Sendiri mau ingat

I survived the weekend ! It was tiring but definitely worthwhile climbing Pine Tree Hill ( 4,771" ) and Twin Peak in Frasers Hill. Kudos to OGKL for organizing a very enjoyable and SANTAI event for us. By mantics ; it is indeed stupid to spend one's weekend outdoors - being cold and wet off from the potato couch comfort zone. And somehow , doing this is actually a satisfaction of what one really wants from life..



Azad picked me up early Saturday morning to join other OGKL participants in Teratai Dayabumi. In a typical Malaysian time , we started off late ! haks.. We were supposed to be off from KL by 9 am but unfortunately we only moved out of the restaurant at 11 am !! However , it was an opportunity for me to know most of the other 23 members joining this trip ; in the very true spirit of OGKL ukhwah.I felt a bit "amateurish" when comparing my backpack to their haversack. Malu weeihh.. I managed to buy my first hiking stick though - which proved to be very useful during this trip.




We arrived in Frasers Hill at 1pm - and surprisingly it was very cold up there ! The fog was so thick that we can barely see the road during our journey to the starting point.To make it worse , it was drizzling and the temperature was low. I cannot recall Fraser's Hill being cold and windy. Unfortunately , that was the weather for us to start our journey to the highest peak in that area.

The journey to Pine Tree Hills on the map was 5 km , sounds short eih ? haks.. Obviously not. Seeing the organizers being so laid back , I would have thought the track there would be easy and within 2 hours since we only started walking at 3pm. I was SOOO WRONG ! It was wet and very slippery. I fell a few times walking through the thick forest. The climb was not easy as we had to cross 4 other lower hills before arriving on top of Pine Tree Hill ! It took us 5 hours for the gruelling 5 km track. We arrived there at about 6.30 pm.




It was so cold and windy when we arrived that the leader of the trip - decided we should camp there instead of Twin Peak which was just about 1 kilometer away. I was freezing and a friend recorded the temperature to be about 12oC. I did not expect the weather to be so cold hence my pathetic thin clothes. I noticed most of the other climbers brought thin clothings too , so I was not alone in this issue !! I only had one long sleeve t-shirt with my windbreaker.. and I suffered that night !

Pine Tree Hill was certainly not suitable for big group campings - and we had to break the basic rule in camping. Camping on a bare area - on top of the hill ! haks.. literally , we were sleeping on top of the peak which was very-very freezing especially when the wind blows. We did attempt to start a fire - it was difficult at first because most of the woods were wet. Azad was very skillful that he managed to start the small campfire for the team to gather around - keeping oneself warm !

It was so breezy that everytime the wind blew we became unstable ! I can't imagine if it rained heavily that night . Something funny happened to us as well ; the area on top of the peak was not that great - thus when we set our tent it was quite slopy. There were 4 of us in that tent - very small space i can tell you ! However when we woke up at about 5 am , our tent moved more than a meter away from where we set it up ! Luckily there were small trees blocking the movement otherwise we could have just fallen off the cliff ! Scary isn't it !!


We woke up in the morning feeling tired - but we had to continue our journey to reach the Twin peak ! The trip was definitely less challenging and we arrived there at about 10 am in the morning ! It was so satisfying to be up there on top of the world... Looking how vast the Titiwangsa higher ground were. Beautiful view and very soothing. I was so proud to be up there - having to survive the challenging trail. Thank you OGKL..

more pictures in : http://picasaweb.google.com/mafeitz