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Adventure from Experience
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The locals believe that to visit the summit area of the mountain is to risk the wrath of their ancestral spirits who dwell there. Every year a sacrifice of chickens, eggs and Betel nuts are made on behalf of all the many visitors. Our expedition, set to attempt a complete descent of the awesome cleft splitting the mountain – known as Low’s Gully - fascinated the entire population of Sabah, and was deemed to require support from the Bobohizan - ancestral female spiritual leaders, who arranged a welcoming ceremony, sacrifice of seven white chickens, and later a thanksgiving ceremony to re-unite us with the part of our spirit which we inevitably had left behind in the Gully.
Kinabulu: Place of the Dead
The descent of Low’s Gully
Fixing a quick release abseil system onto my harness, I slid down the rope from anchors fixed at full stretch beyond the torrent. Below me the black inscrutable depths beckoned beyond the frothing maelstrom where the waterfall plunged into the narrow channel in its headlong rush through Low’s Gully.
An icy blast as I dropped into the water, cutting loose from the rope and striking out for shore, towing a second line behind me. In this bottomless channel I must at all costs avoid entanglement with the rope. On the boulder field beyond, I grovelled out and tensioned the rope off. Minutes later, the rest of the team were whooping down this enormous “death slide” or “zip wire” some 100 metres out from the cliff face. A landscape of mosses and ferns, water worn boulders and black pools teeming with frogs, snakes and weird scuttling creatures set between impenetrable jungles: at last, the notorious canyons of Low’s Gully were yielding up some of their secrets.
Flying into Kote Kinabulu on a clear morning, the landscape spread below is dominated by the shining bulk of Mount Kinabulu, its wrinkled hide and granite horns a caricature of the vanished Borneo rhino. At 4,101 metres, Kinabulu is the highest mountain between the Himalayas and New Guinea. Moist ocean winds are forced over the mountain, wreathing it every afternoon in impenetrable mists and regular deluges.
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