Fast boats transport you direct to the snow, where you can ski down from spectacular summits to snow-covered beaches – potentially basking in the midnight sun if you're there in May.
The views from the summit are spectacular.
The climb was tough but rewarding and the summit offered spectacular views in all directions, with my hotel a mere dot among the lush blossoming fields of the Bregenzerache river valley.
The crowning glory of this new park is the spectacular terrace at the summit, imagined as an open-air reading room, which feels like being on the deck of a yacht, floating above the city.
An hour's climb through idyllic beech forest pops me out on a summit with spectacular panoramas of the Adriatic from a tower built by the Austro-Hungarians, who held the area until the second world war, when the Italians took it.
While the views from the summit are spectacular, it's Kinabalu's natural diversity that makes it memorable: pitcher plants and orchids bloom alongside the trail, including many species found nowhere else in Borneo.
From its summit, the spectacular view covers the Atlantic Ocean coast, the inlet of the Bay, the large pine forest at its back, as well as the Pyrénées Range of mountains between France and Spain to the south.
And his spectacular views of soaring summits, sprawling glaciers, breathtaking crevasses, awesome ice falls and the people who braved them tend to bear out that opinion.
It's spectacular as you approach the summit.
But it took on added significance after a spectacular dispute at the European summit meeting in December, when Prime Minister David Cameron failed to achieve new safeguards from European Union laws for Britain's financial-services sector.
