Gunung Lambak is a hill (read: very small mountain - 510m) near Kluang in Malaysia. It's a good day trip for trekkers out of Singapore - which is what I was this past weekend.
The trek was rated easy - this is rather misleading. It is relatively short but the upper part of the trail is very steep and much of the climb involved scrambling on all fours instead of hiking. Pictures from this guy's album puts it into perspective:
Length: If you are very fit then you should be able to get up and down in about 2-2.5 hours. The group I was with took about 4-4.5 hours with many breaks along the way.
Gear: I would highly recommend gloves (leather padded cycling gloves would do fine) as you will find yourself grabbing rocks, trees and rope along the way. Good hiking boots with a deep tread are ideal as some of the incline was a bit muddy and slick. Some people did the climb in running shoes but with difficulty. A few people had Leki poles. Personally I think the terrain was too steep to make use of walking sticks as you'll want both hands free to climb monkey style.
Fitness Level: Not for couch potatoes. About a quarter of the group I went with decided not to do the entire hike as it was too arduous. Again "easy" is misleading. It's easy if you hike all the time and are in good shape. You can't do this if you never exercise. Let me put this in perspective - I was able to huff and puff my way through it and was in the front pack of the group... saying that, two weeks ago I was outpaced at MacRitchie by a little French woman in open-toed sandals. Moderate fitness is enough to survive this hill.
Training: Train for this by doing the MacRitchie Tree Top walk (if you can do two circuits of the 1.5km Tree Top walk, you'll be fine) and/or climb stairs. You should be able to climb 10 flights of stairs without dying. Practice climbing stairs two at a time as that's the kind of work your quads will be doing.
Also:
- Distractions: Bring a book or some music. The bus ride from JB is about 2 hours. The trip was an incredibly shocking yet boring display of monoculture: palm trees lined the road the whole way.
- Clothes: Bring a change of clothes, a towel and some soap: there are shower facilities at the pool at the bottom of the hill. Cost: RM2.
- Cash: Bring about RM20 in small bills: You have to pay for every toilet you use. There are also some small food stalls selling fruit and drinks at the hill.
- More cash: If you're going with a tour group on the cheap, bring small change for Singapore public transportation on the causeway between the two checkpoints.
- The usual: 2 litres of water, passport, light hiking gear, bug spray, snacks. Sunscreen not really required as you're under foliage the whole way.
FYI: Looking for a place to eat? We ate at Cin Cin restaurant in Kluang after the hike and it was not bad.
Labels: travel
What I did on my trip to Suburbia:
- Watched the following TV programs (amongst others):
- I saw commercials for:
- Incontinence pads
- Herpes medicine
- White blood cell booster for chemotherapy patients
- Drugs to make your dog smarter
(All available by asking your doctor/vet or going online for home delivery)
- Went to Wallmart
- Saw lots of fat people … some people were so fat they had to move around on electric scooters
- Saw lots of SUVs
- I saw many malls - all with the same stores and restaurants: Boston Pizza, Loeb, The Keg, Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Lone Star, PharmaPrix... There were almost no independent operators.
This was no sight seeing tour. I didn’t visit a place so much as a way of life. Oh and by the way - I was in Canada. If this sounded like the US then you can be forgiven. And if you think it's much of a muchness well... who am I to argue?
Canadians spend a lot of time discussing their identity i.e. what makes them unique (read “not American”). Based on this visit, identity appears to be a matter of brand choice. Watching crappy TV, buying oversized vehicles, excess eating and self medication are as prevalent here as in the States… Maybe the average canuck stuffs himself with a McCain’s frozen pizza and gets his car serviced at Canadian Tire, but otherwise the consumption patterns differ little between suburban populations north and south.
Does the intelligencia differ north and south? Certainly. Canada has stayed out of Iraq, they've decriminalised Mary Jane and recently, the Prime Minister even said “We are a nation of minorities. And in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don't cherry-pick rights.” You won't hear the American President expressing the same sentiment. After all these years abroad, stuff like this still has me proudly saying "we" when I refer to the Canadian people.
But as for the bulging bulk of the population… they are living day to day off the same hopes and dreams dished out to their yankee brethren on prime time. Is suburbia the frontline for erosion of Canadian culture? Given that "we" mostly watch American TV, it's amazing there are any differences left to speak of. But then we've always watched American TV and perhaps because of it, in spite of it, Canada's obese, SUV driving, Alka Selzer popping voters still haven't elected any movie stars and still haven't taken to keeping firearms. They've consistently put governments in power who provide them with health care and they don't tend to sue corporations millions of dollars for their own stupidity.
Perhaps that's the mystery of Canadian identity - not what the difference is but how in the bland sameness of suburbia, any difference has managed to survive.
Labels: travel
In a lot of countries, you can drive out of the city, and soon you are in farm country and can see gangs of cows loitering in the fields. Kids in Singapore haven't been able to experience this... until now. Comfort is doing a promo campaign which involves planting these colorful cows everywhere.
It seems in fact that the cows are multiplying as there are more each day... Perhaps this can explain it:
There must be a few bulls in the crowd because otherwise Singapore wouldn't allow it...
Labels: travel
This week I went to Sydney for business (photos). This largely involved lying in my hotel with food poisoning but that's another story. As I was in town, I had to check out the Sydney Opera House.
On Thursday I went to see Carmen in the Opera Theatre along with a lot of pensioners and a few tourists (the average age of the audience was about 65). The place was packed and with tickets going at $220 a pop, it's safe to say these people do not have financial problems.
The performance was enjoyable although this Carmen was a total bitch and I was rather happy to see her murdered in the end. They portrayed the French equally well... as being the bunch of cigarette smoking bastards that they are. They were even smoking Gauloise so the whole place stunk. No in fairness it was not bad at all. I have, however, resolved never to see Carmen again... It's never advisable to see opera in a language you speak because invariably the cast will butcher it.
The next night I went to see the Sydney Symphony in the concert hall. The hall has a cozy feel and even though there is more seating than the Esplanade, there seems to be a great focus on the stage. I felt closer to the musicians even though I was near the back. The hall has a high sweeping ceiling from which clear plastic donuts 1 metre wide (affectionately referred to as perspex calamari below) are suspended on cables. This is presumably to improve the sound quality - my chief interest for the evening.
I was keen to compare the acoustics of this famous space to my adopted home auditorium: The Esplanade. Major disappointment. The Symphony was doing a jazz thing and were using SPEAKERS to amplify the sound. Huh? Then the guy next to me spills the beans that the SOH concert hall acoustics are notoriously bad. Well I'll never know because I caught the show via the speakers above my seat. Imagine paying $90 for a ticket and then your aural experience comes down to the audio set up. Well the concert was a great performance I only wish I could have heard it live.
On the SOH: A disappointment since it opened its doors 32 years ago and the Australian Opera tried to cram Prokofiev's epic War and Peace into the mean stage and claustrophobic pit of the opera auditorium. Not Joern Utzon's fault. He had planned the big auditorium for opera, and the smaller for orchestral music. But the Sydney Symphony Orchestra wouldn't leave the Sydney Town Hall unless it got the larger space. So the Opera Theatre became the Concert Hall and vice versa. Neither is a success. Even with the perspex calamari floating above the orchestra, the Concert Hall acoustics are certainly no better than the Town Hall's, though the real problem is an opera theatre with too few seats, too small an orchestra pit and too little wing space. The Opera House should have been abandoned after stage two, when the shells were completed, without ever attempting the interiors. It would be a glorious white-tiled folly on Bennelong Point, strikingly beautiful as a soaring sculpture, and no less effective as a symbol for the city. The money spent redesigning then executing the compromised Opera House interiors could instead have financed a couple of plain but functional boxy auditoriums in some then-neglected part of Sydney which could have done justice to both voice and instruments. - source.
Labels: travel
I was flying biz class from Toronto to Vancouver on
Air Canada this evening. I was reading
Eats, Shoots and Leaves and was right in the middle of the chapter on the misuse of the apostrophe (usually in cahoots with the letter S) when dinner was served along with a little irony.
After the meal came an announcement that for $2 you could buy desert. That seemed chincy but I'll expect anything on a North American airline, even in Business Class. Fortunately, it turned out that was just for economy.
For the people in the big-ass seats, the steward came around with a cart offering ice-cream and cookies. I said I didn't want ice-cream but was game on for cookies. He offered the choice of oatmeal or chocolate chip.
How about one of each?
No. Only one cookie per passenger.
So really the offer was for Ice Cream and Cookie
singular. There were no
CookieS to be had. There should have been no S at the end of that offer. If I'd asked him to spell it, dessert probably would have been a choice of
Ice Cream and Cookie's. I suppose I could have asked him "Cookie's what?" to amuse myself but I hate people who say crap like that.
I next found myself arguing that foregoing ice-cream was a fair exchange for an additional cookie instead of pointing out their false advertising that Cookie
S were coming our way. I didn't even have the dinner dammit! All I wanted were the bloody cookies. I mean what kind of bucket shop is Air Canada running if business class passengers have to barter for their snacks?
I should have been on notice that this was a no frills J-class when the stewardess came around at the beginning of the flight - not with hot steaming face cloths as on Singapore Airlines - but with a small packaged moist towlette.
Fortunately, the passenger next to me was full and offered her share of the ship's biscuit booty to me which brought the embarassing scene to a close. I think she was feeling charitable because from what I gathered from her work on her laptop, she'd just broken up with her boyfriend and was generally miserable.
I find it interesting that the most expensive airlines, like Virgin and SIA, have avoided the financial difficulties of their cheaper competitors. It seems that people are willing to pay for service if you're able to provide it. Otherwise you're just another flying K-mart.
Labels: travel
I'm on the last day of a two week trip to North America.
It started with a week in New York where I had some meetings for work. Manhattan was a crazy place to be last week with Bush in town staying around the corner from me at the Waldorf. There were about 20 cops per city block and dozens of secret service camped out at my hotel (The Palace).
After that it was 4 days in Ottawa - pretty, quiet, cool, relaxing. I did the full tourist package as I had some friends with me who wanted the whole 9 yards.
Now it's 3 days in TO then I'm back to SGP. I'm presently camped out in a part of town where dirty clothes and face piercing are popular. KT is behind me at this internet cafe and we're both rather stuffed on veggie burgars and Juice For Life pick me ups.
She's 4 1/2 months pregnant now and will find out the sex of the baby next week. Life has been pretty tough for her lately and with the preganancy hormones to leverage the experience, she seems to be doing better than you'd expect. I kinda feel like it's the last time I'm gonna hang out with her... in a way. Soon she'll be getting her new-mother lobotomy and it tends to take several years for a new brain to grow back after that. It will be fun to have a niece though... well a niece is expected on account of the fact that KC, dad to be, dreamt about her just before KT found out she was preggers.
A girl is better in a lot of ways but mainly because she won't have to be called Kenneth C Bateman the 4th...
Labels: travel
I have a dream of living in a house in a cool climate. I have a big kitchen where in my minds eye, a large earthenware bowl of fresh salad sits on an old wooden table before a late lunch. The shelves are lined with jams, pickles and preserves. There is half a loaf of bread bought that morning on a little indulgent trip to the local bakery. It sits on the table next to the salad along with cheese and pate. The scene is very provincial in a French kind of way.
The house is on a large property, bordered by woods and a lake. A few miles down the road is a village with a huge summer market filled with great produce including locals crops, free range chicken, grass fed beef. In the winter, a covered market takes its place.
The climate is warm - cool by my current standards but pleasant. In the winter the temperature drops but never far below zero. There are seasons. The trees shed their leaves annually waiting naked through winter days sometimes crisp, sometimes grey.
I'd love such a place. It's probably hard coded into my French genes. Or maybe it's a nostalgia for the Quebec countryside visits I enjoyed as a child.
But the reality of this country home in a temperate land, is that the people I love aren't there. That is the problem with having no roots. All you want and all those you love are scattered around the world. Choice of one always means loss of another. So the ideal home, the home where your heart is, can only exist in your imagination.
Labels: travel
I've been in Canada for the past two weeks. Being there was nice... getting there and back was no piknik. I thought it was bad enough that I had to spend 8 hours in JFK waiting for my connecting flight on the way to Toronto... but on the way back, Air Canada got to Newark 2 hours late and I missed my connecting flight. That meant I had to entertain myself at the Marriot Newark for 24 hours as SQ only flies from there once a day.
I took the 19 hour non-stop to Singapore. What a great flight. The "executive economy" seats are a business class hybrid with a spacious 2-3-2 configuration. I mostly watched films and cat-napped. At one point when I awoke, it was night and we were flying over the himalyas. You could see the snow covered mountain tops reflected in the moon light 20 thousand feet below. In the distance, storm clouds shimmered with cracks of lightening. The storm must have been a thousand kilometres long.
I'm over my jetlag now... am also back to myself. The trip home was really a trip. KT had some surprises for me which really blew my mind... I can't reveal her secret though until she's ready to tell the world.
Labels: travel
