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KOTA KINABALU / KINABALU PARK HQ / TIMPOHON GATE / ASCEND UP TO PENDANT HUT/ Via FERRATA TEASER BRIEFING/ STAR GAZING
(06:30hrs) Pick up will be from your hotel lobby for a 2hour journey up winding roads, down valleys and through spectacular scenery which lead to Kinabalu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that celebrates the richest and most diverse flora in the world. With as many as 6000 floral species occurring in the park and high levels of endemism, you’re definitely in for a treat!
Collect your packed lunches. Your guide will also arrange for all necessary registrations, assign you a mountain guide and apply for your ID TAG, which you must wear at all times.
(09:00hrs) All necessary registrations will be done by your guide, which includes assigning you to a mountain guide and applying your ID Tag. A pack lunch will be given to you, to fuel you for your adventure!
At Timpohon Gate, you are about to enter South East-Asia’s center of plant diversity, Borneo’s 140 million old rainforest in all its antiquity and majesty, you are also about to immerse yourself in a melting pot of all that is mysteriously cool, gigantically strange, enormously beautiful, and weirdly wonderful... evolution at its most finest, nature at its most beautiful.
It is raw grandeur all the way as you zoom in and experience 2 out of the 4 main vegetation zones that makes up the majestic Mount Kinabalu - the Lower Mountain Forest ( 1,200- 1,900m) and Upper Montane Forest (1,900 to 2,700m).
Thread along the oak-chestnut Lower Montane forest laced with chestnuts, myrtles, eucalyptus and also some conifers. As you trek further, big broad-leafed ferns unfurl and the “living fossil” known as the Celery Pine. The journey continues with fig trees and the well-known carnivorous pitcher plants. both small and big.
The air is cool and moist as you ease into the Upper Montane Forest at 1,900m. Trees are stunted (less than 6m tall) with trunks and branches (as well as leaves!) are draped with lichens, mosses and liverworts. Thick mists swirl and wander with the winds of the montane forest but flamboyant species of Rhododendrons with colors of red, pink, yellow and orange stand out in this zone, where it predominates.
After 4 to 5 hours of hiking, you will arrive at an open exposed ridge offering a breathtaking view to the East, 'Layang-Layang' Shelter (2,702m), Dusun for 'Place of Swallows'. Here, wild raspberries thrive and the soil takes on an orange-cinnamon color. Enjoy the sights and gulps of fresh air, your body is slowly acclimatizing!
The steepness of the path gradually increases as you proceed for final 2km leading to Pendant Hut. Vegetation is down to very short trees and scrubs, stones and earth.
(15:00hrs) Arrive at Pendant hut @ 3,289m and settle in.
(15:30hrs) Attend the mandatory Via Ferrata familiarization in Pendant Hut and meet your Mountain Torq trainer.
(18:00hrs) Buffet Dinner at Laban Rata restaurant and overnight at Pendant Hut.
(20:00hrs) Lights out.
