so much for my happy ending

it's one of those time.. again.. when you feel demoralized and everything just won't matter. one of my dear colleague said he was quitting today, and that was after i heard about another resignation during yesterday's team meeting.

so there were 2 of them. maybe there would be another one tomorrow and it would be a hatrick. it would then probably followed by a slow death of our acquintance, if the funeral parlour in front of the office is anything to go by.

ok it was not actually a funeral parlour but some temporary storage trailers but i swear they look like one.

these news just hit me off pretty hard. sometimes i just wished that things would remain as they are. you know, like we live in a time vacuum or something. i would then have all my close friends nearby having fun all the time and stay forever 25.

but now i felt just like those in Friends when rachel got a job in paris.

during lunch i returned to my cubicle and browse some sites that offer higher degree learnings. hmm maybe i should take some part-time course and try to change field. especially after my boss doesn't think i'm doing anything.

even if he was, it's not like i can strike a millionare doing what i'm doing. i mean, how many of those top millionares out there are from engineering fields?exactly.

i must first distance myself from facebook and find something constructive to do with my life, like thinking about my future and find an electrician to fix my water heater.

want to blame someone that i was always occupied at night after work? blame the facebook. it's the place where you make artificial friends that keep your friends counter going and nothing else. seriously.

you see, when a bunch of friends invited me for a durian fiesta recently, they were not originally my facebook friends, and we had fun.


and the durian was superb. we had it at this durian king stall in chinatown just beside that famous frog porridge restaurant. i didn't notice this place before, probably because the only time i went to chinatown, was during chinese new year festival to see the kereta ayer opera.

what was good about this place was that it had all the different types of durians nicely labelled, so you won't get cheated as you most probably would if you were in geylang.

those geylang durian sellers just wait while sharpening their knife by the chopperboard, on which people keep willingly put their heads on. it's amazing really.


facebook so-called friends just dropped into town and treated like you didn't exist. i guess, we are all 2-dimensional substance to the other internet end, who goes to screensavers whenever we idle, or downloads torrents while on standby mode.

another non-facebook friend invited me for a movie last weekend. we watched red hill. ok that was what i mistakenly called the movie until my friend corrected me. red hill was of course, the mrt station, and the movie was red cliff.

it was just another chinese epic war movie based on the famous 3-kingdoms power struggle period in chinese history. nevertheless, i enjoyed it. it was a kind that the good guy's army was greatly outnumbered and you kinda wait for every tricks to unfold during the war while fighting the bad guy's army. in the end, the good prevails and all of us left happy.

of course that was only limited in the cinema theater. the reality in the real world isn't exactly so. george bush will prevail, as will abdullah ahmad badawi. there will be no happy ending. if cinderella was in our world, she would be the maid that fall to her death when being forced to clean the balcony of a high rise hdb.

i'm not doing much better either. if i don't know any better, i would think this is all retribution. it's karma. i must be job hopping all my life in my previous life, making friends and then leaving them in misery, ignoring my facebook contacts, and being an assholes on the roads.

maybe i should discuss this in facebook's forums.




...ed
p/s add me @ facebook 'adie zulkifli'

jazzy lil' dives

i woke up without a hang over today. ok it made sense actually, because it was not like miss chivas last night could do me any harm with that extent, but sometimes i could just only hope.

the clarke quay riverwalk outing was fun. sure, all was my colleagues and as crazy as we could be, i guess everyone figured it was wise not to smear our reputation too bad to someone who could end up being our boss in the future.

the result? a very business-like outing, the only thing missing was a notebook.

still it was a breath of fresh air to see them eye to eye and not mentioned about the yields. we stayed at the Jazz bar till almost midnight before i had to take leave and collect my car in my company, somehow feeling a bit like friday-night loser.

but again, maybe i was just not being soberly myself...


anyway, i opened my mailbox yesterday and there was a letter from PADI, piled in between junk mails.. i mean, bills.

it was my open water diving license! issued by PADI asia pacific which is based in australia.

sounds cool huh? i almost secretly wished someone was beside me while i opened that, so i could shrugged away and say, 'nah it's nothing, just my diving license' as if i got this everyday.

it seemed quite a world away when i was on that diving trip. ok it was actually a 4D3N diving course, held in aur island off johore's east coast shore in early june.



Aur Island Diving
07-10 June

to be honest, i've never heard of aur island before. apparently it's located not far from tioman island, but have much lower profile (thus much cheaper) because this place isn't really developed as a tourist spot.


for a start, we were stranded on boat early morning ~5am just offshore because of low tide. the beach looked ugly with lots of rocks, shells and dead coral pieces alongside a narrow white sandy area. the water looked clear though, i could see colourful fishes, even squid from the boat.

only at about 7am the tide was high enough for us to get ashore using a transfer small speed boat.

this was the extent of the low tide

the place we were going to stay was just consist of few dorm rooms, a couple of chalets and an eating hall. full stop. my friend asked beforehand if the room has aircond and stuff, and this organizer guy said, divers don't really care about those stuff.

huh really? guess i got my first sense of culture shock.

even in this remote island murphy's law still applies. as soon as we arrived, it got cloudy.

Day 1

at about 10am, all the open water students gathered and we met the instructors properly for the first time, a french guy named christophe and his helper, nas. ok they looked friendly enough.

they asked us to each took a bundle of instruments and introduced us piece by piece. it was the first time I saw a bc, regulator and of course, the tank. it looked complicated at first but we managed to put them together and headed to the water.

from left: christophe, nas, x,x,me! and the rest...

first lesson in the water was to kneel, as in doing a confession but to some god of sea or something. not that i do that, but just to give an idea. you'd be suprised how difficult it was to balance. we kept on being pushed by the current.

next, to clear water from inside the mask. chances are, water is gonna get inside your mask while you are deep underwater and you won't wanna surface up everytime to clear it. it was kinda tricky because water kept getting into our nose but it was pretty simple actually.

then, how to search for the oxygen tube in case it got knocked over and how to share oxygen point from buddy when ours somehow cut off.

after lunch we got back in the water. this time we practised how to completely opened our mask and put back on. having the mask nicely and secured was so our comfort zone, thus having to purposely opened it felt like a torture.

even more so, when we were asked to open the bc which kept us afloat and put it back on. i bet the instructors were enjoying this because i so wasn't. i mean, it was like when you are on a parachute and they asked you to fold it and open it back on while on air. evil? i think so..

the controlled emergency swimming ascent, or CESA as they called it, was more fun. we just need to take a deep breath underwater, then screamed Aaaaaaaaaa while paddling rigorously to the surface. useful when we are running away from sharks. haha ok that was actually in the event when we are out of air and no buddy in sight to share air nearby. the scream was supposed to even out the pressure in our lungs to the surroundings.

the highlight of the day was when we did buoyancy practise. by the way, the instructor always pronounced it as beyonce, which was kinda funny. he would be like, 'ok let's do beyonce today' haha.. anyway, we did the practise by swimming around following the instructors while starting to enjoy underwater scenery.

i had some problem to stay afloat at static level because i would either sinked and threating the corals towards extinction, or floated too high. the view was not as clear as in the morning, at one time i could barely even see the instructor.


Day2

our morning session dive did not start until 1015am. what i like about this arrangement was that we were not forced to wake up early and stuff. everything felt laid back and relaxing. after all, this was supposed to be a holiday too, right?

the weather was still cloudy and very windy. it even rained lightly when we got underwater. can you believe that? it could rain for another 364 days and it had to fall today.

this morning we did the yesterday's mask clearance, regulator drop and find, and buddy secondary air source sharing. by now we could do those with ease as if it was our second nature. ok most of the time anyway.

then the instructor led us swimming, or rather, diving through the sea bottom towards a deeper area.

man, so that was how diving feels like. it was like being on drugs, not that i've tried any but that was how i imagined it, being enclosed in another world with colourful sights and only air bubbles in our ears.

the visibility was not superb but pretty good. i could see various shapes of corals ~hard, soft, salad shape, mushroom shape etc.. you name it, it was there. ok i might blindly treat anything static underwater as corals but hey, who cares? you could not find these on land anyway.

the fishes were colourful but nothing too big. halfway through the dive, i lost sight of my buddy so I kept going up, down and around to search for her, feeling every bit like marlin searching for nemo. except i did find her later, she just had trouble descending.

we got back to shore by alternately towing each other with our buddy.

after lunch break, we rode a boat with our diving equipments to the pontoon further a bit from the shore for a swim test..

which i don't understand why. the basic concept of swimming is to stay afloat above water. what's the basic of diving? to stay submerged underwater. now tell me why we need to do the swimming test during this diving lesson?


plus, i'm not a good swimmer.


but my brain must have been affected in some way by nitrogen poisoning from the morning dive or something, because i found myself willingly jumped into the water and did breast stroke as if i have been doing it all along.

in fact, i was starting to feel proud of myself when i realised my mask was blocking my nose. i could not breathe properly but i could not stop to adjust it. ok this was so not good.

my heart started to pump heavily as i got more panicked. my head got lower and lower during inhalation when i got more tired from struggling to stay afloat. some water made it through my mouth and that was when i realized i was going to drown.

you know i saw a lot of movies with people drowning so i was very convincing when i cried for help. a diving friend was nearby so he let me hold onto to him but he started sinking as well. wait, this too was so like in the movie. or was it in the accident news?

anyway, i lived to tell the story after the dive instructor jumped down and saved me. never had i been so relieved being in a man's arms before. ok scratch that but the point is, nobody was harmed in making that little scene around the pontoon on that particular afternoon.

enjoying those on land moments by watching sunset by the beach

Day3,4

basically we just did dive after dive and learned along the way. there are few different dive sites around aur island with different water depth, but generally we did not exceed 15m. the weather started to improved too, and for the first time i was worried about getting sun burnt.









the highlight of the dive was when i spotted a blue spotted lagoon stingray on the sea bed. at last something big, and i know the name of (obviously i only knew it as just stingray, i checked the complete name thereafter), and then i saw a giant sea cucumber, which i thought was a bolster dropped out from the titanic.

before returning to the surface, we learned to do a buddha pose and hovered about 5meters under water for a few minutes to neutralize the pressure and get rid of access nitrogen in our blood. it was for safety precaution but for me, it was fun doing acrobatics like nobody's business when we were supposed to stay still like a yoga posture.

written test that night to see if we understood the theory

in total we did 6 dives altogether, which was pretty a lot for a diving trip. partly because after we were certified, we joined the rest of the experienced divers who mostly were hardcores. seriously, these people were like a whole other species. i guess when we evolved from sea creatures onto the land animal a gazillion years ago, some of those behaviour left inside some of us.

i got to enjoy the nice scnerey of the island during those dry moments in between dives.

we were fortunate that we had help in getting those tanks in and out of boats, because those things were darn heavy. during the first day when we did the initial underwater practise near the shore, we had to walk back to the beach with that thing on our back. i felt very much like a turtle that inched towards the sand to lay eggs. seriously.

the final photo before we left the island.. satisfied and certified but just without the official license which was just arrived recently. i was glad i did it you know, it was a totally different experience and moreover, one step closer to our dream visit to sipadan island.



till i wear this flippers again... in the meantime i'd be just content in spending time in some Jazz bars humming kelly clarkson's chivas.







...ed

wake me up when monday ends

i'm exhausted. i don't know what i did. ok i did go to the gym before noon for about 20 minutes, then drove down to joo chiat for lunch at hajah maimunah, sending my friend off in toa payoh dan headed back home for an afternoon nap. from then on i have been in hibernation mode.

maybe that was the problem. too much slacking time.

i don't mind though. tomorrow is monday, and as if the normal afternoon weekly meeting isn't stressful enough, there will be a visitor from our main hq in US.

as with the past visitors, i expect she will be getting the normal red carpet treatment from her hotel to her temporary throne in the office, and the whole department 'kow-tow'ing to her feet chanting 'long live long live her majesty' all the time.

you see, i so need the energy to face all that tomorrow apart from my usual monday blues.

yesterday me and my dear friend went for a vegetarian buffet at ling zhi restaurant. i have heard about this place in chinatown before, but last week we spotted this new branch in novena square and found out about the high-tea dim sum buffet for dollars 15++ and figured, we must try this out.

i must say i'm not that all crazy about dim sum in the first place. in fact, i don't think i'm normally crazy about any food, except sushi, and hajah maimunah, and now the durians, but i'm all for new taste. plus, considering i'm trying to get my kilos one notch lower, i have been abstaining myself from the usual splurge so this felt like a treat.




there was not much of a spread, which i guess it's ok considering this is a high-tea, and me and my friend are not big-eaters anyway. here are some of the dishes we took. i'm sorry i don't even know what they are called. i mean, they are all steamed flours wrapping some stuff, what's the difference?

we were told we could order some off the menu, so i went for 'sauteed monkey head mushroom with dried chilli'. ok i admit, the monkey head was the one catching my attention. it turned up to be the one on the bottom left. we ordered 'bag of treasure' too for one obvious reason, and that was the one on the bottom right.

taste wise, it was alright. not very tasty and not very bland either. i guess that's what vegetarian is all about too : moderation.

after that we went to yishun avenue 7 choice optical shop because my friend wanted to buy glasses. his friend is working there so it was like throwing 2 birds with one stone. ok perhaps 3 birds in this case because that means genuine discount and no rip-off as well.

what i wanted to say here is that, after my friend did his eye test, they did mine too, just out of my interest, and here was the result.




the result was quite a relief. after spending about half of my life staring at computer screens (in romantic dim lights normally at home), i guess my eyes are still alright.

except a bit of astig on my left eye. the reading says 1.75, which i guess not serious since i don't notice it unless i'm on the back of the room trying to read the board in front. plus, wikipedia says Astigmatism is quite common. studies have shown that about one in three people suffers from it.

ahah. one in three, that's very common right? like when you see a family of 3 on the road, or say maybe the 'destiny's child', one of them would have astig right?

then the article goes, 'the prevalence of astigmatism increases with age. although a person may not notice mild astigmatism, higher amounts of astigmatism may cause blurry vision, squinting, asthenopia, fatigue, or headaches.'

hmm.. fatigue? maybe that's what causing me feeling fatigue all day. oh god i knew it! but again, it's for my left eye. must i feel fatigue on my left side then? gosh i'm so screwed.

i better close my eyes then and go to bed, hoping i'd wake up on tuesday.



...ed

tennis, the train and ghostbusters

i'm ecstatic. ok i literally was smiling ear to ear from early morning. the moment i woke up, i jumped off my bed and clicked on yahoo tennis, and there was the sight of rafael nadal screaming on the grass and i knew it was all a happy ending.

that was just passed 5am, and i felt fresh as ever. although the truth is, i couldn't sleep all night. i know at that moment nadal was battling roger federer for the wimbledon tennis championship crown, so i kept getting these glimpses of nightmares of federer actually won (god forbids!) in my sleep.

i just couldn't watch the match live. i just couldn't. it was too heart-wrenching, the roller-coaster ride events were just too much to bare. i mean, i like riding the actual roller-coaster you know, but at least with that i know i won't feel like jumping off some cliff at the end of the ride.

so what i did was just have my panasonic HD recorder do the job and i just hoped for the best (spell: chickened-out).

and you know what, good things do come to boys who wait. never have i been so upbeat about going to work on monday morning, even with lack of the previous night's sleep just to share the joy with everybody who bothers. i think the whole company know i'm nadal's big fan.

work, well, went as usual. morning was spent preparing for the weekly meeting (whilst peeping in menstennisforums.com once in awhile when the computer was processing), then lunch, long meeting, then having the usual after-meeting withdrawal syndrome hanging around in other people's cubicles before dashing home on time.

to rewatch the good parts of last night's match.

gosh, now when i wrote about it, i do sound like a maniac, don't i? i guess these freaky little things make me happy in my pathetic little life. i mean, i really don't need to be climbing mt kinabalu up and down, or diving to the shore of the deep sea just to feel fulfilled. give me a nadal win from my couch and i'm practically in orgasm mode.

i just think that i'm easily satisfied. in fact, as a human being, i must be the simplest emotionally created version ever. there are no complex feeling whatsoever. like the other day when my internet acquintance happened to throw me a bomb, asking me what was i thinking about at that exact moment, and i figured, nothing.

nada. which made me think, am i that shallow inside?

maybe it's ok you know. i mean, do i need unnecessary stress thinking about stuff that might or might not happened? i might as well just enjoy the ride as it is. if there is even a ride in the first place.

oh yes, i must mentioned about this long time friend that i met last saturday. we studied our degree together in nagoya japan. we were from different universities though, me from nagoya university of technology doing engineering and she was from nagoya university doing medicine.

we haven't met since i left japan in year 2000, so when she said she'd be in singapore for some conference thingy, we just had to meet. eventhough the only time and place to do that was one hour before her flight in changi airport terminal 2 sakae sushi.

it was refreshing catching up with our lives. she was still as i had remembered her. all the deja vu of our students life came rushing back in. it was amazing how we were once in the same time and space, and now we have our own lives to live.

while updating each other about our lost moments, i kept on thinking, 'has it been that long?' it has been 8 years for goodness sake. what have i achieved for the last 8 years to update? only something so mediocre i must say. i haven't invent anything new, or make any beneficial discoveries, or even contribute anything back to the society.

my life has been a straightforward constantly-moving-way-under-speed-limit-in-singapore-expressway journey with little sights in between. with that sights being weekends.

weekends that include a trip to JB by railway train from singapore's tanjong pagar station recently which i couldn't understand why it has to be delayed every single freaking time. seriously. that railway company is a total disgrace. they charged me SGD10 for a 45 minutes journey which include super slow-motioned immigration checkpoint at woodlands. i spent like what, 5 minutes inside the train.

the stupid train was delayed by 30 minutes, at its starting station!


at least this still gave me a bit of childhood nostalgia


anyway, if it was not for the invititation for house warming cum ghostbuster mission made by my friend, i wouldn't bother to make the trip. she's from johore, working in singapore and recently just purchased an apartment in larkin. confused? well i couldn't write more about her since she's reading this blog haha..

the house by the way, is nice. the location was on this quiet suburb beside some greens, from where i supposed some paranormal instances could originate from haha.. (ok the truth is i'm always jealous of nice new houses). the gathering went ok too, it was a lot of fun.




ok now i am sleepy. i think i'll watch a bit more of last night match and go to bed feeling high...



...ed

no holds barred (not in batam)

wow now only i got some time to write.

it has been quite some hectic weeks for me. it's not my fault. when the atp tour arranged french open grand slam and wimbledon lawn tennis championship head to head with only few weeks aparts, they failed to see that for a tennis freak like me, that means many weeks glued in front of tv after work and abandoned my blog.

plus, i was away last weekend. a friend of mine who works in a travel agency in raffles place got us a SGD98 deal for 2D1N batam purajaya resort escapade. that was cheap! i mean, the boat alone normally costs around SGD50 including taxes, now plus the seaport transfers, hotel room and lunch/breakfast for that amount is a total rip.

the whole trip, well, was pretty fun. it's batam so it's not like there was anything to see, we just had fun enjoying cheap nice foods and bargain hunting. there were 8 of us so our movements were quite slow, i didn't even manage to go for night live band and body massage which was kind of a bummer...


the resort itself was pretty far from town. it's a nongsa part of the island, which is about 40 minutes drive to nagoya, or about rph80,000 per taxi. that works about sgd12, which is not much cheaper compared to singapore.



in fact, in you asked me, things in batam was not much cheaper either. i guess it all depends on how we bargain. it's one of those places where every single tourist has the word 'rip me off please' firmly planted on their forehead.

i mean, tell me why a kilogram of rambutan at the roadside stall costs rph15,000 (sgd2.25) when in singapore i could buy for sgd1.50? we had to fight to lower the price for some fake goods too which the quality is of course, very questionable. it got so tiring after awhile having to argue every single time so i ended up shopping in local supermarkets.


when we got back to singapore, where there was internet again, a free internet unlike blood-sucking sgd8/hour internet at the resort, i found out about the new sodomy claim against malaysian ex-deputy PM anwar ibrahim.

that was quite a news huh! apart from a particular attention-catching keyword, this evolves a high profile figure. i have no idea politics in malaysia could get that dirty. who in a sound mind would believe such a claim? what's sad is that despite knowing that, there is nothing us, the civillians, could do, especially with election 4 (light-)years away.

well at least there's an infinite 4-years wait, but in my situation at work right now, i don't even know when things could improve. i had a talk with my boss this morning. it was a performance review actually. apparently he took notice that i had been losing steam lately. which was surprising considering i did my work as normal despite no longer feeling interested. man, was it that obvious?

ok maybe i wasn't producing much results to begin with, but that was actually because i figured i had been loaded with unmeaningful tasks. while i was busy doing a supporting role from the backseat, my colleagues have been consistently leaping over me scoring issues by issues and be like the darling of the company. so when the evaluation time comes, tell me what's stopping me from getting a pariah pay?

oh well, we did the talks and let's see how things go. at this moment, i just want to gloat over rafael nadal's victory to wimbledon's quarter-final...



...ed

all hail the majestic aki-nabalu

golden week travelogue part 3 ~ mount kinabalu
07-09 May 2008


it was late afternoon when our royal brunei landed back in kota kinabalu. it felt funny just about 24 hours ago we left for brunei and now we were back again on this same land. it was like a deja-vu.

view from my flight window

my friend has already booked a room for us at le meridien, so we quickly grabbed a cab and headed to the city. i was hoping we could be at the waterfront in time to view the sunset.

by the way, this friend who booked the room is my dearest friend's friend. i met him for the first time in brunei. apparently he has like thousands of hotel membership points so he used those for booking.

little did we know when we arrived at the hotel and opened the room door, that it was a suite!

i know he's rich and all that but this surely a bit too much, i felt a bit obligated to sell him part of my soul.

oh well, probably the bank he works at in brunei pays his salary in oil barrels or something (thanks khalid! :)


the room was totally sea view, i could see the lighted-up sky from by bed. probably even from my toilet if i looked really hard.

but then, we were invited to have free reception cocktail buffet on top floor after doing our royal gold-class member check-in there. the lounge has this wide window panel we could see the whole sea horizon from.

ok forget the room-view sunset, we were gonna enjoy the sunset right here right now.




there were we sipping drinks while observing the sun in its final glory. so this is how being on holiday really feels like. a non-backpacked money-briefcased 6-star holiday that is.

by the time i finished my cocktail, i already forgot how it was like being a commoners.

mt kinabalu park


the next morning started with some minor misunderstanding with our mountain-climbing tour agent about pickup timing. we thought it was 7.30am, they thought it was 12.30pm, in the end we settled at 10am departure. oh well.

2 hours van trip later we arrived at kinabalu park resort at ranau/kundasang. after doing all the registrations and took note of the schedule, we wondered around.

frankly, there was nothing much there. none that excite me anyway. there were some dorm buildings, some food hall which mostly serves buffet style menu, botanical garden and some walking trails that i didn't bother go in. i mean, the greeneries all looked the same to me.


this is where we stayed for the night.

notice the mt kinabalu at the backdrop? i shuddered to think that we were actually gonna climb all the way up to the top tomorrow. i mean, it looked very far and high up.

oh god.

this lady briefed us about tomorow's climb route




night time local entertainment while we were having our dinner.. and this fella visited our room

On your mark...get set.. GO!

by 8am tomorrow morning, we already had our heartfull breakfast, picked up our mountain climbing passes, handshaked our guide and set to go.

oh and a lil' prayer too...


a van sent us to Timpohon gate about about 1.5km away to begin our climb. so this was it - the starting point. the feeling was just surreal. i mean, if everything goes well, i will be at the top by sunrise!




ok the first mission was to go from point A (timpohon gate) to point B (laban rata guesthouse, >3000m high) which approximately a 6km journey through various steps - earth, stones, tree roots, well.. anything that could get us a step higher.

the first few km were pretty boring i must say. all normal plants around, so there were nothing special to see. plus, somehow i got a bit upfront than my group so i ended up plucking in my headphones and started humming amuro namie's numbers while making those steps.

i started off the climb with a long sleeve shirt and a track bottom but they ended up as 3-quarter sleeve shirt and a knee length bottom. the wind was chilling but i still sweat, at least up to almost 3m elevation as what above photo tells.

there were many resting booth like this along the journey where there was toilet and supply of untreated water (which we were warned could make us sick because our stomachs were not adapt to it unlike the locals).

what's cool about these booths are they have information on current geography.




as we got higher and higher, there were much more things to see. the plants here are those that thrived in cold weather and thinner soils. my favourite? definitely the pitcher plant. i caught one in its full red glory.

before we knew it, ok after much anticipation, sweat and cramped legs, we were above the clouds!

Laban Rata (3272m) ~ one stop before the final climb


it took us almost 5 hours the reach laban rata guesthouse at 3272.7m elevation where we would stay the night and resume climbing to the peak at 3am the next morning.

by this time, me legs were killing me, so i quickly checked in the 5-double-deckers dorm room and took a nap straight away to recharge. my friends fared much better in the leg department, only they had headache probably due to the thin air.

the final climb to Low's peak

we woke up shortly before 3am. while we were having our early breakfast (a pot of horlicks with some biscuits and energy bars), we could hear the wind roaring like crazy outside.

seriously it sounded just like the apocalypse out there, so i was all,' gosh, are we really really gonna go out there?'

apparently we were, of course.
...because the truth is out there.


to my surprise, it wasn't as cold as i had expected. to me, i was just full of anticipation of what might come. there were like gazillion people who failed to get on top, and i was about to find out why.

it was dead dark most of the pathway, with the only sights being the headlight trails from the people in front.

the final checkpoint before heading to the peak

after about 2 hours of early morning hike through carved steps, slopes, and especially towards the tops, steep rocks that requires rope to pull ourselves up, i managed to reach the low's peak!!

the peak was just pile of rocks with signboards. if this were the everest, there would be flag poles. i was expecting some kind of wide flat clearance where we could do line dancing while waiting for sun rise but instead, only few person could stand on the highest point at a time.

i'm not bragging or anything but to tell you the truth, i did not think the overall climb was that hard. the only thing killing me was the coldness that started to creep in my bones once i became dormant. it was 5.30am and i had a good an hour before sunrise. the wind was strong so i had to curl myself behind some rocks. once or twice some chap would tap me on my shoulder asking for help to take their photos, and i had to reluctantly leave my comfort zone. after all, obviously i had to ask one of them to take my photo considering the fact that my friends were nowhere to be seen.

oh yes, i had no idea where were they at that moment. not until the sun had risen (which to be honest, nothing overly spectacular because i saw the light one minutes, and then the stupid clouds covered it all) and i was starting to climb down when i met my dear friend.

which was cool because now that we have each other to snap each other's photos, we could cam-whore over 4000m above sea level. of course, cool on top of the fact that i would want my friends to succeed in whatever they do too haha ...

and this pretty much summed up our feelings at the moment haha...

only after it was bright we started to appreciate the surrounding sights. man, we were very very high up indeed. we were literally on cloud-9.

not for long though, because then i just realized how painful it was to climb down. gosh i must have been so engrossed for the effort to get to the top, i totally mislooked the going down part.

i cringed everytime my knees had to stop myself from sliding the way down. and the fact that now we could see all the steep edges half a step away didn't help either.

plus, it rained when we were halfway down so it got all slippery. i'd never forget that 9km climb-down misery, i even vowed to never climbing any mountain anymore.

not in near future anyway.

group photo at the end of the climb with our guide

all in all, i survived. i survived big time. it was such an enriching experience i probably have found a new respect for life.

eventhough probably while it lasted only 5 minutes after we crossed the finishing line, or within the 2 days MC i got due to muscle pain after i returned home, or even within the 1 week when i still could not walk properly let alone using stairs.

all i'm certain about is when anybody talks about the tallest mountain in south east asia, i could go, 'yeah and you know what? i've climbed it' with a full smug on my face.

and of course, they don't have to know anything about the climb-down.



...ed