Mount Kinabalu is a mass of bare granite rising 4,095 metres out of the rainforest of Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo, the highest mountain between the Himalaya and New Guinea, and it is climbed overnight without ropes to a summit plateau that the local Kadazan-Dusun people say the dead rest on. The climb takes two days: a first day up through forest to the huts at Laban Rata, a few hours' sleep, and a start around two in the morning for the summit. Above the treeline the mountain is a sloping desert of pale rock, polished smooth by an ice cap that covered it during the last Ice Age, only six degrees from the equator; the route follows fixed white ropes across the granite, narrow enough that the parties ahead set your pace, and ends on Low's Peak as the sun comes up over Borneo with the rock towers of the plateau standing black around you. Long before it was a tourist climb, Kadazan-Dusun guides held rites to ask the mountain's spirits for safe passage, and the guides who walk with you today are their descendants.
The lower slopes are the other reason the park is a UNESCO site: they hold one of the richest bands of plant life on Earth, more than 5,000 species, with over a thousand kinds of orchid and the world's largest pitcher plant, Nepenthes rajah, whose jugs hold two litres and feed largely on the droppings of a small tree shrew that climbs in to lick nectar from the lid. You do not have to climb to get the mountain; from the park headquarters at 1,500 metres the granite wall fills the sky above the cloud forest, and trails wind through the forest under it. For those who want the cliff, a route down from the summit follows iron rungs and cables across a granite wall at 3,600 metres and crosses a suspension bridge strung over open air. Kinabalu is a mountain climbed for a sunrise, and the rock you stand on for it was ground flat by ice on the equator.