walk the torq: trusting the ropes unconditionally

note: regression (2011)

a lot of people who have climbed mt kinabalu told me to take the ferrata package to make our kinabalu experience complete. with madam wong's assistance, i booked the walk the torq package with mountain torq. 

it's been a while since i last held a rope and a harness. my last rappelling activity was summer of 2011, which was so many months from november 2011. good thing though, roland of mountain torq did a refresher. still hungry, all i could remember during the work shop was him yelling, "rope in, rope out!"

after our summit assault, we went to sayat sayat hut for a second briefing. the mountain torq team distributed our equipment and taught us again for the second time. 

sayat sayat hut

view of the trail from sayat sayat hut

starting point of walk the torq

since it was almost rainy season, we did not have much clearing as seen in google when you search for via ferratta in kinabalu. the clouds would uncover the breath-taking view below only a very few times. what i've seen for a few seconds made me realize the value of "rope in, rope out!" 

photos taken by our guide, roland, using my camera

the nasty monkey bridge and the boundless abyss.

despite a few instances of height fright, i did not regret spending extra on the via ferratta package. the only thing that disappointed me, aside from the zero clearing, was the steps were made for caucasians. a 164 cm-tall woman will have to stretch so much just to get to the next step!

according to the mountain torq guides, our team was the fastest to finish the walk the torq at 1 hour and 24 minutes. they said that tourists would normally finish in 2 to 3 hours. the fastest they said was at least 2 hours (i forget the exact figures). i guess what made us finish fast was the absence of a clearing. just imagine the cam whoring we could have done when the sky opened up!

regressions

i have been traveling since 2007 but i haven't documented most of them. if i did, it was in multiply or in my personal blogspot which was dormant for years now. given the chance, i could go back to those places and write stuff about them. but then, the world is big enough to go back to the past. 

since the experiences and photos are still valuable, i am posting them as "regressions". i have created tags specifically for posts of the old and you can find them sorted by year at the right side of this page. the bad thing though is posts far back 2007 have budget information which is not updated. what i can assure you that's updated are the travels i had since 2011 because i still have the contacts.