When you are in Kota Kinabalu, you have to visit the Mount Kinabalu area, even if you are not going to climb all the way to the summit. Up here, you will find Malaysia’s first world heritage, Kinabalu Park. The Mount Kinabalu area is easy to reach, it takes only a two hours drive by car.
Mount Kinabalu is the highest mountain on the island of Borneo. The summit Low´s Peak has a height of 4.095 metres (13.435 feet) and is the third tallest in South East Asia. Low’s Peak can be relatively easily climbed by a person with basic fitness and requires no mountaineering equipment, but other peaks along the massif require rock climbing skills. It is really worth a visit, when you stand there at the highest summit, you can see the splendour of Sabah in all directions.
Mount Kinabalu area is well-known worldwide for its tremendous botanical and biological species biodiversity, with high levels of endemism (i.e. species which are found only within Kinabalu Park and are do not grow anywhere else in the world). The Mount Kinabalu area has one of the world’s richest orchid flora with over 800 species, over 600 species of ferns (more than the whole of Africa’s 500 species) of which 50 are found nowhere else.
There are many explanations about the name Kinabalu, but the most plausible is that it comes from the local Dusinic languages and is derived from “Aki Nabalu” which means “The revered place of the dead”.
Climbing the Mountain
