Lion city

Almost every time I travel for work, I transit through Singapore airport. It's probably the best airport in the world with its free power and WiFi, indoor gardens, dedicated areas for resting and shopping and watching movies, and unfailingly friendly staff. I was tired of seeing the airport but not the city, so this time I insisted on entering Singapore for a few days on the way home.

Singapore was always going to be a surprise, no matter what we expected. At first sight I described it as "the part of the West where they speak Chinese" (yes, I realise that's imprecise to the point of inaccuracy). It's difficult not to be reassured by Singapore - it's so safe, so advanced, so multicultural.

Reassured, then, we cut loose and enjoyed ourselves. We slept late and made no plans and ate good food (crab linguine, Hainanese chicken rice, sweet potato pastries, spam frites - don't knock it till you've tried it). We had lunch with a former colleague at a hawker centre and cocktails at the top of that building that looks like a ship. We counted brand stores on Orchard Road and went to the night safari zoo. We paid local prices for beer without complaining.

Singapore looks like a great place to be wealthy. It's very livable with tons of things to do and easy connections to the rest of the world. Wages are so high that taxi drivers and porters are snooty - they know they earn more than the tourists they serve. If the same attitude prevails in cafes and stores, it would be easy to feel isolated.

Wikipedia tells me there's high income inequality, but we saw very few poor people. Those that we did see were riding in the back of open trucks, eight or ten at a time. Our taxi driver told us they were Indian or Bangladeshi workers brought in for construction projects. He said the mandatory truck transport "allows us to monitor them. They go to work, they go home." He didn't seem to see any problem in these workers being denied full participation in Singaporean society. We looked down at the trucks of workers from our tour buses and wondered if they still had their passports.

That was the only real jarring note in our visit to Singapore. It's a great place to play, and stopping there inevitably breaks up a long trip between New Zealand and the rest of the world. There is something slightly creepy, though, about a city so safe and clean and attractive. I suppose it's difficult to get a crime rate that low without some cost in terms of civil liberties.

KK is More Than OK

Firstly the beach is excellent, but Kota Kinabalu was so interesting we didn't visit it.

Kota Kinabalu is universally called KK and it deserves to be a household name. Everything about the place screams fantastic holiday resort. The climate is resolutely warm and pleasant, the hotels cheap, the people lovely, and the views stunning.

KK society seems to be completely integrated and sorted. The people are 2/3 Bornean and, honestly, couldn't care less about race or creed. They're friendly, educated, talkative, and interesting. This is all anecdote but I saw no evidence that KK and Sabah had any problems that weren't from the Philippines.

KK itself is completely safe, but the east of Sabah has a reputation of raids from the Sulu Islands, part of the Philippines, by Islamic extremists targeting tourists for ransom. Malaysia is handling this international problem by beefing up the military and police presence. The Sabahan themselves aren't worried about it, so it's a very unlikely occurrence.

Within KK the only things that could worry you is the water-taxi touts charging a bit much or the laundry lady talking your ear off (I jest, she was lovely). The food is varied and interesting, there was even bacon, and the prices are fantastic. Everything we had was good stuff and we tried hotel, street, and bar food. There was one exception: wagyu beef is nice but horrendously overpriced.

Our hotel, Le Meridien, was the best we stayed at and it was the same price as a motel at home. The view was fabulous, the location central, the room enormous, and the shower excellent. Breakfast included 4 counters and continuous plungers of coffee. Seriously, every hotelier should go to Le Meridien to see a good hotel.

Even though we were shattered after climbing Mount Kinabalu, we still managed to enjoy a lovely walk along the esplanade. With water-taxis zipping between mainland and islands and local markets galore there was excellent strolling, even without a plan. If we'd been able to exceed 1kph we would have visited an island, probably the one with monitor lizards.

By the way, Mt Kinabalu is an awesome hike. Just do it over 3 days. We did it over 2 and everything was fine until we tried to walk out after summiting. If you take 3 days you'll get to enjoy your time on the mountain and the descent. As it was we were pleased to descend quickly but given the option I'd've loved to explore the other peaks. The rock climbing looks fabulous!

Back in KK there is scuba diving surpassed only by the east of Sabah. So whether you like heights or depths KK is your gateway to happiness.

Oh and the toastmasters are fun too :)

Heat

After 16 days in Malaysia and two in Singapore, we have learned something about handling the heat. It's been around 30 degrees most days here, with humidity pushing the perceived temperature up to 35. Nighttime temperatures fell as low as 22 one night in KL. It was all new to us and we had to adapt.

The first thing that had to change was my body image. Usually I don't like to show my legs, and in Wellington I have the option of going through life in trousers. Not so over here - skirts and even shorts are now comfortable for me, and I don't even care about people seeing the mosquito bites on my calves. Hooray!

The next change was our attitude to distance. In hot climates, distances stretch. It takes longer to get places and do things. You just adapt, leave more time, be less demanding. It's relaxing.

The other thing we had to get used to was air conditioning. It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's amazing being able to duck into a mall any time you want a break from the heat. On the other hand, now you're in a mall. It's noisy and bright and you can't really relax, even if you find a nice coffee shop. It's cold too - if you plan to spend much time inside you have to carry a jacket, which is a ridiculous burden when out in the heat.

Using malls as accessways leads to intense disorientation when you get back outside. And air conditioning can be almost as tiring as heat - the air in malls is dry, and after a few hours inside you start to feel as slow and dehydrated as after a night's drinking.

You dehydrate outside too, of course. It's somehow more noticeable when you're hot and sweaty, so it's easier to deal with. We learned to buy juice or iced tea every few blocks when walking. Carrying a water bottle just isn't enough - especially in Malaysia where the tap water supposedly isn't potable, so you can't refill your bottle. Fortunately, in Malaysia, drinks (and food) are very cheap.

As for being sweaty, that's something else you get used to. You shower as soon as you get in, even if you're going out again. I don't know what office workers do in their hot business clothes. Maybe they stay inside for lunch; certainly those that I saw in bars after work looked comfortable enough, not as though they'd been in sweaty clothes all day.

We got used to the heat and, by the end, we preferred the warm humidity outside to the dry cool inside. Who knows what will happen to us when we return to the cool Spring weather of New Zealand tomorrow.

Chicken with everything

Before we left, when I told people we were going to Malaysia, there were two main reactions: "gosh, it'll be really hot" and "won't you have some lovely food!".

I'm not much of a foodie when I travel. Food is a necessity that shouldn't take up too much of my sightseeing time. As long as I get a little bit of protein every day, I don't care what I eat. (In Seoul I lived mostly on 5000-won fried rice, and in London it was, to my shame, sandwiches from the lunch chain Eat.)

However, the universal prediction that the food in Malaysia would be wonderful did have me a bit curious. More wonderful than the nasi goreng we get at home? And in what way? So much of the food I eat when I go out at home is either Malaysian or Chinese - it's hard to know what to expect when visiting a favourite dish's home country.

I think it would be fair to say that we were pretty consistently underwhelmed. In KL we had no time to find the good street food, so we ate in malls a lot. This meant we experienced a lot of different presentations of chicken with rice. In a nation that's 60 percent Muslim, pork is literally a dirty word. Sandwiches contain "turkey ham", and sausages are invariably chicken. For some reason beef is also hard to come by. In fried rice and noodles the meet is usually chicken - often, we found, diced but not deboned. Gross.

In Kuching we fared better. We had time to wander, and our wanderings were rewarded with good laksa, high-end Chinese food, many types of noodles and, unexpectedly, Italian. In KK we were back to time-short snacking - our one attempt at satay, which I love, left us both feeling ill, and the day after coming down the mountain we were so exhausted and tender we headed straight to a Tex-Mex bar and stayed there.

There have been moments of culinary brilliance. The "Borneo laksa" in Kuching was astonishing. Local soft drinks have essentially replaced our familar thirst-quenchers - chrysanthemum tea, soy milk and tamarind juice all taste so good out of a cold can on a hot day. Malaysian "kopi", intense and thick with condensed milk, is now a staple. And no breakfast is complete without mee (thin noodles).

But my favourite would have to be the bacon. Pork-free bacon, made out of beef. Malaysia has proven the internet right: if bacon did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

Stoner Pistachios

Having claimed on Twitter that every fruit in Asia tastes like lychees, I have to retract/explain.

There does seem to be a lot of lychee-ish-ness happening, which is particularly strange since lychee isn't much of a flavour. It's kind of a watery coolness that is sweet but gentle, nice with custard, but hardly a shock to the senses. But, in the continent that produced kimchee, curry, fugu, and satay, I wasn't expecting subtle.

So I was disappointed when the first 3 fruits I was handed were 2 lychee-ish fruits and a green mandarin. Rambutan is exciting to look, a red ball with yellow strands like a small soft sea egg, and quite fun to open. The taste is nice, and I think might work at home, but it is very lychee like.

Longan is similar to lychee too but quite annoying to get into. Gael enjoys the longan and water drinks available in various places. My experience with a similar tamarind drink was more nuanced. It's a salty sour taste which was hard going. It looked like a sunset but was more difficult to appreciate. I was still tempted to acquire the taste though.

Much more yum though was mangosteen. Completely unlike a mango, mangosteen has a hard and resolutely red case with translucent white flesh (like a lychee :) within. The locals warn that the red will stain FOREVER, and some hotels have banned mangosteen for that reason. I didn't test it but after the first mangosteen I didn't care. It's like a tangy mandarin with a slight buttery flavour. They're very tasty and sweet, well worth the effort. Just, carefully, tear the shell off and eat the white flesh with gusto.

Dragonfruit manages to out lychee lychees while being obviously the most exciting fruit. It's covered in purple-red scales like a dragons egg, and seems about the right size. Cut it open like a small watermelon and you'll find flesh the most vivid purple you've ever seen. The colour is stunning, we literally stopped our meal to discuss the colour. The taste is also stunning: it doesn't have any at all. Seriously it's a visual spectacle with no substance. Watermelon is a taste explosion in comparison. However if you want to add a fantastic colour to something without changing the flavour, dragonfruit is your best friend.

Also reminding me of watermelon is ... Yellow watermelon. It's just like watermelon but yellow. It's also, in my opinion, slightly nicer so I'd like to see it at home.

We also tried guava slices. Guava turns up occasionally in drinks at home so we knew what to expect. However the thin 10cm and slightly dry slices were excellent. A pear with flavour, spicy and cedar-ish. They are green on one side and white and you just eat everything with a big smile.

Honey dew melon slices look similar but have a slightly crunchy centre like an apple or pear. They taste similar to the guava but not quite as good.

Papaya is a pastel orange eaten like a melon and relatively popular at home so it was a familiar friend to visit in Sabah. As were pineapples, oranges, and apples.

Durian was not. It's an angry pineapple on the outside, and a yellow kidney on the inside. The smell is simultaneously nutty and revolting. Sort of like some sort of pickled walnut but without the tang of vinegar. The taste loiters around like a stoner pistachio: never really nutty nor completely revolting. I like marmite so I understand acquired tastes and durian is definitely one of those.

So I take it back: fruits in Asia more interesting than lychees, and I'd love to see more of them at home.

"But Everest you can take days over"

The greatest phone call I've ever made would have to be the one I made yesterday morning to tell my family Gregory and I had just got engaged. We were on descent, about 30 minutes below the summit, when we stopped to rest on a shallow granite slope just above Sayat Sayat checkpoint. With the morning sun shining and the little fields and houses of Sabah spread out at our feet, we decided now was as good a time as any to make the calls. Mt Kinabalu has excellent cellphone reception, even at the summit. My mum was excited, wanted to see the ring; Gregory's dad texted "glad you both got altitude sickness together".

That was about the last bright point of the day. Gregory's sparkly rock on my finger definitely made for a distraction from the hellish descent, but nothing could have made it any easier.

It took us from 2.30 till 9.30am to make the round trip from Pendant Hut to the summit and back. By the time we got back to the hut we felt as if we'd done a full day of climbing already, which we had. It wasn't easy climbing either - there were ropes and steep faces, hundreds of steps, and large boulder piles to ascend hand over hand. Our toes were sore from being rammed into the front of our shoes, and our ankles were sore from balancing. We were glad we'd bailed on the via ferrata - although the locals are very proud of it, we were too tired to try it (and see Gregory's post for his concerns about the safety briefing).

There was little time to rest. After a cooked breakfast at the hut we toasted our engagement with arak (Sarawak rice spirit), stocked up on chocolate at the Laban Rata store, and started on the remainder of the descent around 11.30am.

We limped out of Timpohon Gate just before 5.30pm. Six kilometers in six hours - the same speed we had made going up. Because we were already fatigued, coming down was even harder. This was made worse by my idea that it would be easier below Layang Layang - but that only applies when you're going up - while stepping up thousands of steps is tiring, it's way easier than stepping down them.

Well before halfway we were seriously struggling. Our knees were too sore to take the steps properly, so we were going down crabwise, one step at a time. Our bruised toes made every step painful. My ankles and calves were too weak to balance, forcing me to grip the handrail with both hands to avoid falling. In the state we were in, it was a miracle that neither of us did fall and hurt ourselves.

We weren't the only people struggling. Apart from the local guides and porters, almost every climber we saw that day was in distress, from the summit to the exit. Fitness levels had nothing to do with it, nor nutrition, nor clothing; it was just that the task was too much for the majority of people up there. People were suffering on that mountain because it can't safely be climbed the way the tourist operators want you to climb it.

I don't know why they promote this two-day round trip, but it's madness. No one but the true mountaineers should be trying to descend on the same day they summit. To make the mountain accessible to the reasonably fit tourist - which is what they seem to want to do - the operators should instead be promoting an "in your own time" approach.

At the very minimum a standard trip should include two nights at Laban Rata with a daylight summit attempt in the middle. The 2.30am start for the summit is just exhausting people and making the trip more dangerous, and without the pressure to descend on the same day, it's unnecessary. Laban Rata has the infrastructure to handle many people at leisure - store, restaurant, books and games - and it would make so much more sense to have people relaxing there after they come down from the summit. Having them pack up and walk out immediately is dangerous and dumb.

One other thing I'd add to the standard package is a night at Kinabalu Park HQ after the descent. It's hard to know how necessary this would be if you'd taken the descent at a reasonable pace, but with our sore knees and ankles, we definitely didn't want to get straight in a van for the two-hour drive back to KK. If we'd booked in at the HQ we would have been able to go straight to sleep, and someone making better time would have had the option of exploring the trails around the base of the mountain, which look very inviting.

Mt Kinabalu should be a tourist attraction on par with Yosemite National Park, but the way they're selling it makes it a hazard up there with Aoraki. I got the title of this post from two fit climbers who passed us on descent, discussing whether Kinabalu is made harder than Everest by the schedule. This is madness; I say enough.

Everything is OK

The morning is crisp but not cold. I'm up promptly at 1AM after tossing and turning with anticipation and trepidation. The sky is black and crystal clear, but there is a whippy wind. Perfect weather for viewing, staying warm, and keeping cool.

Slowly everyone awakes, looking befuddled but ernest.

Not many had a good night's sleep but some of that disappointment was assuaged by the DeLonghi 4 slice toaster. A little bit of luxury goes a long way.

2:39 and we're on our way, with stars above and the lights of KK to the west. The path is an easy but steep mix of wooden steps and wet granite. We all have headlamps so even the darkness doesn't matter. I can even blog, albeit slowly, as I walk

We've passed 3.5km attitude and the steps are steeper. To our right the boulders have changed to walls of granite. The rock climbing here is fantastic with 100s of metres of slab  and excellent boulders long before you reach the pinnacles. The locals are justifiably proud of top-notch talent visiting and laying new routes.

Far to the south lightning crackles as we finally reach a flat bit.

We emerge from the stunted bonsai tree onto an enormous diagonal slab. A series of white ropes zig-zag across the face and then turn straight up. Horror at the sheerness are overwhelmed by memories of batman and robin climbing much harder walls trivially easily. With "na-na-na" ringing in my head I bolted hand over hand to the top. I felt very chuffed with myself. The similar 3 rope climb later on slowed us down but was a fantastic effort. 

We've reached Sayat-Sayat checkpoint with 1/2 an hour to spare. Now for the summit.

Beyond Sayat-Sayat the route is a continuous 45° slab. The constant uphill balancing act got to Gael and she switched gecko mode. But our guide Byron used his hypnotic superpower to help her find her feet again. With his help we were able walk past the highest point in New Zealand holding hands.

Beyond the Mount Cook mark the mountain flattens to a granite slope that connects the many peaks. It was a relief, though Gael was feeling the altitude with every step. She got lightheaded every time she stood up. With my encouragement and Byron's expertise she continued on, rock by rock, step by step. The granite rose up toward the summit as the sunrise coloured the sky. When the first rays of sun touched the summit, we stood there together having conquered distance, uncertainty, rock, and tiredness together. It was the most romantic moment in my life.

So I asked Gael to marry me.