Monday, June 19, 2006

This is like Part 2, where I shall dwell on more mundane things and attempt to remember other stuff, after browsing through other people’s blogs.
The first day, as I have mentioned before, had been spent in a plane, a bus and at some mall, before going over to our hotel.
It was Anthony’s first ride on an aeroplane. Someone very tactfully said ‘Your first time was with us, Anthony’ or something along that lines, which, when taken out of context, had many, many meanings.
Simply put, he was very excited.
In the end, he got used to it after the plane took off and spent the rest of the time moaning and groaning about his bridge game, and putting the breakfast label on his forehead, which meant that he was, very briefly, against all laws of physics, an omelette.
When we landed, we had to walk to the airport, like all presidents do, someone very smarmily remarked. We spent a while queuing up to register or whatever or to check that our passports were really passports and not bits of paper, then went on for a bus ride to some high up hotel.
Anthony spent the first bit of the ride going ‘Whoooa!’ every time the bus swerved, which was many times, before everyone got severely irritated with him or he just got bored. Either way, he stopped because of those two reasons, or he got motion sickness, which explained why he stole the airsickness bags from the aeroplane earlier on.
The bus ride consisted mostly of sleepy people (Anthony and Kenneth really, really look like each other when they nap), talkative people (I remember an eye-opening session when we talked about ghosts) and mischievous people with a camera (Meiying. I rest my case. Okay with me included).
I remember taking a picture of Yuanhan poking Agapera, who was sleeping in a most interesting manner.
We played minor games, slept, slept some more, in which afterwards we got out, breathed a bit of air, went back and slept some more.
When we reached the hotel, it was pretty late already and we were supposed to eat dinner. We waited a bit, served everyone tea, talked a lot, was bothered by the thought of foreign food but they served something so wonderfully mundane that it was almost boring.
They gave us fish in green curry, rice and… pineapples.
The beginning of the Pineapple Saga.
We ate, talking and laughing, and then we had musical entertainment! Fascinating. This two people took out their guitars and begun strumming them, playing songs that we knew. I remember they played Survivor, This Love and finally this famous Chinese song.
He was quite good, he got us all to sing together with him (or we just sang together with him) and we gave him applause later yay. What a nice person.
After dinner, Fariha, who cut her hair, was asked by Myra to do a Sadako impersonation. Fariha just flipped her hair forward then started walking around slowly with her walking stick, and Myra was sent screaming. Droll!
Okay for the first night, we were split into two hotels. Almost all the JC1s and Chee Yong went over to the other hotel, including me, while most of the JC2s and some JC1s stayed at the hotel in which we ate dinner. We took the little beloh (I think that’s what Mr. Chin said) and went over to the other hotel. The ride was fun and fast. Yeah!
Our hotel was nice and cool and the ambience was really, really nice. We had lots of greenery and the lighting was great. Our room was just this big bed, a connecting section with a cupboard then the toilet. Which was big and scary and pink.
And had only one light bulb. The horror.
We rotated bathing times, screaming and looking-at-the-wall times. It was mostly like gasping and cleaning yourself really quickly then washing it off then gasping some more, grabbing your towel and then drying yourself then changing.
Ah yes, before that, we had check-ups from the teachers on the weight of our bags. Me, bringing the heaviest of course had to pack the most, until we were reduced to the bare essentials and happily, my bag weighed as much as Fariha’s or Rachel’s. Fabulous stuff.
So it was to bed, after bathing. We slept with Fariha in the middle, and by the morning, which was around 6am but we in fact had been woken up 3 hours earlier by some insane chickens we felt that their territory was in constant threat by their neighbours, (i.e they kept crowing and crowing and crowing and crowing for three whole hours) and thus we were not in very good moods.
Fariha sleeps most wonderfully. She moves, she snuggles up to you, she kicks (according to Rachel) and when we woke up, she was snuggling up to me in a most lesbian way.
But I still like her. And she still DARES to say that I molest her. Hahaha.
We woke up to nice noodles.
Apparently the other side had hideous pancakes with weird bananas.
I never did like bananas.
We tried on our gaiters after breakfast! They were nice and fun but not really effective.
Of course, Mr. Lim would put that down to us not being gaiter-friendly and give us a good solid kick.
Trekking was tiring. Can die. Only can remember Jonathan and Chang Tai singing songs when we were trekking to up our morale and also to do wonders for our stamina.
It is one thing to sing pitch perfect on stage, it is another to sing pitch perfect while climbing over rocks, tree roots and holes while carrying a bag.
So we went up the hill, and up the hill, and Chang Tai was generally annoying or amusing people with his repeated exclamations of ‘Oh my gawd we are in the CLOUDS!’
Yes we got to our first campsite at aroundish 5pm, just as the sun was setting. Here we introduced each other to the campsite and had lots of fun.
The JC2s all crammed into one tent and had a very rapid discussion while Mr. Chin, Jia Chang and Jonathan went around loosening their tent pegs.
The tent was wobbling like jelly and the JC2 guys came out and were quite angry about it. They tracked down Jonathan and tortured him, most horrendously I must add: Death By Tickles/Pinching/Worrying In General is not a nice way to die.
Worrying in this case means random poking, tickling whatever on the body. Apparently it hints of violence as well. JonP is still rather badly scarred by that.
They tried to get Jia Chang to be tortured as well, unfortunately, Jia Chang when cornered like a rat by snakes, fights like a mongoose. A fierce… desperate mongoose.
The only reason why I cannot remember much of the second camp site is because I didn’t take much pictures of it. Yes. No wonder.
The lake was nice. I like the lake. It was big and cold and had fishes. I think. At least the shirt in which the map of the National Park is printed on says that it has fish. And ducks.
Liew wanted me to swim in it. I told her gladly, after she jumped in of course.
There was the cute baby volcano by the lake! It was really adorable!
I like it. I call it… Anak!
The second base camp was pretty uneventful, other than the hot springs visit and the crossing the waters of the river which was super fun and I would like to do it again and again even though some people fell but still it was-
Okay. Stop. Right. After that, we edged the lake for a few steps, walked up and down some more on hills and then reached the third base camp.
It was pretty.
Okay there isn’t much to type here because everything else is in the previous post. I shall just expand a bit on the last few days. Ah yes, Mr. Lim kept whistling some ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ tune. It was really nice to hear that jaunty tune whistled over and over again when trekking. By the end of the trip, Teck Hao had mastered the song while I was still stuck at trying to get the pitch right. Hahaha.
Okay after coming back from the mountain, which was super nice, contrary to me losing my little hat and all other posts, we had our first bath in 4 days. There was sand in my ear, gravel in my pants and our bathing water turned brown.
Sand. In. My. Ears.
The INSULT!
The second last night, we went back to the hotel we had for the first night. However there was a switch; whoever had stayed in the hotel that served noodles (easy reference for my readers hahaha) stayed in the banana-serving hotel and vice versa.
We had this extra empty room and some senior guys moved over.
Ah yes… Clement came over, together with Teck Hao and Jeremy. Everyone knows what that means.
That meant that I woke up to the very abrupt sound of him sneezing.
When he was not next to our room, but one room away. And I could hear him very clearly.
Indeed, Clement’s sneezing has become sort of legendary within the ODAC groups. He sneezed once on the plane back, severely embarrassing every one of us who knew him, and still very nonchalantly said ‘What?’ when we all looked at him, laughing.
Jeremy said they spent the next morning monitoring this huge spider in their room. When the spider crawled to this part of the room, they scuttled over to the other side.
Which brings me to another point. Our rooms were bug infested. It was like they were a bug haven. The bugs flew towards our pretty lights (ahhh that explains it…) and then hit it and predictably fell onto the clean white tiled floor, spasming vigorously. It meant that leaving your shoes outside the room occasionally meant that you had to tip them over to see what unfortunate insect got stuck in them. And that our floors were like a bug cemetery. You don’t want to step on a wriggling bug when you’re only wearing socks. Or not wearing socks at all. It’s… weird. And I could have sworn I saw chrysalises (ah, such is the plural form of chrysalis) hanging in Anthony and Jia Chang’s room, who were beside us for the second last night.
I think this bit of the blog post gets weird. We came back to this hotel, which was the hotel we stayed at during our first night, around the evening. Thus all my observations on brown water, insects banging into lights and all what not, was made at night. The night we played bridge until 2am. The morning that Jeremy said that he saw the huge spider happened the next day.
Oh. I made the changes already. Oh well.
When we woke up that day (thank you, Clement for waking me up in the most abrupt of ways) it was the day we were going to the waterfall. Fariha had injured her knee, thus she couldn’t go and thus she spent the whole day sulking. Well the whole morning anyway. She could enjoy a long luxurious bath while we were away playing in water, albeit her bath would be in cold water, like us.
All of us promised to bring back some waterfall water for her.
We walked there, got lost, found the seniors again and finally the waterfall itself. There were some pretty rainbows, and we could really see that the rainbows were actually round, instead of the arc that we always see them in, as I remember seeing this rainbow that was almost a circle, even though I was being splattered at by 10-degree water and all, at more than the normal decent acceleration of gravity would allow, which is around 9.81 kg/ms-minus two but whatever. I don’t study Physics.
I walked around barefoot as I didn’t bring sandals and every step was torture.
Went underneath the big waterfall and the other bigger waterfall and screamed a lot. The guys were running around half naked which I, sad to say, didn’t see much of as I was too busy wincing about my feet and closing my eyes in general.
But hem, hem, it was indeed an eye-opener during the hot springs session…
And don’t look so scandalised, all you ODACian girls.
So yes, after this, you know, we buzzed off to the Mataram Mall again, for one hour of shopping (more like walking around and enjoying the $1 plus Swenson’s ice cream) and then back to the other hotel.
We spent the bus ride sleeping. My camera died on me on alternative tries. I think it was getting bored with defective batteries.
The hotel in which we spent our last night in seriously creeped me out. It was dark and there wasn’t much lights and the rooms were all separate, like a little semi-terrace, two rooms under one hut, with paths leading every where else. Fariha, Rachel and me shared one side of the hut. The other side was empty. And we were provided a map. For goodness sake, a map.
We went to our rooms, set out who was to sleep where and waxed lyrical about the bathrooms as usual.
‘Do you know? There’s hot water! And the toilet actually flushes! And there’s a sink! Oh my gawd!’
Mr. Chin said later that we were deprived children.
Dinner was quite a fun affair. We had to walk to this funny café thing near the beach, where they had a buffet spread out for us.
First we celebrated Jia Wen’s birthday with a huge cake. They took pictures of the cake and her, and remarked that there was this picture of her cutting her cake with a most interesting of expressions. Caught somewhere between really wanting to kill the cake and scrunched up with the difficulty of doing it.
Then it was dinner, which was a sordid affair. The food was okay but it was the portions which got Anthony annoyed.
Ah yes, Joyce had this brilliant idea to take some of the people in amusing poses taken from movies. She took Journey to the West, in which I have the picture of, and King Kong, in which I saw the picture but I don’t have. She had a hell of a time trying to get that picture. It was the traditional picture of Whatshername in King Kong’s palm. She was doing Whatshername and she had to stand quite far behind Chee Yong, who was acting as King Kong (good choice haha) so that perception vision would do its wonders and that she would actually look as small as Chee Yong’s hands. Then the problem of not having enough light arrived, for which she employed the usage of many cameras to provide flash on her as she was quite far back and thus quite dark. So people stood out of the way and took pictures of her with flashes just as the person standing in front of Chee Yong took the picture, so that it really looked like Joyce was sleeping on Chee Yong’s hands.
She wanted to do another one; I heard there was a Lord of the Rings one, with Chee Yong as Legolas (I like Joyce more already) but I never knew what happened to that.
Whoo, four pages!
She took this other picture, with Kenneth and Stacy (our reigning president and vice) as some sort of patriarch and matriarch to some family (hence fuelling more scandals) with servants serving them drinks and fanning them.
It was really amusing.
After dinner, the guide, John and his porters tested us with mathematical tricks using match sticks. He was actually doing some sort of magic trick with the teachers using some stones, in which the stones would be laid out in two rows and he would walk away. We were supposed to touch one of the stones and he would come back and tell us which stone we touched. He was quite good at that, able to accurately deciphering what the stones were telling him, using his sense of touch, smell and hearing.
I remember the one with the glass upturned on a plate of water, where we were supposed to get all the water into the glass without turning the glass over.
Physics again, simply put a burning match stick into the glass and cover it quickly and the burning matchstick will use up the oxygen in the glass and thus the water will enter the glass by vacuum.
Trust Mr. Lim to come and flummox all of us with the talk on cigarettes and how the chemical nicotine actually worked its way chemically into this trick when a cigarette wasn’t even used at all…
There was one also with making the matchsticks into seven squares and we were supposed to make the seven squares become five squares. Clement solved that one quite easily.
I think there was one about the cow, and how to make it turn around by moving only two matchsticks. Anthony contributed with his own question, that there was a cow and a speeding bullet and we were supposed to move 2 match stick so that the cow dodged the speeding bullet. Amusing answer. And there was another one with the match stick where John would burn it then put out the fire and ask us how we can make the match stick burn again. The answer to that was pretty stupid.
Anthony solved one too, where the porter arranged two triangles next to each other and asked us how we were going to make two triangles become four triangles of the same size.
There was also another one, where he used Roman digits, that IIII + I = III. We were supposed to solve that equation to make it equal, moving only one stick. The answer is to move one stick, such that it became I + I + I = III. I think. Erm. A bit hazy here.
The final trick the porter showed us was pretty dirty, where a woman was involved in an accident and had to be hospitalised. Her husband visited her and stayed in her room for three hours when he was told he could only stay in her room for ten minutes. The question was what they were doing in that room, which was pretty obvious when the woman, which was actually a catapult made from matchsticks, worked and sent the man on top of her flying. Hem, hem.
John showed us one trick, where there were two cars and there were going through this tunnel. And they were going in opposite directions when the tunnel only allowed one car to pass through. How did the two cars pass through then? The answer can only be done with a matchbox.
Another trick he showed was when he supported a match box with three match sticks, with a rupee note being underneath it all. He asked us how we were going to remove the rupee note without causing the matchbox to drop. The answer to that was rolling the note really slowly.
Then there was another trick, where he said he had to remove a coin underneath or on a matchbox without touching the match box or something. I remember only contributing to pulling the tablecloth as the answer but I can’t seem to remember what the actual problem was. The solution was that since he couldn’t touch the matchbox at all, he got his friend to do it for him.
Argh.
Yeah I think that was it.
We slept pretty well that night, though I was a half-frozen banana by the next morning. Bloody-single-sheet-of-blankets…!
The last day was pretty boring. We went to the airport, had a little… debriefing (ahem, ahem hahahah) from Mr. Chin while waiting for our delayed plane. We might be going to Taiwan at the end of the year. Oh boy.
I think I pretty much got all of the nice things here in my blog already. Yay!

Posted by norbert at 6/19/2006 10:46:00 PM