the world outside is wondrous, wide

Much as I would like, I've haven't ever felt that way since, but I remember what it was like, and everything that preceded it. Good thing I wrote it down in a circular for my friends, back when I was eighteen; with a friend, in the land that was once my home, carefree, filthy, aching, loving it; quintessentially male.

..."Then Borneo. Such a whirlwind that I can barely remember anything sequentially. I paint a picture of wild rivers, wind-rocked suspension bridges, shrieks from within freezing, mountain-cold waterfalls surrounded by steaming hot and verdant forest. Fish nibbling at our ankles, making us laugh. Insects the size of a forearm and as loud as a chainsaw, deafening us at night. Light-aircraft, river-boats, leopard tracks and mangroves, comical bright-beaked hornbills, bizarre limestone massifs and the soaring peaks of the Crocker Range, that take the breath away and burn insignificance into your soul, to bring tears to the eyes and furnish regrets of ever having to leave.

And the great feeling of accomplishment. Three of Southeast Asia’s highest peaks were ours for the taking. A favourite, and certainly the hardest, Gunung Mulu; trudging through lowland swamp for hours just to reach her base, knee high in mud, or chest deep in water, our heavy packs held high above our heads, wavering like nylon butterflies, or the myriad dragonflies that made us their landing-posts in order to get at our dried or reforming sweat – so copious that crystals had formed on our skin. Such freely available amounts of salt are a rare, and much coveted commodity in the rainforest.

Then the slopes that lead up and up, for what seems like forever, the only change being the gradual softening of the vegetation around us as we enter the cloud-forest, where mosses and lichens, and orchids and ferns grow with such unparalleled splendour and lushness that you can only smile and hope to remember such fairytale beauty. Or long, in vain, to be dry; a place where you really are walking through the clouds, with little hope that even your freshest change won’t feel cold and damp, clinging like wet laundry to your grimy skin.
A dislocated shoulder, my excruciating first experience of skeletal damage, and that before we were even near to the dangling ropes that were to help us, one armed or otherwise, up sheer walls of rich, dark peat, or pearly microganiodite rock that glittered eerily in the intense mountain-harsh sunlight.

The tremendous relief at reaching the summit. And vistas as spectacular to see as the venerable mountains themselves are from all that way below.
From mighty Kinabalu, the highest of all, you can even see the Philippine islands of Cagayan Sulu and Palawan, the gateways to a whole new country and a whole new adventure, all that distance away. The stillness is entire; I feel sure that I can see the curvature of the earth; I've never felt so small, or so sad; there is nothing so humbling as nature in her grand and devastating majesty, and it terrifies me that all that I am, I am. And that is nothing, in any greater scheme."

Picture (top): Mount Kinabalu, Sabah, East Malaysia; highest peak in SE Asia, as seen from the summit of Mount Trus Madi, second highest peak on Borneo. With an estimated 5000 to 6000 plant species in the relatively small Kinabalu National park alone, including some of the highest orchid and rhododendron endemism outside of the Himalaya, this is thought to be the single most ecologically diverse area of land on the planet. Taking into account the equally rich fauna, this isn't hard to believe. She's a jewel in my eye, and I have scaled her twice, once in 1995, once in 1998, aged fifteen and eighteen respectively.