After 4 days of grueling camping, expeditions, Chinese chess marathons and near sleepless nights, I am back from Taman Negara in Pahang, Malaysia and finally, I get some 15 hours of sleep before writing this post. This will be long post, so be prepared. There were no pictures though, I didn’t bring my camera. Take note, I do not have a watch with my during the camp, so some of the times might not be right
DAY 1
Reached school at 6am and assembled at the parade square. Had attendance taking and some admin work followed by daily devotion before boarding the bus at 7am plus. Filled in the white card and got through the Tuas checkpoint quickly and swiftly. Passed through fast Singapore checkpoints before reaching the not-so-fast Malaysian customs where we waited for about 15 minutes before clearing it before boarding another bus. We travelled for 1 and a half hours before reaching Yong Peng for our lunch. We had a few stops along the way to stock up on food and take a pee. The bus ride was… long, literally. From PHS to Gua Kota Gelanggi(our destination) is about 10 hours, inclusive of passing through customs, having lunch and stops. It was quite noisy too. After every bus ride, you can hear lots of noise before it dies down a while later and eventually, everyone is asleep. It repeats itself after every bus stop.
We eventually reached Gua Kota Gelanggi campsite at 5.10pm. Waited for the other buses to come before making our way up into a cave, and let me tell you, travelling up a cave was already a huge problem. We have to climb a steep hill, followed by 13 stone steps and then 49 steep metal steps, and yes, I did count the number of steps. The 4 men tents were already there when we climbed our way up the cave. We placed our bags in our respective tents. And guess what? My tent is the deepest in the cave and to make our way there, we must traverse rocky ground, avoid huge holes and cross narrow walkways. Shared a tent with Yujian, Keith and Shawn.
We made our way down back to base (or whatever you call it) to start with field cooking, and let me tell you, the experience was horrible. We were unfortunate that it rained so heavily it totally drenched not only us, but also some of our food, causing some major aftereffects(this will be explained later in the post). We did have our fill though, and the next activity was carried out after being delayed by 1 hour – the night confidence walk. Basically, what happened was that we made our way, on foot, all the way to the start point, which is the cave about a 15 minutes walk away, before leaving the place in fours, but this time without any torch-lights on. So Keith, Yujian, Vincent and I went together and it was so dark that we can’t see our 5 fingers even when we put it in front of our faces. Along the way, we sang songs (you won’t want to know which ones) and at one point, Yujian almost fell into the river. Thankfully, there were trainers there so he was back on the path, unharmed.
Was briefed on what to do tomorrow before going back to the tents to sort out our sleeping bags and stuff, before we had our chess marathon till midnight, and had a chat before sleeping. Thankfully we were not interrupted in the middle of the night.
Blooper! : Keith had to wake up in the middle of the name more than 10 times to take a sh!t since his messtin of noodles had an “added ingredient”, which is none other than uncooked rainwater. Poor Shawn and Keith had to go down and up the cave just to use the toilet about 10 times between the period of 3am to about 6am.