Hooked on Height Via Ferrata, Mount Kinabalu, Borneo
I just try to focus on what we were told at the briefing: never unclip both karabiners attaching you to the cable at once. Even if you unclip both karabiners and then fall off, however, you will survive unless you have also sawn through the yellow rope linking you to your via ferrata guide.
“Via what?” you might ask? Don’t worry. Hardly anybody has even heard of “via ferrate”, as they are known in the plural. That includes Mount Kinabalu visitors from Italy, who should maybe have a better idea because their First World War Dolomite forebears devised them so that they could kill Austrians with greater ease.
A via ferrata (Italian for “iron road”) is a mountain path consisting of fixed steel rungs, rails and cables. Soaring up to 3800 metres, the via ferrata I am entangled with, which is called Mountain Torq (old English for “necklace”), offers fantastic views from vertiginously dizzy heights. Mountain Torq is both the world’s highest and Asia’s first mountain steel staircase.
Opened in December 2007, Mountain Torq is fair game for anyone aged 10 to 70 who is moderately fit and equipped with above average get-up-and-go. You put on a harness and are hooked onto the cable that lines the route, then clamber and scramble or just plonk your behind on every rung, as some particularly nervous individuals do.
Why bother going anywhere near it? Because a ferrata route enables people who have never climbed anything wilder than the office ladder to touch the void, overcome their fear of heights and experience altitude through the eyes of a rock climber. Even if you have to put up with being dressed like a dork, as I am.
My climbing costume consists of three shirts along with a purple balaclava and a pair of fuzzy mittens donated by a female Aussie backpacker. I feel preposterous yet confident.
I have already managed to navigate the UNESCO-listed world heritage site foothills of Mount Kinabalu itself. No mean feat. You must trek for four to six hours up a dizzying array of steps. These steps take all conceivable forms: shallow steps; cliff-like steps into the unknown; steps made of roots; steps of chipped, slimy rock; steps supporting whole colonies of toads.
As a result of all the impromptu training I feel “in the zone” but have made progress hard by rejecting the “Walk the Torq” beginner’s route in favour of the deceptively named “The Preamble”, which meanders for 1.2 kilometres through beautiful rhododendrons and the bone-like branches that snake everywhere in the mossy humidity. Make it through the jungle and you arrive at a gleaming succession of rungs that single-handedly takes you from 3,200 to 3,800 metres above sea level.
By the standards of via ferrate, The Preamble is “difficult” (the official rating). All the more so for me because I have chosen to double the calories by going up, not down.
When I started climbing in the starry dawn the muted light softened the contours of the abyss. Now that the sun has risen, I can easily get a sense of the immensity if I look down. Whether to look down or not is a big question. Some climbers adamantly refuse to, keeping their eyes rigidly glued upwards. After a while I start to look down regularly as, in a funny way, I come to like the fear so induced. It certainly makes me feel very alive and in the present. I totally forget about the financial and relationship problems that have been nagging at me for weeks.
It’s really perfect, this via ferrata lark. You get the adrenaline buzz of doing something which your senses are screaming at you to desist from, while maintaining perfect safety. Thanks to your hooks, the farthest you can fall is two feet. After a while I let go and lean back on the lanyard, just to see what it feels like – it turns out it’s a bit like sitting in a comfy sofa. I enjoy the effortlessness of being supported by the mountain and sway from side to side a bit just to heighten the experience. After a while I realise there’s nothing to be scared of except fear itself – and maybe the scorn of the purists who insist on climbing unaided. After reflecting for a while I decide that such soloists need their heads examined and that I thus don’t really care what they think of me.
Before embarking on my “big wall” climb I was obliged to fill in the standard “if you die, tough” document with a next-of-kin section, which made me wonder how many climbers come to grief on Kinabalu. Nobody seems to know – or at least be willing to tell me.
Wilfred Tok, the 39-year-old Singaporean mountaineer behind Mountain Torq, says that many people, even the British Commandos who virtually run up the mountain, experience the banging headaches associated with altitude sickness (much to their shame when they see 70-year-old Japanese ladies acclimatising perfectly). Anyone with a history of strokes should not try the Kinabalu via ferrata, as the rapid altitude rise is dangerous for such people.
My curiosity is aroused by a book I find in one of the mountain huts – “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained” by the late Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary. Sir Edmund’s non-fiction thriller is awash with accounts of redoubtable men having magnificent accidents. After one recounted fall, a rescued climber named McFarlane, who seems to be dying, quips that he much prefers being carried down a glacier to walking.
That’s climbing. Even if you have a ruptured spleen and bloodied skull, the rule is: keep on smiling and remark, say, on how you’re looking forward to meeting attractive nurses or doctors in hospital. Every cloud has a silver lining – even the black one that triggered the avalanche.
On my jaunt, the closest event to an accident occurs when the rope linking me to my guide snags on a bonsai tree sprouting from the rock face. Awkward, but no big deal. I regularly forget to unclip my karabiners and with a lurch run up against one of the superglued bolts that help keep the cable hugging the mountain.
Thanks in part to such hitches, my “assault” takes three hours to complete, making it the longest three quarters of a mile I have experienced since nursery school walkies. I should have stocked up with chocolate from the mountain hut’s strange little canteen, where I had been somewhat surprised to see a squirrel walk into a cupboard.
I don’t feel fit. I don’t mind wheezing like a bellows when attempting to talk to my younger companions, but when I realise that someone twenty years older than me is fitter, I get a bit gloomy. I wish I hadn’t spent most of the last 42 years consuming too much beer and lamb madras.
Exhausted, I almost stagger from the top rung onto the slate moonscape at the rock face’s top, where a climber set to follow in my footsteps, only downwards, asks how it was. “Tough,” I say.
Fifteen minutes later, from a distance, I can still see him and his friends marooned on the plateau. My guide explains that people find the descent scarier than the ascent. The laser-like sunshine leaves nothing to the imagination and many first-timers just freeze. Others, when confronted with the chasm, cry – men as well as women. I’m pleased I haven’t blubbed, it would have been almost as embarrassing as when I got all teary when the Kylie Minogue concert tickets I was trying to buy last year sold out.
Whilst in Thailand, why not visit one of the country’s currently best three beach destinations:
Koh Lao Liang: http://www.andamanadventures.com/kohlaoliang.shtml
Ao Nang: http://www.andamanadventures.com/ao_nang.shtml
Railay/Tonsai: http://www.andamanadventures.com/railay-tonsai.shtml
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Runs Andaman Sky Co., Ltd, specialising in climbing and diving trips to Thailand’s best beach destinations.