Well I arrived in Borneo safe and sound and geeze after a relatively cool Thailand this place it so hot and humid - you can't walk to the end of the street without being covered in sweat!

I flew into Kota Kinabalu and met my new intrepid group; 2 english couples, 1 australian couple and 2 Danish girls travelling together, and 4 solo travellers; me, Dave an English bloke (40 yrs old), Jodie who's australian and Siv from Norway. It's a good group, I like everyone or though Dave is slightly irritating but because the group is bigger it doesn't really matter.

We went out for a group dinner and opted for a curry house only to find you have to eat with no cutlery - have you tried eating curry with your fingers it's bloody ridiculous, luckily I was one of the people that ordered a nan bread (called Roti over here). I think we spent most of the night sizing up how fit each of us was for the mountain climb that we were going to be doing in a few days time; to be honest I was a bit gutted there were no fatties in the group!!

The following morning we headed out by bus (4 hr trip) to a Duscan village that sits in the shadow of Mount Kinabalu. We were met by the locals and the children performed their traditional dance for us - then made us join in which was pretty embarrasing as we had only just met the group and didn't know each other that well. It was very basic accomodation with cold water only but we scrubbed up and headed to one of the villagers houses for dinner. It was a good spread (unfortunately didn't quite agree with me) but they tried. Then they made us drink their rice wine which was pretty foul - you basically didn't have a choice you had to down it and luckily it wasn't as bad as Zambuca or Tequilla but it definately wasn't a drink you could saver. They tried to force it down are necks all evening and a few people who were too polite for their own good got pretty wrecked and ended up dancing around to the villagers make shift band. I drank enough to be polite but not too much as the thought of those toilets really put me off the thought of drinking anything for a very long time!!

Our tour leader, Aldrin, who is a bit of a d*** got smashed and fell down a muddy slope, the Danish girls weren't impressed especially when he puked down himself!! He then got into someone elses bunk bed, so when the rest of us got back we had to reshuffle the bedroom arrangements!!

In the morning when we got up we could see the full extent of the mountain we were to climb on the horizen, daunting is not the word!!! We headed out for a walk round the village which was full of hills and slopes, the good thing was that it was much cooler than Kota Kinabalu as we were higher up. After the walk we got in the vans and headed to Mount Kinabalu Park.