Awesome Mount Kinabalu

Rising above lush rain forest to barren peaks, Southeast Asia's highest mountain is a study in contrasts

It's 6 a.m. and I'm perched atop Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, waiting for the sun to rise. Zipped tightly into my jacket, I guess that the temperature is just above freezing. It's hard to believe that the balmy rain forest of Borneo is just a few miles away.
            "It's a bit chilly, isn't it?" I say to one of my fellow climbers. He's almost too frozen to reply. "My hands are so cold," he says, fumbling with his camera, "I could easily drop something." And from here, that might mean never seeing it again, for there is little beneath us but empty space.
            During the three hours I climbed since leaving a warm bed in the middle of the night, I wondered whether my goal, 13,432-foot-high Low's Peak atop Kinabalu, was worth the effort. With the first rays of the sun now breaking over the eastern horizon, I'm about to find out.

Whoop. Whoop-whoop! Woo-oo-oooo-ooooo. The forest resounds to a loud, haunting song: the duet of a pair of Bornean gibbons, exuberant as children at a party. I glimpse the two grey primates as they move through leafy branches, swinging gracefully as gymnasts with long slender arms.

Loud honking in trees to my left announces the presence of one of the world's greatest rainforest birds, a rhinoceros hornbill. Well over a metre long, it's mainly black, with a long pale bill topped by a brilliant orange casque that curls up like a small horn. It honks louder and faster, and I hear air whooshing through wings, as it switches trees.

A red ribbon on a sapling indicates where, three months earlier, a researcher looked up to see leafy branches folded together: the temporary nest of a Bornean orang-utan. Nearby, a Rajah Brooke's birdwing - a magnificent butterfly with a shining green band across its long, otherwise jet-black wings, and a red front body - glides across a stream.

Towards sunset, it seems the air is filled with flying Geiger counters, as swiftlets chasing tiny insects emit double-clicks. They belong to only two families of birds that employ echolocation. At night, there's a continual chorus of chirps and ringing chirrups from tree frogs and crickets.