Camping at Ulu Terong #1

I'm back from the camping trip, in one piece with battle scars and sore spots all over, so I shall put up a some blog posts to do some subliminal bragging about my hardiness and mad survival skills. To keep myself from doing hanging travel posts, like many times in the past, I've actually written all the three posts on Camping at Ulu Terong, and will release them one by one because all of them are pretty long, and will probably be really boring if you read them all at one go.

The Decision
I suppose I should start with how I decided to go on this trip. On one fine day last week I was bored and browsed through the Couchsurfing KL Forum, to see what was up, and saw this post by a man called Razali asking if people wanted to join in on a camping trip he was organizing for some Canadian students. I juggled with the idea for two seconds and decided that I could do with some camping in my mundane life. Pranced around the house, got my parents' approval ('coz I'm filial like that and 'coz I know they're cool enough to give the nod), gave Razali a call the second morning and transferred the money.

In short I decided within 2 seconds to transfer RM150 (Trip cost RM300, discounted from RM380 only for CS members =D) to a complete stranger and to go into the jungle with a bunch of complete strangers. And this is why I am studying this amazing essence called trust and how it works within CS.

Here's Razali's CS profile under the username BANDITLEADER. Tell me if you would make the same decision as I did.

Initiation
On Friday, at 8:40pm I reached Hentian Duta and met up with Fadhil, one of the guides, and the Canadians. There was going to be about 11 Canadians, two Italian girls and me as guests. The reception from Fadhil and the other guides was as warm as that from the Canadians was cold. After trying some furtive smiles at my Canadian trekking counterparts and not getting invited into the group, I settled in for the bus ride to Taiping and we stopped at Bukit Gantang at about 12am. There, we met up with a larger group of guides and trekking kakis, all sipping coffee at the rest stop for the trek ahead.

The tourist us split into two groups and were transferred to a closed Malay restaurant nearby via van. The Italian girls came from Penang and joined us. There, we were instructed to extract unnecessary stuff from our backpacks and deposit them into plastic bags. Previously instructed to bring a 50litre backpack, I expected the others to have backpacks that dwarfed my 32litre, but turned out that mine was the biggest among all the tourists. Most of them brought light day packs. I took out my jacket and extra khakis and a bunch of keys, and decided that the rest were not dispensable.

Then they handed each of us a sleeping mat and a parang (machete). The combination of the wooden handle, the polished wooden sheath and the dull glimmer of the blade of the parang gave an air of solid purposefulness. Do not mess with the parang, it seemed to say. With the blade safely tucked in its sheath, in turn safely stowed in my backpack, I was whisked into the jungle by a four-wheel drive, finally initiating some polite and boring conversation with some of the Canadians.

At this point I have to clarify that calling them Canadians or Mat Sallehs or whatever is not of racist intent - but I simply have no other handle to refer to them collectively. Moving on.

Reaching The Campsite
As we reached the starting point, all pretense of conversation and niceties lapsed with the regrouping of the Mat Sallehs, so with anticipation bubbling silently within, I stood in line while the guides sprayed our shoes with repellent that was supposed to keep the leeches at bay.

The repellent did not work very well. As we started trekking, some of the Mat Sallehs started crying out in alarm when leeches started to latch on them. My facade of being the tough and unperturbed Malaysian used to the perils of the jungle was quickly blown when I found a long one on my sock, trying to suck my blood through it. It was three times the size of the puny ones found at FRIM. In panic, I flicked it away. It worked, but then I saw another one coolly making its way up my shoe.

I hate leeches. I hate the way they move - I maintain that if they moved like worms or snakes I would be much less afraid of them. If there's anything more than my fear of leeches, it would be the fear of leeches in the dark of the night. And these were leeches in the dark of the night. I was very, very perturbed.

We reached the campsite in about half an hour, all sweaty and freaked out from the leeches, and by the time we set up camp it was 3:30am. "Camp" was tarpaulin sheets tied up as shelter and tarpaulin sheets on the ground to put our gear and weary selves on - "no walls", described Federica, one of the Italians. The Italian girls and I had a small camp to ourselves some metres away from the guides' camp, while the Canadians were positioned in another camp a short trek away.

As I lay on my sleeping mat, staring at the clusters of stars through the leaves and listening to the jungle surrounding me (one, two three crickets by the right and a laughing cicada somewhere above, with a background music of tiny strings playing), I pondered. About life in general, about how I'm going to need loads more social skills to do my research, about how Italian actually sounds a bit like Malay. Not about the non-existent walls and the ineffective repellent and the prowling leeches outside the camp.

You know, 'coz I'm a tough and unperturbed Malaysian used to the perils of the jungle like that.

Part 2 here.
Part 3 here.