Kuala Kuba Baru Revisited

There's nothing like an "annual outing" to remind you that another year has passed... Though not actually planned as such, I returned to Kampung Kuba Baru this weekend with a group of about 20 people almost a year after my first trip there. Only four of us returned that had been there for last years outing as well... such is the nature of folks who live and work abroad, they come and go... Anyway, it was a well timed outing for me. I finished my thesis proposal on Friday afternoon, amidst trying to clean up the apartment for agents to come by with new prospective tenants.

So, Saturday morning, bright and early my dear friends Jen and Lynn swung by and whisked us away to KKB, about an hour and half drive north of here. We were running late, so Jen took advantage of the trafficless streets to recreate the Formula One circuit in downtown KL. D and I sat in the backseat and hung on for dear life. ;-) I finally reminded her what it looks like when someone throws up and it ends up on the ceiling of the car. :-P She slowed down after that, and the next incident didn't come until Lynn attempted to feed her Nasi Lemak while we were on the highway. We quickly discovered that this too is not such a great idea... Anyway, we hit the road and were in KKB by my 10:30 or so.

In KKB we met up with the rest of the group, that spanned an age range of 5-40 something... and nationalities from Malaysian to Ukrainian to French to NZ to American and quite a bit in between. Quite the motley crew. We hiked back to the same waterfall we saw last year and crossed the same rivers, but they were all considerably higher, owing to the heavier rainfall this year. What might've taken us an hour to hike in a smaller group, took about 2. But it was quite the adventure along the way... especially the river crossings. I stupidly put my cell phone in my backpack, so had to worry about keeping it above water the whole way there and back, which was more of a challenge with the high water, as you'll see in a couple of the pics. I kept it dry, but only just. I went down a couple of times, and in up to my neck, but somehow managed to keep my back out of the water or had already passed it across to someone on the other side. My knees are a nice shade of brownish purple where they smashed against the rocks when I fell... So, we hiked there and back... like a big trail of ants, followed there and back by Cleo the super mutt dog. I'm not a dog person really, but you'd have to be heartless to not like this dog. On the way back I got a ways ahead of the group and the dog more or less led me all the way back. We had a lovely time, just enjoying the sounds of the jungle... and the occasional sounds of the 25 monkeys following us... ;-)

The waterfall is fantastic. Two tiers, the first about 50 feet high, the second a little shorter. We hung out at the pool in between, though we couldn't really wade around in the middle like we did last year because the water was so high. We ate our lunches, packed by the caretakers back at the bungalow... Nasi Lemak and Ayam Goreng... Though some people had Nasi Ayam soup instead, as it too was submerged on the river crossings... I vegged out and fell asleep on a rock for about an hour. At one point I climbed a very steep hill to find a place to ermm.... buang air kecil (pee) and on the way back down, saw a spider as big as my hand. But, due to our large number, that, and the dog were the only thing we saw in the way of wildlife...

Later we returned to the bungalow that we'd rented for the night. It's quite a basic place, sparsely furnished, but with enough beds to sleep 15, so those of us who were staying for the night got our showers and chilled out, played cards, mahjong, or scrabble (I lost twice... and I was not happy about it...) and ate the fantastic barbeque that the caretaker couple prepared for us. They are the same family that was living there last year, in fact have been there 11 years now. But this year they'd sent their two daughters back to Indonesia to live with their grandmother and go to school there. That made it seem much quieter, though we had a 5 year old in our group who made up for that in enthusiasm... :-) The night wound down with a game of charades, that was solely based on movie titles... Which was interesting. The players were German, American, Kiwi, Malaysian Chinese, Malaysian-Indian, Ukrainian, Dutch. Consequently, when we started digging back to older titles, we found that not everyone had heard of some of them... And yes, eventually someone had to insist on making the other team figure out how to act out Free Willy... :-O

Morning came with the sound of roosters crowing and geese quackle-ing (it wasn't quite a quack... not sure what was going on back there...) which was obnoxious. Especially the prepubescent rooster that couldn't quite get his crows to come out right... Though that was preferable to the snoring of a certain German two rooms over. The not quite walls that separate the rooms means you can hear everything from one end of the bungalow to the other. During the night we got a few hours of heavy rain which created that fantastic sound of rain hitting the roof that can lull anyone to sleep despite the deafening sound of it. The electricity is only on from 7pm to 1 am, so the rain brought a nice cool breeze to cool down the fanless room. Just like last year, breakfast was fantastic, and after some swimming and chewing the fat, we headed back to KL this afternoon... Jen drove a little slower, D made me wear my seatbelt even though I was in the backseat, and DJ Jazzy Lynn supplied the tunes...

Now, it's back to reality. Proposal needs to be reworked and returned by Tuesday. Presentation Wednesday at 10am. So for now, thats all she wrote... :-)