Gunung Tahan Day 3

Long day today. This is not an easy hike, I can tell you. Actually today we finally started climbing the mountain Gunung Tahan. The past 2 days have been an up and down and up and down approach through the jungle. But today we left the river and started up. And up. To a final elevation of 1400 meters. That’s a lot of climbing for one day.

But first we had to escape the bee invasion this morning. We got up at 6am (in the dark), but the bees had been up since 5am. We did as much as we could (eat, pack) inside the tent and then got out, packed up the tent, and slowly, calmly left the bees behind. JC had a few casualties during the night though. I guess 2 leeches made it inside our tent and sucked on his ankle all night long. When he woke up there was blood everywhere, all over his sleeping pad. Somehow they missed me and man was I glad about that.

Anyway we started to hike at 7am and had a steady, steep, uphill climb for about 3 hours. We actually had to summit 4 other mountains today on the route to Tahan (which hopefully we will hit tomorrow). Those other 4 were Gunung Pankin (1463 m, 4800 feet), Gunung Tangga Lima Belas (1539 m, 5050 feet), Gunung Reskit (1666 m, 5466 feet), and Gunung Gedong (1830 m, 6004 feet). Many hours of climbing up, up then down, then up, up – a total of 11 hours today. We pushed it to get here because there was no water anywhere else and now that I’m here I’m happy we did it but it was a long day. I wasn’t expecting this trip to be as challenging as it’s been but I’m happy that it’s worked out this way. Mind you most people take 4-5 days to get where we are now and we’ve done it in 3.

The bees have definitely added a new element of challenge for me. And the trail itself was pretty difficult in some parts today – sheer rock faces with ropes hanging down that you either had to scale up or belay yourself down. And when you’ve already been climbing and sweating your ass off all day those rock sections can be a real bitch. But we made it.

We had some great views from the summit of Gedong and we also got our first glimpse of Gunung Tahan. At 2187 meters, it’s another 700 meters of climbing from here, but after what we did today that seems like nothing.

The plan is to set out early tomorrow morning for the summit and then descend down the north side, a different route than the one we’ve taken up. Should be a few hours to the peak from here and then we hope to put in another 6 hours or so to get down to the next camp.

Oh, and the best thing which I forgot to mention is that there are NO bees at this campsite where we are tonight! How wonderful!! When I unrolled the tent to set it up here, there were about 30 or 40 dead bees which had gotten caught in the tent from this morning. Ha – suckers! Have to admit it felt pretty good watching their dead bodies roll off the nylon.

We did see a few other hikers today – 2 groups of Singaporeans heading down from Tahan. Not too many people actually venture this far into the oldest rainforest in the world I guess.

Gaining elevation

Summit of Gunung Gedong

This is where were headed folks

Add comment June 25th, 2002