Diana Connor What would be better than capping off our two-week trip through amazing Malaysia with a nice “one-day jungle trek” to a lookout offering views of otherworldly limestone peaks? Lots of things, it turns out. Root canal, taxes, maybe even dealing with the cable company (although that is a toss-up) may have all been easier than this hike. But we didn’t know that yet.
We were looking for a final activity in Malaysian Borneo and were enticed by Gunung Mulu National Park’s off-the-beaten track location and decided we had just enough time for a little adventure. Located just outside the small city of Miri in Malaysian Borneo, this National Park boasted a hike called “The Pinnacles.” A hike that the promotion material market with a clean, not-sweaty, not-scratched up, not-rained-on, not-impaled, happy go lucky couple at the top of the hike.
“If these models on the brochure can handle it, so can we!” I presumed out loud in the direction of my fiancé.
He agreed and we booked the day-hike which actually turned out to be a “1-day hike” that took three days and a death-wish.
The unexpected torture trip began with a nice, gentle long-boat ride along the Melinau River to the World Heritage site of Clearwater Cave, where we enjoyed a delicious lunch made by our guide before exploring the largest cave system in the world. It was a beautiful marvel of stalactites and stalagmites bathed in the yellow glow of fluorescent lights illuminating the miles of wonder. While these caves are one of the main attractions in the National Park, this story is not about the miles of deep wondrous caverns, it is about the Pinnacles hike. So stay tuned, and skip past the wonders of the cave and onto a few hours later when we re-boarded the longboat. Our skilled driver somehow navigated the river, fighting the current. Only once were we required to exit and push our transport over a too-shallow bend in the river, still blissfully unaware of the harrowing journey ahead of us. With naïve smiles from ear to ear, we continued up the narrow river in the shallow canoe, imagining ourselves as early explorers, braving the dense jungle, spotting the occasional local, residing in stilted homes and relying on fruits of the land for their livelihood. I felt like Magellan. Wait, he was a sailor and was never in Borneo. I was Percy Fawcett. Nope, that was the Amazon. I am Carl Alfred Bock (thank you, Wikipedia), exploring this untouched land and ready for an adventure. It was thrilling to be in a place that felt untouched by time.
The boat bumped to the side of a small wooden pier, waking me from my dream of exploration and contemplation of what scurvy would feel like, alerting me to reality, and the beginning of the first day’s hike.
The hike began with a fee; not monetary, rather a donation of blood as a legacy homage offering to the infamous Borneo headhunter tribes, collected by the abiding local leeches. No need to make an appointment for this donation; just walk 8km through the jungle to your accommodations for the night at ‘Camp 5’ and the collection will be pulled, often without you even realizing. You are unable to opt-out of this donation, it is mandatory for the full Pinnacles hike experience.
This first 8km offered more than jungle flora, the easy stroll included being surrounded by bustling butterflies and exotic birds. Black hornbills cawed in the distance. Whenever I looked up to identify the feathered friends, I tripped on a banyan tree root. I consider the tree roots may be part of the grand jungle plan to get trespassers to trip and fall on the ground, where your juicy blood can be accessed easier by the blind but effective leeches. After a few miles, hours, pints of sweat, and drops of blood later, the trail opened up to ‘Camp 5’. The area is a lovely stopover situated alongside the river and home to clean, basic lodging, attracting adventurers, bats, and wasps (ahh!). As the wasps sought any exposed skin, we headed straight for the river, slipped off our backpacks and hiking boots, and plunged into the cold water, fully-clothed, to wash off our only-appetizing-to-wasps, disgusting sweat. Spending the rest of the day wearing soaked clothes was well worth the semi-promise to not be wasp food.
After spending the remainder of the daylight hours gazing in awe at the majestic mountain face across the river, we indulged in a fantastic, hot meal prepared by our guide-by-day, chef-by-night. Feeling satisfied and happy; the digestion got underway, as did our introduction to tomorrow’s trail.
The guide sat next to us bringing two large (I argue inaccurate) maps, outlining the main destination points for the hike.
“If you don’t reach the first milestone within 60 minutes,” he informs us, “you will be forced to return to Camp 5.”
The rule is enforced for everyone who hikes the trail. It doesn’t look too hard, and we are sort-of fit people so we let the guide continue the hike outline. Assuming the map indicated the slope and general direction of the hike, it wove the tale that the next section was a walk down a gentle slope beyond the first milestone point, a mere 30-minute saunter, which would bring us to the halfway point. The map then displayed a hiking line with a small slope to the next milestone. Just another short 30 minutes away, then another small sloped meandering line to “the ladders” area, the line interrupted only by a drawing of a gentle flower.
“Ooh, this is where we’ll be able to stop and smell the flowers,” I thought.
The childlike illustration of ladders drawn on the map that casually lean against cartoonish, hand-drawn peaks appear whimsical… if only a tad tricky to navigate.
Only after a relatively decent night’s sleep under mosquito nets did we learn how deceptive the map—and our guide’s cavalier description of what laid before us—actually was.
With morning came another delicious meal, this time of fried rice, toast, and— (curiously) hot dogs. We cringed as we re-donned our river-soaked hiking pants and shirts from the day before and began the walk. We set out with vigor and determination; we had to reach the first milestone by a specific time, so we put our heads down and trotted up the mountain at what felt like a 95° slope.
Each step is almost directly on top of the previous step.
“This is extreme stair climbers,” I pant.
We have to use all four limbs to advance up this mountain before us.
“This is just the tough part,” we mumble to one another, coaching ourselves through the exhaustion.
“It will get easier.”
My clothes are soaked again, this time there is no river to blame for the saturation. We trudge on, reaching with our arms over our heads to help heave up the rest of our body. My lungs are burning. I look at my watch…perhaps we are almost there?
It’s only been 15 minutes.
“Oh my god, why am I doing this to myself?” I begin to question if I even like hiking. Do I actually find this fun? Why did I pay money to endure this torture? Why is reaching this arbitrary milestone so important? Couldn’t I just look at the glossy photos in travel magazine are just as nice.
As I think, “I should have worked out more”, I realize that this is what working out feels like, so, why would I have wanted to feel this way multiple times a week! Uggg. I vow to never hike again.
Distracted by my self-defeating internal dialogue, but still pushing the limbs onward and literally upward, we reach the milestone just in time. It only took us 42 minutes and our guide congratulates us.
The celebration does not last long.
This is where the deceptiveness of the map deceit really kicks in. The trail doesn’t veer left gentling climbing along the mountain, as depicted. There is no meandering at a gentle pace. We continue to hoist our bodies straight up the mountain, each step heavier and more treacherous than the previous. Metal rungs start to appear as the pointed, jagged rock face is too steep to hike up without their assistance. Soon, the metal rungs are not enough to assist in the assent, ropes then appeared to our right.
Is this The Hunger Games, where survival gifts keep popping up because you are so close to danger? The trail is getting tough, here are some metal rungs… still too vertical, slick, and sharp? How about a rope?
Mustering the sheer willpower to climb dauntingly steep cliffs defined the next two hours. And as I pulled my body from one sharp, pointy rock to sharp rock, to Ginsu knife rock, it became clear to me why all hikers are required to bring their own medical kits.
As we traversed the terrain, my mind wondered how long it might take a rescue helicopter to reach us.
At this stage of the journey, it is not a test of the fitness of one’s lungs as it was a test of patience—find your footing, grab the rope, and contemplate where to place your (not-ripped-open-yet) hand to hoist yourself up. There are no flat spots to rest, not even enough room for both of your feet to be on the same level. You are in a perpetual state of “hiker pose” with your arm stretched overhead and one leg bent at a 90° angle.
After three grueling hours that felt like thirty, we reached “the ladders.” The standard Home Depot-style metal ladder propped against the rock seemed makeshift and unsteady, but we climbed. And climbed. Somewhat comforted by a familiar action of climbing a ladder, I get excited that each step will be evenly spaced and it is a “known” challenge. However, the vertical ladders gave way to horizontal ladders positioned over gullies like tight-ropes, wet ones, with sharp limestone peaks waiting to skewer you on all sides.
Each successful step felt like cheating death.
Our guide, of course, navigates these obstacles with ease, like a weightless elf, frolicking without a care in the world. Only a few more death-defying ladders to go to reach the great reward.
With a lot of luck—and motivated by the fear of turning back—we made it to the top of the mountain, after the nearly vertical 1,175-meter rock climb. The reward: an out-of-this-world view of some of the world’s most majestic rock formations. We were finally able to look up from our feet, catch our breath, and enjoy the moment. Time stood still for a few minutes and we forgot the past several hours. The other-worldly landscape of weathered limestone spikes emerging from the trees was captivating, and you are allowed to set up lunch at this viewpoint to drink it all in.
I could not recall any place in the world I’d been that looked like this and wondered where else this geologic feature has occurred. This is truly the definition of remote and I am happy that someone found it and the National Park was able to create a… trail? Surely, that isn’t the right word…path? hike? way? Yes, the National Park was able to find a way up to a rare piece of ridge to view this marvel. Lost in my thoughts and admiration of the scene before me, I was blissfully unaware of the impending five to eight-hour trek back down the mountain.
After an hour of admiring the view, eating lunch, and taking pictures, we were snapped back into reality by our guide who informed us that we’d need to make it back to camp before the impending jungle rainstorm. What goes up, must muster up the mental strength to go down.
Contrary to my (popular?) belief, climbing down is not as easy as it seems. I thought the climb up was steep, but I didn’t understand how steep until I was looking at it from above. When you are headed down, you feel like a sky diver, nothing but air in front of you and the next step is only reached by faith that your foot will reach a surface before you are forced into the splits.
Again, I begin to wonder about medical scenarios…
“Can our wonderful guide actually stich up an open wound?”
I breathed a sigh of relief once we successfully navigated back through the ladders section and felt slightly more assured that we would survive this hike. A wrong step may lead to impaling a foot, quad, hand, arm, or glute, but it seemed survivable. At one point, my arm was raised above me to bear the weight of my body as my legs found footholds, and I saw a spot a little lower and offered an angled area that could fit my whole foot. I followed the trajectory and my upper arm caught a bit on an outcrop of rock. My body jostled, I missed my footing, but my arm found a way out from behind the limestone fingers and freed up just in time to avoid a sure breaking of my upper arm. I call back to let my fiancé know about “the trouble spot.” I don’t know if he chuckled at the absurdity that there was “one” trouble spot, if he was too focused to hear, or took my note to reconsider his path down. He was far away, even though GPS would have placed us literally on top of each other, he was essentially on the same horizontal axis but two stories above me.
On the way down the path is marked with a sign post every 100 meters. We’d begun our decent three hours ago and still had 700 meters to go. Then it started to rain, our spirits diluted with each drop. The going was slow—and wet—and the inside of my raincoat was just as wet with sweat as the outside was with rain. Each step took longer and longer in order to find the right footing, keep your limbs unbroken, and avoid slipping on tree roots. Your choice of footing is: the slick-as-oil tree root, or the razor-sharp rocks (i.e. unknown destiny or known pain). I call out when we complete another football field distance. Thinking of “only 4 more football fields to go” seems accomplishable.
“Three football fields to go.”
Sweat. Reach. Slip. Repeat.
“Two football fields to go.”
I narrowly avoid stepping on a 10-inch lizard who’s decided to lay her eggs in the middle of the path. Even the lizards live dangerously here.
The last 100 meters of the hike seemed eternal, though in reality it took a paltry 45 minutes.
Ultimately, we made it. Rain (okay, tears) rolled down my cheek. I wanted to call my parents and let them know I was okay. Completing the Pinnacles hike felt like we’d survived some sort of life-changing natural disaster.
At camp that night, we cleaned up, played cards, and watched as a group of fresh-eyed hikers entered camp. Some of whom obviously donated their blood via the leech phlebotomist, as blood streamed down their calves. Our quads were already screaming, but we chatted with the newcomers and attempted to offer honest feedback on the hike they were to embark on the next day.
“The view is AMAZING, but make sure to take your time and be sure of your steps. It will seem crazy, it is crazy…,” I say.
“Is it worth it?” they ask.
Pause. Awkward silence.
We know the answer is YES!, because even though the hike was the most challenging we had experienced, and the guide finally admitted to numerous stories of common injuries of cut skin and broken bones; the hike was incredible, inspiring, stimulating, unique and remarkable. We know we will look fondly upon the experience, eventually, and these hikers before us will love it too. So we focus on the incredible limestone peaks that will be like nowhere else they have ever been. Trying to muster the enthusiasm that will set up shop in our memories after some recovery time.
Hiking the Pinnacles in Gunung Mulu National Park was an unforgettable experience. Long-boating in a land seemingly lost to time, succumbing to the blood donation of the leeches, sleeping under the stars next to a river flowing under limestone cliffs, hiking almost 1,200 meters up a vertical mountainside, marveling at a landscape of unimaginable character, surviving the four hour decent, and winding our way back to civilization through the same woods once wandered by headhunters. It’s now been a year since our trip to Malaysian Borneo. Our legs have recovered, and at last our minds have, too. With the passing of time, the more traumatic memories have given way to fond memories of a truly unforgettable adventure. While the Pinnacles hike isn’t for the faint of heart, the clumsy, or prone to puncture, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see some of the world’s most unusual scenery.
