saw fall.

Boun That Luang

Once a year during the November full moon, Pha That Luang (Vientiane’s most important stupa, which is just uphill from Vientiane College), becomes the center of everyone’s attention for the Boun That Luang festival.  People from around the country come to visit the monument and make merit for one of the country’s largest Buddhist holidays.  These events culminate on the final day with a mass early morning alms-giving, and a late-night vien tian (similar to the name of the city, though not actually related), or candlelit walk, around the stupa.

Like most holidays around the world, the solemn religious origins have been compromised in the modern day by rampant commercialism.  Some of my students bemoaned the fact that this was “ruining” the event in their eyes, but it seemed to be entertaining for all regardless.  For days the stupa grounds are overrun with a carnival not dissimilar to that set up on the Mekong before boat racing.  The air fills with the aromas of grilled meat and sticky rice desserts, along with the sounds of hawkers selling their home improvement products.  Competing music clashes in the air between the Beerlao and Namkhong entertainment tents.  Balloon-popping carnival games, and other diversions, like the ever-present “Here there Be Strange Animals” circus tent sprout up on the temple grounds.  And each night a phalanx of cars, motorbikes, pedestrians, and tuk-tuks brings the traffic in the immediate area to a grinding halt.  I weaved my motorbike slowly through the waiting vehicles with renewed thankfulness every day after hearing of coworkers who spent 3-5 hours in their cumbersome cars trying to wade through the mess.

Alms are given every morning around the city, on a very small scale.  Small clusters of monks from the village temples process along the sidewalks at dawn, and early risers will wait outside their houses to offer some snacks or sticky rice before beginning their day.  I’ve observed this ritual a handful of times (entirely due to my tendency to go to bed far too late rather than to wake up early), and have been fascinated by the coexistence of these small religious ceremonies with the prosaic routines of day-to-day life–street dogs sniffing each other, shopowners sweeping the stoop before opening, trash collectors making the rounds, kids getting ready for school, and small handfuls of people praying on the sidewalks before opening their own shops.

At Boun That Luang, this ritual is amplified by the thousands.  Between the hours of 5 and 9 in the morning, people gather around the stupa, dressed in their finest, with offerings at hand awaiting the monks.  This is a chance for people to pray and to make merit for themselves and their families, and also to give back to the monks and the communities that they represent through these acts of charity.  I find it overall a poetic concept, save the fact that most of the “snacks” that are given to the monks are like Thai versions of Twinkies.  I guess health food hasn’t made it into the donation circuit yet.

And so, last Thursday my alarm rang at 5:30 am, and in the peach-tinged hours of dusk, my housemate Mike and I sleepily donned scarves and sinhs (well, I wore the sinh), and rode toward the stupa, early enough to get a parking space and to pick up some essentials–sticky rice, tiny boxes of soy milk, and packaged snacks–to put in our gold alms-giving bowls, purchased the day before.  As we looked for a place to kneel, and lamented our lack of foresight in bringing a mat, we were lucky enough to hear a familiar call, and find an acquaintance, who invited us to join her and her friends.  The women quickly went to work on our baskets, helping us fold 500 and 1000 kip notes (worth approximately 6 and 12 cents, respectively) into neat little fans, to be more presentable.  They showed us when to touch our baskets and when to press our hands together, as prayers echoed from the tinny loudspeakers, and the bottom half of my legs nearly lost all feeling and circulation from the pain of kneeling for so long (a skill among devotees that I truly admire!).  Finally, the procession of monks began and the alms-giving began–we rushed to pull sticky rice and treats out fast enough to keep up with the stream of saffron robes, putting a bit of sticky rice along with money and a snack in each basket.  In the past, the monks have sat still and people have processed by, but this year the arrangement was reversed.  Mostly this seemed more appropriate, so that the monks were standing above us, rather than vice versa, but it also resulted in their baskets getting overloaded very quickly.  Many were trailed by assistants carrying burlap sacks, into which they dumped their baskets every few minutes, which reminded me amusingly of carrying around a pillowcase on Halloween in order to deposit the maximum amount of candy.

Our baskets were empty after only about 10 minutes, so we took our leave from the procession.  The sun had risen and was beginning to get hot, a (presumably five-legged) rooster was crowing in the circus tent behind us, and our respects had been paid, in the form of individually-wrapped vanilla wafers and soy milk cartons.  Time to go home and nap before class.

Microvacation

Sometimes my surroundings pass by too quickly from the seat of a motorbike, as I scan the road for dogs and potholes and other potential beginnings of an accident.  As I blink rapidly, trying to clear my eyes of the ever-present dust in my contact lenses,  I miss the details around me.

For this reason, along with the constant need to remind myself to embrace the bo pen nyang  a bit more,  Sunday at dusk has become my time for “microvacations”–tiny pauses from productivity to notice the here and now.  Last week, my housemates and I took a walk to some rice paddies only 10 minutes from my house and got a glimpse into another world, perhaps a look at what Vientiane was like several years ago.





Naturally the tranquility of this bucolic landscape was juxtaposed with the thump of karaoke music at the giant convention center/movie theater/mall/bowling alley just next door.  The cows munched on grass and local boys looked for frogs in the creek, while K-Pop throbbed in the background–another typically paradoxical Vientiane scene.

Souk San Wan Kurt!

A birthday party abroad, for the third year in a row.

Homemade mango sticky rice, grills, kebabs–what more do you need for a delicious party?!

This year was a blend of new and old: some new friends, some old friends, a new house, but the same idea–fill a cooler with Beerlao, fire-up two Lao-style grills (basically half a metal drum with a grate on top) and a party will ensue.  In honor of the many theme parties past, my theme this year was simply “Accessories,” allowing for a motley collection of leftover hats, sunglasses, costume jewelry and bowties to be dusted off and see another party.

We take accessorizing very seriously.  These are only a handful of the night’s decorations.

Some guests were less happy about the theme than others.


Once again, I had not one, but two, amazing cakes: a work of art from a local bakery in the shape of a purple handbag sculpted from marzipan, and a delicious coconut cake.  With an impromptu living room dance party, about 30 friends who stopped by at various points in the night, and a plethora of silly headwear (berets, headlamps, ski hats, and more), it was yet another very happy birthday here in Vientiane.

This is a cake. Amazing.