Sabah is the northern-most part of Borneo and is dominated by Mount Kinabalu. You know it's a big mountain when it's poking above the clouds and isn't totally covered in rainforest like the rest.

Before tackling a 4.1km high mountain we had a few days in the main state city of Kota Kinabalu. KK is a friendly and fairly small city but it certainly has a traffic problem, at least around Christmas. The air is thick with fumes and it’s much worse than London, which is saying something. You notice this when coming from Singapore with its subjectively slightly better air quality than London. I suspect the poor air quality has something to do with less stringent emissions regulations and maybe this is what things were like before catalytic converters were mandatory.

There appears to be a culture of car modification here and there are lots of embellished vehicles. The number plates are also quite interesting. Many cars have plates starting with SAB, which we originally thought stood for Sabah. However, it’s just the SA that stands for the state so you also get SAA and SAC. This year is D but it doesn’t look like anyone wants a SAD car, as we haven’t spotted any.

Unfortunately, something that is sad is the sea. We took a boat trip to an island and there was lots of rubbish floating in the water that we could see on the journey. Most of it was plastic waste and even included whole black bin bags full of trash. It would seem that a culture of stewardship and conservation deserves greater fostering.

Good Tidings We Bring to You and Your Kinabalu

Our Christmas Day challenge was the aforementioned 4100m lump of glaciated granite, which in hindsight may not have been a great choice considering we planned to do more walking for the remainder of the week. To say it was a sufferfest would be an understatement.

The impact of the altitude should not be underestimated and we both got very sick. We formed an ad-hoc group of five but only three of us made it to the summit, which fortunately included us. I’d recommend a good stretch and warm up before starting every pitch. Unfortunately, our climbing wall didn’t provide sufficient altitude training. The descent ruined our legs for the rest of the week, which made our plans a bit tough. However, we went through with them anyway, so stay tuned.