freedom

Long time since my last post.

Over the Easter weekend, I was fortunate to have some time on my hands and ventured over to Borneo (Sabah, Malaysia) to visit Kota Kinabalu and attempt to climb Mount Kinabalu. After completing the 4095m climb at 5am in the morning, I sat on a freezing summit, a whisker from the equator, to watch the early morning sunrise.

Soon after, I dropped a couple of hundred metres to the start of the highest via Ferrata route in the world, to commence a 1.2km route. Although this does not sound all that spectacular, when you are almost 4km up, believe me, there are some giddy moments, especially the first part of the route that takes you vertically off the start ledge.

Alas, I was too busy having fun on the via Ferrata to snap any photos. Here are a couple of images from other climbers on the route to give you an idea of the experience.

Woke up to another beautiful day, Julien treated himself to a bit of a lie in. It was still cold but bright always helps. Broke the tent down. Set off and headed 55km down the hill towards Angelique’s location. The head winds were at it again and even though the cycling was downhill it was only possible to reach 8mph, cycling into the winds is heartbreaking and always a challenge . It was an unrelenting 4 hours. When we met up with Angelique she deduced that Julien needed to lose some kit to make the head winds easier so we had a bit of a turn out and Angelique will be taking 10 kilo’s of stuff and leaving it at the airport on her way out tomorrow.

Currently Julien’s leg muscles look like I imagine Popeye’s would. Now having a nice meal and preparing to wave Angelique off in the morning. Dave is on his way and is flying out tomorrow although Julien will be heading to Akureyri in the middle of nowhere so it will take a few days to meet up.