Malaysia Part 1 - Tioman/Mukut

Malaysia was a dream world. We expected to be dropped back into difficult travel with bartering, trying to find the right bus, people lying to us so that we will buy some service or other, etc. However, it turned out to be quite the opposite! Malaysia is one of the easiest countries that we've had the pleasure to visit, and the people some of the friendliest. Even the children were amazing, most of them smiling and going out of their way to say, "Hello!" Malay food was also some of the best of the trip. There were influences from India, China, and more. On top of that, there were even fusions of the various cuisines. So much food to try, so little time!
Part of our plan for Malaysia was rather ambitious. Scotty, a friend and long-time climbing partner from San Diego, spent much time and effort climbing an obscure route buried in the jungle of Tioman Island on the south east side of Peninsular Malaysia. After three attempts, spread over three years, he finally climbed the 300m (1000') granite face after a 5 day push during which he endured a tropical storm near the summit. Since we were headed to the area, he recommended it to us and we decided to put it on the itinerary. We weren't really prepared for a multi-day ascent, so we would have to climb the route in a single day. It would be hard, but potentially possible.

Leaving Singapore, we bused up into Malaysia to the town closest to Tioman Island. From their the speed boat taxi service dropped at the southern most of the "touristy" villages. The tourist taxi roams up and down the west coast, but we needed to go to the southern tip. I left Nath at the Jetty, and started walking around town looking for a boat. After a talking to a few people, I found someone who would take us down in their tiny motor boat for around $30. We hopped in the boat, and during the next 30 or so minutes watched the beautiful island pass by on our left and the Dragon's Horns came into view. I'll give it to Scotty, he sure picked a beautiful place to climb! It's truly stunning, and we've been quite a few amazing places on this trip. The granite face we were to climb looked steep, but featured. The rock was black and white, with huge streaks running down. I was practically drooling! When the boat landed that evening, the next mission was to find lodging and food!

We were in Kampot Mukut (Mukut Village), a tiny place where there is a single foot path across the village that can easily be walked in about 10 minutes. As we started walking toward the direction of a place to stay we had read about in the Malaysian climbing guide, we quickly realized that staying in Mukut we be a unique experience. It just seemed deserted. There were many bungalows that looked closed, no workers, no tourists, nothing. There were a few locals around, but that's about it. When we found the recommended bungalows, the name had changed to Tanjon Adventure Inn and the paths looked rather overgrown. It was completely deserted. Since none of the other bungalows looked open, I left Nath to see if I could find someone to let us rent a bungalow.

Almost immediately, the wonder of Mukut started to show through. Amir, one of the locals, asked me if I needed help. I told him that I wanted to stay at the bungaloos down the path and he said that he would help me find a worker. His English was good enough that we talked a little while we walked all the way across the village and back to find Matar. Matar greeted us with a smile, and jumped on his motorbike to zip over to the bungalows to get one ready. They were completely unprepared for tourists, since it was the low season, and we didn't even have running water for the first day and a half. Instead, we just jumped in the ocean to clean off since we literally had the only beach of the entire village to ourselves. It was truly unbelievable... That night, wandering the town for dinner we saw Amir again who pointed us toward the ONLY restaurant that served dinner. We ate there almost every night we were in Mukut and tried everything on the menu.

Day 1:

We woke up the next day ready to start work on climbing the big route. We had read trip reports from the most recent pair to climb the route (there have only been 3 teams to climb the face, ever) and they told horror stories of spending 3 days chopping a trail through the jungle, barbed vines leaving lines of infected welts all over their bodies, and slashing away with a machete that they had borrowed at the local police station. We figured that the path would have been over grown again, figured we needed a good breakfast to prepare for a big day of jungle trashing! Walking across Mukut, we couldn't even see something that resembled a restaurant. The restaurant for dinner was closed, and the two that worked there were across the street working to build a house. We kept going, until we ran into Matar. Matar greeted us with his enormous smile and asked us, "Breakfast?" We said yes, and he replied energetically, "Roti Canai!" and pointed toward the end of the village we were walking toward. We figured we'd find this roti canai he was speaking of, and kept walking happy that we would be able to eat. As we kept going, a little restaurant came into view that many locals went to for breakfast. They didn't serve much as far as we could tell, and we ordered some roti canai! It was simply amazing! It's like a little fried pancake that is served with curry in one little plate and sugar in another. You tear pieces off the roti and dip them in the sugar or curry or both. I learned that roti canai was a little piece of heaven. That curry was some of the best I've ever had! As the days went by, we figured out that the only other option for breakfast was Nasi Lemak. It's coconut flavored rice with a little spicy sauce and it's covered in tiny fried anchovies. I tried it a few times for variety, but it was no roti! We had figured out dinner, and now breakfast, but what were we going to do for lunch while hacking away in the jungle all day? Luckily, we found a tiny market and bought some crackers, peanuts, cookies and a few other little things.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in the jungle. There was an established trail that lead into the jungle up toward the Dragon's Horns, but this was more a trekking trail that wouldn't take us to the base of the main granite face. We followed it until we passed the two boulders described in the Malaysian climbing guide, and took a left off into the jungle. The Malaysian climbing guide warned us, you need to have a compass and maybe even an altimeter in order to find the granite wall. I figured that we could go without, but almost immediately realized how serious they were. It was completely impossible to tell not only the direction of the wall, and the direction we were travelling, but even something as simple as north south east west! The jungle canopy completely blocked all view of the surroundings, and when the clouds obscured the sun, we couldn't even tell which direction the sun was! Sometimes it felt like we were on an old trail, but we were essentially creating a trail from scratch. Interestingly enough, one of the hardest parts of the trail building was to leave signs of how to get back! I quickly realized that one of the ferns that was EVERYWHERE was perfect. We just bent branches about midway as a sign that we had passed that way. Sometimes we were beating essentially a tunnel and that was easy to follow, but others when we found a path of least resistance, it was scary to realize how quickly we could be lost if we hadn't left signs of our passage. Unfortunately, the same fern that was everywhere and perfect for leaving signs of our passage was the same plant with the spiked vines! We were both very careful, but we both still ended up nursing wounds with antibiotic for days afterwards due to those evil things. It wasn't nearly as horrible as the other guys made it out to be, and a machete was completely unnecessary. After a few hours of descent progress, it started to rain. Actually, I should probably describe it more as a river started pouring down on us from the sky... Since our trail was headed uphill, and the ground was getting slippery, I called it quits and we headed down. By the time we made it back to the bungalow, we were so wet that we were clean... Our filthy clothes would be perfect next time we put them on, but everything in the backpack was soaked too. Now, if you're reading this it might seem like a while back, but we had just bought our camera 2 days previously in Singapore. Yup.... that's right.... the camera was in the backpack! It was in it's original sheath, in a camera bag, in a zip lock bag, in the top of the backpack. Now, normally that would probably have kept it dry. Or maybe at least prevented it from getting wet enough to be damaged, but unfortunately the top of the backpack we brought had POOLED WATER in the top. When I opened it up, I had to pour water out! When I saw the zip lock bag had water in it, I was devastated! It was completely soaked through, all the way. We tried to dry it, but it was as futile as resisting the borg. We were in Malaysia, in one of the coolest villages we'd stayed at so far, trying to climb an unimaginably beautiful wall, and again we were without a camera!!!!! AAAAAAaaaarrrrrgh!

On top of the camera, after swimming in the ocean to cool down Nath was drying herself with a towel in front of the bungalow and got stung by a wasp in the head! Some of you have heard the story about the wasp nest that Nath walked into in the Needles back in California, when she got swarmed and they stung her many times on the head. She's still traumatized from it, so this was an extremely horrible for her and apparently so bad she could feel the poison and pain spreading through her. On top of that, she left the room to get something drying outside a few minutes later, another wasp stung her on the head! At this point, I looked outside carefully, and sure enough there was a wasp nest just under the roof of the bungalow! They were HUGE! What a way to end the day...

Day 2:

We decided to have a rest day on day 2. My hand was pretty infected from the trail building, and Nath's head was hurting from the previous day's wasp encounters. After our morning roti, which usually cost under $2 for as much as we could eat along with drinks, we hit the beach in front of our bungalow for some good old snorkeling! We put on swimming goggles and swim suits and started off into the ocean. There were corals, but there was much damage and not too much. There were beautiful fish we'd seen everywhere else on the few corals that were on the bottom, but the snorkeling wasn't fantastic. We had fun just swimming along seeing what we could find and taking it easy. After a while, so that we wouldn't get too sunburned, we headed back to the bungalows. We still had some time, and had heard about a waterfall to the east of the village. The walk there took about an hour, and when we got there it was rather late in the day. The waterfalls were similar to what we had been playing in Litchfield NP in Australia just a few weeks ago, but not nearly as inviting. Instead of swimming, we headed back toward Mukut.

Along the way, we passed a huge soccer field. Many of the locals were playing soccer, and having a great time. We stopped and watched, and after a few minutes they started motioning me to join them. I hesitated since I hadn't played for years, but gave in and joined the crowd.
I wasn't very good, but playing soccer with those guys, laughing and running around the grassy field barefoot was some of the most fun I've had on the trip. It was a really cool experience, and I was very happy when one of them told me in broken English that they play every day in the evening. I told myself that I would come play again.

That night at dinner, we met some Singaporean tourists who invited us to eat dinner with them the next night.

Day 3:

Post roti, it was another day of trail building. It was hot up there in the jungle, blindly pushing the trail farther and farther. We really had no idea if we were heading in the right direction, but intuition lead us straight to the climb. We turned where we should, scrambled gullies, and finally barged straight up the hill until the main face with uncanny accuracy and literally ended up in the perfect spot! Standing at the base of the route, I realized this was going to be more adventure than I had planned. The first pitch had no rock climbing at all.... it was a vine chocked gully, near vertical, that lead to the cleaner rock above. To lead that pitch, I would have to play Tarzan for almost 100' with questionable protection. We headed down, fixing the trail in places to ensure we could follow it if we were coming down at night, and headed to dinner!

We ate dinner with the man we met the day before, and his family. They were on an organized tour that included room and dinner, but the tour operator didn't mind feeding us as well since he always made too much food anyways. We ate amazing fish curry, fresh fruits, and more. It was fun to sit and hang out with some other people, and at the end of the dinner they introduced us to a dessert called ABC. It was really good, and they showed us the place we could buy it! We had a new place to buy food from! Whoo Hoo!

Day 4:

The next day we saw the weather was good and we went up with the gear to preview the initial pitches of the route. The plan was to climb up a few pitches, teach Nath how to jumar (ascend a rope mechanically), stash the gear, and come back another day a quickly climb the route and come back down. The hike went very quickly, and it seemed like no time before we were at the base. I quickly racked up and flaked out the rope and headed off up the first pitch. It started with ledge scrambling and a little vine pulling, but quickly the angle steepens and the only thing to grab are vines. I determined that the best strategy was to grab as many vines as possible to minimize my chance of having them pull out sending me to the ground, and I started hauling myself up the wall. As I progressed, there were a few places to grab actual rock, but it really was mostly vine climbing. Eventually, after much hesitation about what I was doing, I managed to pull myself up onto a large forested ledge and sling a large tree to belay off of. Nath quickly followed up, and I started off on the next pitch.

The next pitch was real rock climbing, and it was hard. I found a bolted line, that Scotty may or may not have climbed. I believe that he climbed more vines up a face to the right according to his topo (route description) but there were bolts protecting some very thin face climbing. They were added relatively recently, but they still showed signs of rusting due to the climate and the proximity to the salty ocean. Within 20' of climbing, I was already hanging on the bolts not wanting to take a fall on them due to their quality, and I ended up stepping on one of the bolts to pass a very difficult move. Higher, the difficulty eased and a crack appeared which could be protected by cams. The crack was rather dirty though, and the rock quality not the best. After finishing up a 10-15 meter corner, I ended up on a ledge with a single newer bolt for belay and what appeared to be Scotty's original extremely rusted bolts. I backed up the single bolt with some large cams, fixed the rope, and rappelled back down to join Nath.

Once on the ground, I showed Nath how to jumar. She took to it quite quickly, and was chugging up the pitch in no time. Once on top, I had her put me on belay and I reclimbed the pitch barely pulling off the move where I had stepped on the bolt before. The pitch showed a rating of around 5.9 with maybe some aid. I headed out on easy territory and quickly found myself looking at a horror show of a lead. It was a steep leaning crack, wet from the humidity covered with a strange dirty slimy layer that would compress when cams were placed and pulled, and on top of all that it was wide. I smiled to myself and thought, "Only Scotty...." As I struggled up the crack, I botched a foot sequence and ended up hanging on the rope. Above, the crack ended in a protectionless roof. There was an old bolt, possibly Scotty's, right where the crack ended, but I had a cam right next to it and the bolt was so bad that even I wouldn't clip it. My motto is often, "if it's there, clip it!" I started working my way up into the roof feeling for holds, smearing on tiny feet on the slab below. I moved up and left away from my gear and had to make a final massive reach to great holds above. As I hauled my feet over the roof, I knew I was done with that pitch. I placed two pieces of gear to protect Nathalie since the anchor was off to the side, and finished off the pitch.

Nath came up and had a little trouble with the wide crack and roof but eventually pulled through the moves. We were sitting on a nice large sloping ledge where I'm sure previous parties had stayed the night. The rock quality so far had been quite low, but it looked much better and cleaner above. The next pitch didn't look too bad, and it leaned hard left meaning retreat might become more difficult, so Nath and I decided that we had previewed enough and rappelled back down to the ground. We stowed our gear under a rock and made the jungle hike back down to the hut.

On the way down to the hut, I made the horrible realization that I had left the key in the top of the backpack which was stowed at the base of the climb! The funny thing is, in climbing you don't store your gear often, and one of the only other times I've stored a back was with Scotty and we did the same thing and had to do an extra 8 miles of hiking at night to retrieve the keys! I was ready to go back, but Nath convinced me that we could find another way into the room. I told her we could try since we were only 15 minutes from the bungalow. When I got to the room, I figured out that I could easily remove the glass from the window, which I did, and we were back in the room!

Once we were done with the hike and back in the room, we got in our swimming suits and headed down to the beach. Today, there were others staying in one of the bungalows, and as we headed down to the water they yelled and pointed at the water. We looked down, and on the beach was the biggest turtle I've ever seen in my life. It looked like it was easily a meter long! The huge guy pulled himself up on shore for a bit, then turned around and headed back into the water. And us without a camera!!!!! Oh well, seems like it's the theme of the trip.

At dinnertime, we ended up eating with some locals who were very nice and had some of the best food we ate our whole time in Malaysia. They lived in Mersing, the city from which you boat to Tioman Island, and brought tour groups from Singapore out for a few days at a time. They had a group there for part of the time we were there and luckily they invited us for dinner on their last night there. There was endless seafood, and then endless dessert. The seafood was probably caught a few hours before and was just perfection. They were very nice, and we talked quite a bit. They told us about how they watch the news often and that part of the US was severely flooded at the moment. It was funny to get current news from a Malaysian local in a remote part of an island. After that they had us go talk to their clients who had endless questions about our climbing of the Dragon's Horns. The clients gave us free beer too! It was a good night.

Day 5:

We decided to take a rest day since the weather was suboptimal and we wanted to be completely fresh for our big push. The others who were staying a few bungalows down were in the restaurant area of the place, and they yelled at us to come join them, which we did. It turned out that they were the owner and his son, who live in Kuala Lumpur. It was the low season so they didn't expect any guests. I don't remember their names since we met them over a month ago, and we only spent one day with them, but they were just like everyone else in Mukut; friendly, happy, kind, and giving. They were drinking Nescafe like water and they offered it to Nath and I. I joined in, and soon I had a good sugar/caffiene buzz going. Matar was there, who works for them, and they were playing checkers. They use a larger board than I was used to, and they taught me how to play. Checkers is a common game, but I really had no idea the rules when you get a "king." They just bounce all over the place! It's wild. Matar was the master and could defeat anyone. I got my butt kicked. Nath and I played and I think we were about evenly matched if I remember right. As lunch approached, they asked us if we wanted to join them. Matar and the owner had been hunting in the jungle for mouse deer and caught one. They were Matar was cooking up mouse deer curry!!! What an amazing opportunity! We, of course, took them up on their offer and had another amazing meal with the locals! Mukut really was a magical place. That was their last day there, they only came for 2-3 days, and they took off that afternoon.

I finished the day with another round of soccer with the locals! :) I got better, but I still wasn't great.

Day 6: The big day!

We were up around 5:30 and hiking around 6am. It was potentially going to be a big day. The route was hard, and various characteristics made for slow climbing. We blasted the trail to the base in under an hour, tossed the ropes out, I racked up and I unhappily started jungle pulling again to complete the first pitch. It really wasn't fun since there was no protection and if the vines went, I went. In a matter of minutes I was on the ledge and bringing Nathalie up. We finished the first of 10 pitches in 15 minutes! Unfortunately, we forgot the topo so Nath had to go back down... We finished the first of 10 pitches AGAIN in 22 minutes! :)

I knew what to expect from the next pitch and where the difficulties were so I knew it would go faster. I was planned on going all the way to our previous highpoint and linking the two pitches from the day before. I climbed up through the bolts, decided time was more important than style and stepped on the bolt again, flew up the crack in a corner, and passed the next ledge which had a tree growing out of it, that I had stopped at the day before. Now I was at the base of the wide dirty wet crack leaning crack, but I knew how to climb it. I managed it easier than expected, and soon I was pulling through the roof and bringing my feet up. As soon as I was standing above the roof on a good ledge for my feet I was very relieved. I moved up a move or two and started looking for where I put the gear in two days ago. While I was looking around, I realized the rope was hooked under the roof I had just pulled myself over. I leaned down and flicked it free, and in the process my instincts went haywire. For no apparent reason, I felt myself off balance and moving backward. I immediately screamed, "FALLING," twice so Nath could hopefully haul in some rope and prepare for the coming impact on her end. She did wonderfully, but I was already a ways above my last piece since the roof had no protection, and I took a huge swinging fall of around 10m/35' into the tree growing out of the ledge below snapping a few medium size branches off of it. The block I had been holding had just detached from the face and and gone flying, as had I. It was rather scary, and luckily Nath wasn't hit by any of the debris, rock or tree that had come crashing down past her. Also, I had managed to get away unscathed except a little lost skin where I had impacted on the tree.

I've learned that when climbing, you have to be proactive to not give into the fear. Instead of hanging there, focusing on what happened, I just pulled myself hand over hand back up the rope, to where my highest cam was in the crack. Moving is better than thinking sometimes. When I got to the last piece, I was surprised to see that due to the coating in the crack, the 0.5 camalot had slid over 6" almost entirely out of the crack and was precariously holding me up by 2 of the 4 lobes! I started climbing again, reset the cam deeper in the crack, and pulled the roof one last time. After building the anchor, I brought Nath up and we sat on the ledge looking at the next pitch and discussing options.

The next pitch didn't look too hard to climb, but the protection was pathetic to say the least. There was at least one bolted variation to what Scotty had climbed out left, but some sort of chemical ooze that seeped out of the rock above had corroded the bolts to less than worthless in a matter of a couple years! Even the granite, which is one of the sturdiest rocks, was corroded as if acid had been poured on it. It looked almost like featured limestone. Scotty's variation followed a crack, but I knew that higher there would be a high probability that bolts would be necessary for safe climbing where the two variations met, and even if I followed Scotty's variation I didn't trust my gear as much due to the coating on the inside of the crack. With the low quality rock, poor protection, and remote nature of the climb (no rescue really), I threw in the towel. The climb wasn't for us. Instead we sat down on the large ledge and just appreciated the amazing view down on the jungle, beaches, ocean, and islands for about an hour. If we had a bolt kit, and significantly more time, I would have stayed and finished the route on such a beautiful location, but we didn't and I think we made the right choice in retreating.

If anyone ever goes up to do that climb, be aware that the bolts deteriorate very rapidly, possibly as quickly as in Krabi, Thailand. The bolts should probably be replaced with titanium glue-ins of the same quality used in Krabi. The route has only seen 3 ascents, and it already has multiple bolted variations, old really bad bolts and newer rusted bolts, and it's starting to look ugly. Do it right, because it is truly an amazing piece of rock, in a world class location. I wish I could have gotten to the quality pitches up higher, safely. Maybe we'll be back!

We rappelled, packed the bags, and headed down the trail. When we met up with the trekking trail, we decided to explore it. We dumped our packs and headed off up the hiker's trail. As we slogged uphill, we realized that we were getting closer and closer to where our trail went! In the end, we found a relatively good trail that lead us right to the base of the climb already in existance! Ha! Oh well, it'll just be easier next time. With that knowledge, we headed back down the trail feeling somewhat defeated, but happy with our overall experience in Mukut.

That evening, I played one last game of soccer with the guys and managed to even score a goal! I was definitely improving (but still not nearly as good as them) and loving it.

Day 7:

We left Mukut after a truly special week there. The people there were some of the friendliest I've ever met in my life, anywhere, and we had many great experiences that we'll always remember. It's really fun to have every child in a village yell, "Hello!" every time you walk by.... Almost all of the villagers asked us when we were coming back and tried to convince us to come next year! We failed at the climb, but we found an amazing little niche of the world we otherwise would have missed. Outside of staying with my brother for a few weeks, our time in Mukut was one of the better experiences of the trip.