How do you Celebrate Climbing the Highest Peak in Borneo? Hmm, let me have a Tiger beer while I think about that….

Fact:  One of the joys of doing a lot of work overseas is that sometimes you get to have adventures. 

Fact:  When 80% of your waking hours are consumed by a company, you tend to make some good friends at work. 

When you combine these two facts, sometimes you get to have great adventures with one of your good friends. 

My buddy Kent and I both worked at the same company, roughly joining within six months of each other. We used to climb and backpack all over Colorado.  There are some great pics – and more beer tales of some of these in-state adventures - but one of the things that we both remember fondly was our climb of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo. 

Yes, it sounds like some cheesy pick up line – There I was , IN BORNEO.  However, it was an incredible adventure and a great beer tale. 

I was overseeing the launch of a cable channel in Singapore and I needed one of our video editors to fly over to Singapore with me and teach them some of our techniques.  These days, we’d just do a webex or something and that would be it. Me, feeling cocky, got to pick someone from the US team to come over and of course I picked my buddy Kent, especially after hearing about a 13,000 foot peak in Borneo not more than a 90 minute flight away. 

After getting him to Singapore and knocking out quite a bit over the next week, we prepared to for our trip.

The flight to Kinabalu wasn’t long and flying over the Pacific, it was intermittent clouds and clear skies.  I kept imagining all those WW2 films I’ve seen with the planes looking for the Japanese or American fleets.  Alas, we were not in a dive bomber but a commercial jet liner.  We landed in Kota Kinabalu and it looked like we just landed on Gilligan’s Island.  The airstrip was right along the beach and it was beautiful with white sands, palm trees and clear blue waters.   This was going to be cool.  

We started out very early in the morning. 

The beer of choice on this trip turned out to be Tiger beer.   A nice lager first brewed in Singapore in the 1930s.