Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia (1)

One has to sacrifice a chicken to appease the spirits of mount Kota Kinabalu. Or so the legend says. With an increasing number of climbers, hitting 20,000 people in 2009, summiting or at least attempting to summit Borneo's highest peak, the approach to chicken sacrifices got more pragmatic. These days, seven chickens are given to the mountain spirits per year. I'm not so sure if the spirit is too happy about this new deal. I did my part to ask for a safe climb by sacrificing my packed-lunch chicken. Being a vegetarian has some benefits after all.

Our 5.5-hour hike started shortly after nine o’clock in the morning from the Kota Kinabalu Park headquarters. Much to the surprise of our guide, we insisted to walk the 4.6km paved road to the Timpohon trailhead. He met us there an hour and a half later.

Entering the gated trail, we followed a man-made path clearly marked as summit trail for the next four hours. The trail is well established, patched up with cement in places where erosion is getting a grip of the reddish soil of the mountain. After leaving the jungle like thick forest, crossing the tree line, the vegetation looked a lot like that of the Alps. Shrubs, granite rocks, never vanishing mist, and a constant drizzle. One or two times the sun broke through the clouds giving away parts of our distant goal: the 4,095.2-meter high summit of Mount Kota Kinabalu.

At an altitude of around 3,000 meters, the air is getting considerably thin. Our heart rates are up and our walking pace down. We dragged our feet over endless steps. Glenn dragged even more: Parts of the soles of his new hiking boots started to fall off. While he was suffering from shoe mal-function, I was struggling with a damaged knee.

Despite our little obstacles, we got to snap some pictures along the trail. We reached the Laban Rata hut for our overnight stay at 2pm. While we slept like kings in Kota Kinabalu’s Meridien for the past two nights, it is bunk beds in an eight men room with shared shower facilities for this night! The rumors about water and power shortages turned out to be wrong, at least for us. We took a quick warm shower and learned our lesson standing on a freezing cold tile floor: let the water trickle rather than go full blast to achieve maximum heat experience from the small on-demand-water heater.

Freezing seemed to be the motto up there. The rooms were basic and so were the windows. We decide to use our bunk bed efficiently, meaning the upper bed as storage shelf while sleeping together in the lower bed. According to our judgment, the heavy wool blankets haven’t been washed in... Ever! The only way to keep potential high-altitude skin diseases away was to sleep in our hiking outfits...

How my necklace grew legs

It had to happen sometime, didn’t it? On my way to a meeting in Cebu my necklace got snatched off my neck. Trying to ignore the emotional (I got this one in Singapore 5 years ago) and the value (my one and only white gold jewelry) loss, this incident focused my attention to an interesting aspect: speed.

It took a split second for my necklace to grow legs and decide to unchain itself from years of boring dangling around my neck. Or so I wish to believe. Fact is, a hand out of nowhere grabbed it straight off my neck, leaving a nasty scratch-mark and a puzzled me.

It took me 2 minutes to fully grasp what had just happened for I didn't see anybody approach or run away from me. I just felt that little monkey-like hand grabbing me.

Since the whole spectacle took place in front of a bank, my meeting partner, it took less than 5 minutes for the rumor to spread. The next 2 hours I was approached by bank clerks and customers asking if I'm the one... tapping heir necks. Yes, that's me! I received so many condolence-like sorries one could think I lost a family member, not my jewelry.

What took forever, or rather did not happen at all, was the intervention by any of the plenty security guards bumming around in front of the bank building. Hiding from UV exposure in the shade of trees and entrance halls they were the last to react let alone intervene.

Every time I see a man in uniform with an empty gun holster on an over sized belt, sipping coke out of a plastic bag while pretending to work, I feel much safer! The great thing about the security theater here is, admission is free, there is no age restriction and for the cynic there is definitely a punch line.

The power of context

Life in the Philippines is public. Privacy seems to decline proportionally to an increasing poverty level. The more deprived the area, the less privacy there is. Daily chores like washing, bathing, cooking, sleeping and chit chat move onto the streets, in front of the shacks. Verbal or physical arguments are no exemption. For most parts I’m trying to keep out of any dispute I encounter. However, when children are involved my Western-shaped concept of treating children is challenged.


More than once have I observed adults disciplining children in public. Mostly by slapping them with sticks, shoes or their bare hands. The fact that the whole neighborhood is watching doesn’t seem to pose a problem.

This is what strikes me. Dare raising your hand against a child in public in any Western country and you surely face a lot of trouble. (I’m stressing public here. I know children are being hit and even abused in Western countries as well. But there seems to be a sense of shame so it’s done behind closed doors. That of course, doesn’t change the fact of violence against children being a serious matter.)

Obviously, there is a different understanding of the right or wrong to use force against minors. I observed a similar behavior in Cambodia. Whoever is older, taller, stronger displays this superiority by going for the younger, smaller, weaker.

If I see a child in the streets, a puppy or even a kidden—a creature that might not be able to fend for itself—my inbred “mother instinct” takes over screaming “protect”!

So, what is the right thing to do? Interfere? Turn a blind eye? What proved to work in my encounters is to stop and stare them down. Just as the guy’s hand moved over to get the stick our eyes met and he reconsidered. Why? Because I’m white? Because somebody did stare after all? Who knows.

Knowing my staring prevented that 3 year old boy from being slapped does not leave me with a sense of heroism. It rather triggered that puzzling question how much our environment influences our human instincts which I always believed are the same across the continents. I guess that is what Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point” describes as the ‘power of context’.

The hidden language barrier

The goal of communication is to convey a message between a sender and a receiver. Communication is successful if the message is understood by the receiver in the way the sender meant it to be understood. Our individual background, knowledge, experience and culture greatly influences the process of sending and receiving, the act of decoding and encoding. If we take communication across borders, things get tricky.

When I used to work in Cambodia, I was consciously aware of the language barrier, which literally built a wall between the Khmer people and me and vice versa. Not speaking Khmer beyond polite greeting formalities, I was able to gauge the limits of conveying or receiving a message. My Cambodia experience was a classic demonstration of an obvious language barrier.

Fast forward to the Philippines. English and Tagalog are official languages besides 171 other spoken local languages. Most Filipinos speak an accent free American-influenced English, especially in the cities. This is one of the reasons for the call centre industry to boom, and my own Tagalog skills to still hover around a taxicab chitchat level.

However, speaking the same language does not automatically mean to communicate or to be understood. This takes the language barrier from a linguistic level to conceptual level. Within the past almost 4 years, I have learned my fair share of dealing with what I call a “hidden language barrier”.

The widespread use of the English language in the Philippines often lures me into believing that the message I try to convey in English is understood the way I intend. Needless to say, the first months living in the Philippines were marked by frustrating communication errors. No matter what I said, it seemed I could not make myself understood. It puzzled me because obviously we spoke the same language. Just when I was about to make peace with this status quo it dawned on me. It was not the Filipinos who did not understand me. I was the one who did not use the right “language” to deliver my message properly.

What sounds oh so logically in retrospect, was a long process of realization. The next challenge was to adjust my messages to the Filipino context.

This meant, in the first place, to get rid of all my assumptions and expectations I would place into a statement. I would not expect my counterpart to “read my mind”; meaning to assume he or she would share the same background or experiences I draw from, when talking about a given subject.

Secondly, I tried to stay away from sarcasm (which works well with certain friends back home and here, but not in general), jokes (which might not be considered funny around here) and cultural references that are hard to follow. All this, being culturally sensitive, seems very logical. However, it is hard to be sensitive if the pitfalls camouflage well in a universal language and Western habits.

Last but not least, I adjusted to the hardly ever direct communication, especially when it comes to yes/no questions.

Now that I am past the frustration and know how to communicate properly the doors for interesting conversations open left and right. Language is just as much a part of our culture as a society’s history and customs. It is well worth studying it, too!