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(sorry folks, it's my longest blog yet, as it's been a busy couple of weeks - once again, you have been warned - enjoy.)

"Borneo to be Wild (sorry)"

Simon Wadsworth
2006-09-04 17:28:08

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shorter than me, which is saying something, and often carried over 40kg of supplies, beating us to the restaurant. Absolute legends.

Waking up at the ungodly hour of 2am feeling acclimatised, we began the final uphill treck to the summit at 2:30am, our path across the smooth moonlike terrain lit by our torches and the moonlight. The good news is some of us made it to the summit in 2 hours as proud, proud men. The bad news is, we thus had to wait 90 minutes for the sunrise, and so despite more layers of clothing than Ernest Shackleton, and a sleeping bag to boot, I was still freezing my balls off, and became slightly less proud. The sunrise, when it came, was not the best ever seen, but set above the clouds with distant peaks silhouetted all around, it was certainly memorable - thank god, after what it took to get there. Yes, we were extremely lucky with the weather, not raining once and being able to see as far as the sea from the summit. And then? Then we descended all the way back down, concentrating on every step and relieved to get back to the HQ to finish 2 days I will never forget!

Flo, one of the people I was climbing with, has already put up some of his photos of the climb online, so feel free to take a look - they're pretty good!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flo2005/sets/72057594051126996/

Amazingly, none of us were wringing each other's necks, so all 8 of us went to Poring Hot Springs, which are really just a set of glorified bath tubs surrounded by jungle and monster mozzies, but great at soothing the muscles. By this point, it was just the kind and funny Mr Senior and Mr Junior Mountain left as we headed to a place known as Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp, passing through Sepilok's Orang-Utan Rehabilitation Centre (one of only 4 in the world), on the way. This was fascinating in itself, as we watched about a dozen semi-wild Orang-Utans come to be fed from the depths of the rainforest. They've ...