Mount Kinabalu Expedition Day 2 - RestHouse to Timpohan Gate

Day 2 of the Mount Kinabalu expedition kicks off early for everyone and by 6 ish am all 13 of us gathered around at the parking lot of our rest house for a short briefing from Mr.Boss.

[caption id="attachment_862" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mr.Boss morning briefing before we begin our hike at Timpohan trail[/caption]

*photo by Azrul

Soon after that along with a little prep talk by Boss, we begin our little 'warm-up' before we hit the jungle trail. Since we came in a big group, Boss told us that we had to walk roughly around 100 m towards Kinabalu Park from the rest house and we should meet up with him at the entrance while he went to arrange other things for our expedition. And so we went for our supposedly short warm-up.

If you must know, the hiccups didn't get better overnight. It chose to continue on through the early part of the 2nd day of the expedition too. Our 100 m warm-up walk ended up becoming a close to 2 km warm-up walk mainly due to miss communication and a slight misunderstanding from the team leader. Thank God the weather was great and chilly so no one went totally berserk because we had just walked 2 km away to basically nowhere when all the while the Kinabalu Park was just 5 minutes away from the rest house. Funny thing was despite having confirmation from a fellow local about the direction of the park, we continued following the leading pack and that shows a pretty good team spirit between everyone. We shall stay together regardless of anything and if we had to be lead by the blind and so be it! LOL!

The warm-up walk was refreshing and we had a great time walking  along the street, dodging dog poop and huge trailers along the way while capturing snapshots with signboards which we could never have done if we didn't miss the park. In a way, things happen for a reason and it wasn't a bad hiccup after all.

[caption id="attachment_868" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Uncle Gampat (our guide/porter) tying the sack[/caption]

Upon reaching the entrance gate of the park, we each received our badges to be worn at all time during the hike because it is important for easy identification to our guides. We also got our loads (the one for the porters/guides to carry) weighed and most of us packed our clothes, jackets, gloves, food etc in a plastic bag because it's light weight, won't cost much for the porter fee and will be easy for the porter to simply gather the plastic bags into a huge sack for him to carry. The total combine weight that I shared with FF was 7.5kg and at RM4/kg , our shared load cost us RM60 for a return trip. The bag will be weighed once and won't be weighed again from Laban Rata, so most of us ended up stuffing more load into the porter bags during the return trip and I guess the poor porter uncles had to carry just a little bit more load during the descent hike. Hehe.

Later on, we grabbed our brunch pack from the Sutera Sanctuary Lodges Restaurant and munched on our breakfast during the short 5 km bus trip from the main gate towards the Timpohan trail entrance.

[caption id="attachment_865" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Brunch set provided for hikers[/caption]

* photo by Azleena

More briefing coming up from our guide, Bungin just before we set foot from the starting point at Timpohan Trail. For this expedition, we had 3 guides ( Bungin, Gampat and Downy) following all 13 of us and they work also as our porters. The guides function as the sweeper and at most time they will be at the back of the group walking along who ever is at the back of the team. In other words, through out the hike, the greater part of us including myself hiked on our own all the way to the top. I think it was pretty safe to hike alone because there will always be other people hiking along the way be it porters or other hikers plus guides from other teams.

After a short doa (prayer) by Bullert, we set off heading for Laban Rata and the long hike begins.