The first hour was great!
The second hour was tedious.
The third hour was excruciating.
I thought it would just fly by - since it took us four hours to get up to base camp, it had to be twice as fast on the way down, right? But like Everest, the descent is the most dangerous part. Your legs are tired, your knees are stiff, it's slippery from the rain and cloud mists, so if you stumble and fall here you could find yourself tumbling down about a hundred steps. Then they call in the helicopter to get you down, and as tired as I was, I would rather walk.
Finally finally finally, we reached the bottom!
(Check out our guide's calves - they're huge! Also note that he did the whole thing in Crocs.)
We collected our "congratulations, you officially made it to the summit" color certificates (if you didn't make it all the way to the top, you only get black-and-white "nice try" certificates). We made it back to the hotel just in time for our 90-minute hot stone massages. Afterward, a fight broke out between David and I when he suggested that we dress up and go to the Indian restaurant at the hotel. After over ten hours of climbing and descending, there was no way I was going to be talked out of sitting on the hotel bed in my bathrobe, watching bad cable TV, and falling asleep with a a huge cheeseburger and beer in my stomach. I didn't care if that was boring, it was the only thing I had the energy for.
The next morning, my legs were really really really sore. Like, I'm-not-sure-I-can-make-it-to-the-bathroom sore. We hobbled down to breakfast, with the staff giggling at us and saying, "Oh, you must have climbed the mountain!"
As our last Borneo treat, we went scuba diving. Though there weren't a lot of fish to see, the swim felt pretty good on our legs and the scenery was spectacular.
Thus ends Borneo Part Two. And even though I couldn't walk right for days, I'd go back there again in a second. To the beach I mean. Not the mountain, are you kidding me?
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