Dust & Dirt

I enjoy various sports and these are ones I’ve done on land. It’s fun getting down and dirty with mother nature. Here are snippets of my four-wheel-drive adventures, spelunking fun, and mountaineering.

Snippets of our spelunking/caving adventure at: The Dark Caves where the highlights were us itching after swimming in bat poo mixed water and encountering cave snakes. Getting covered in bat poo and mud is the natural way to have a full body mask done! I would say it’s quite spacious, though there were points where it got really tight. Not for the claustrophobic.

Snippets of our caving adventure at: Gopeng caves where the highlight was the huge flying fox in the cave to end our adventure. But in between, we got to scramble around, up and down through tight crevices in pitch darkness. There’s also a photo of a red star crudely ‘drawn’ on the cave wall by the communists that were hiding in the caves, trying to escape, at the end of the war.

Snippets of our four-wheel-drive adventure!

Snippets of our adventure around Kota Kinabalu and the climb up the famous mountain. Our experience was a wet one. It pretty much rained the entire time we were hiking up the mountain. It was cold but we were warm from the exertion. But when we got up to Laban Rata for our pit stop, the cold quickly seeped in and we started to feel the chill. By nightfall I thought the thermometer was broken as it read ‘zero’ and this is Malaysia. Also, our group was duped by a travel agent who took all our money paid to him for booking our rooms at Laban Rata and we had to sleep on the wooden floor in the mess hall with no heating, beddings or shower facilities. At the end of our trip, we found out that our cheating travel agent had committed suicide from the money he owed us and many others before us because we had made a police report against him and our lawyer was preparing to proceed to the next step. Long story short, it all boiled down to a gambling problem which he had. But overall, it was a wonderful trip which we’d never forget.

Snippets of our adventure around Mulu where we climbed the Mulu Pinnacles and visited the many caves in the Mulu National Park and encountered many creepy critters in the jungle. Do take note, the limestone forest surrounding the base of Mulu Pinnacles emits carbon dioxide. I found out during the hike up to the pinnacles, I had difficulty breathing from the start of the trek, while all my friends were fine. I asked our guide if there was something in the air and he told me that the limestone around us was causing my breathing difficulty. However, to counter that problem, thank goodness a friend of mine had those Easy Breather nose thingy that people who snore stick on the bridge of their nose when they sleep. I stuck it on and felt like I had an oxygen tank on hand! I could breathe again! That Easy Breather thingy was a lifesaver! So for those who naturally can’t tolerate second hand smoke (meaning you tend to feel like you have slight difficulty breathing around smokers) be well prepared when doing this climb.