Mount Kinabalu National Park

As part of our time in Borneo, we drove out to the national park to go for a walk around the mountain. The day before, we had gone to the supermarket to get some snacks for the walk. We bought some crackers, cookies, and some dried fruit. We started our drive early in the morning and turned up at the mountain at around 8:00 and started our walk at around 8:30. The walk was a loop that passed through a plant sanctuary on the way.

The start of the walk was uphill and we were scrambling around trying to grab onto any of the trees to help us get up the big steps that were in our path. At the top of the steep part we found a strange worm wriggling around in the dirt, it was moving quite fast which was surprising. Mum (Wendy) was thinking about letting it crawl onto her finger but Hazel stopped her by saying it might be poisonous!

Little did we know then but it was lucky that Hazel said that because later on in the walk Hazel saw a similar looking worm attached to her shoe and we realised that they were leeches! I started to freak out soon after that because I am not a big fan of bugs and the thought of leeches made me want to scream!

Luckily, after a while I stopped worrying so much and we could continue our walk, we all found a leech on our shoe at least once except for Mila. The leeches just didn't seem to like her that much, we saw many other interesting bugs on the way like beautiful butterfly's the camouflaged in the trees and glide in the air like birds! Some of them were as big as birds too!

Mount Kinabalu is the biggest mountain in Malaysia and is very impressive! As we are driving around we sometimes see it poking its head above the clouds and we stop to take a picture!

We soon stopped as the path split into two separate ways, one leading out and one leading to the plant sanctuary. We took the path to the plants and paid for our entry tickets. We then paid extra to get a tour guide so that we could learn more about the plants that we see! We waited for around five minutes until our guide came.

Our guide was really nice and was able to inform us about the plants, do you know that bamboo can grow up to one metre per day! I sure didn't know that! We also saw these plants called pitcher plants, they get their name from their shape, which makes them look like a pitcher!

These plants eats bugs like, ants and many other small insects. It also gets help from many other animals like small bats that can fit inside the pitcher plant. They sleep in the plant for cover during the night and in return the plant gets fertiliser from their business! They also trick ants in the rainy weather to crawly under the lid of the plant to drink the nectar that is there. Then when the rain splatters against the plant the ant falls in and the pitcher plane eats it!

After the plant sanctuary we headed out of the walk, we went back to our car and headed back home. Our shoes were quite muddy but we managed to wash the mud off and get them nice and clean again!

I has such a fun time at the National park and I would really recommend it to anyone thats wants to try it!

Just watch out for leeches! 😉